HipChat is now free for unlimited users • Hacker News Board

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#171

Post by microtonal » Wed, May 28, 2014, 7:52 AM UTC

quasse wrote: post #82

aspir wrote: post #52

People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian. Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.

I just switched our team to JIRA for this exact reason. We were already on Bitbucket for repos and using Sourcetree for git access, so might as well get issue tracking from the same place. Honestly my feelings on it are mixed so far. Doing a "good" job of administering projects and issues seems to have a pretty steep learning curve if you want to use more than about 10% of JIRA's functionality.

Doing a "good" job of administering projects and issues seems to have a pretty steep learning curve if you want to use more than about 10% of JIRA's functionality.

That's why I like Youtrack more. It's far less complex and driven by search plus keyboard shortcuts.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#172

Post by colordrops » Wed, May 28, 2014, 7:56 AM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #72

aspir wrote: post #52

People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian. Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.

The beauty of Slack, IMO, is in the nice integrations with everything I already use . Does Hipchat/JIRA/Confluence do that? (I honestly don't know) For a small team, there's no reason (for us at least) to move away from Trello, GitHub issues, etc.

Does Slack support local hosting?

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#173

Post by talkingquickly » Wed, May 28, 2014, 8:30 AM UTC

jacktoole1 wrote: post #141

JonoBB wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What absolutely killed HipChat for our team was the fact that its not possible to use HipChat for multiple teams. Need to be logged into multiple accounts at the same time (i.e your own team and your client's team)? Not possible. Their suggested solution is to use multiple different clients (i.e. one native, one browser) at the same time, which is beyond ridiculous. I dont think that I have seen any uservoice votes a…

For anyone else running into the same problem, I just copied my HipChat.app in /Applications, and ran the second hipchat next to the first hipchat (you can also change the second hipchat's icon for easy distinguishment). It's not perfect (upon logout/restart it still remembers the preferences for the other instance), but it solved 90% of my hassle.

This has been driving me crazy for months, I had one version of the old buggy Adobe Air app running and one of the new Native app. Somehow just creating a copy of the new native app just never occurred to me. You just made my day substantially better.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#174

Post by NicoJuicy » Wed, May 28, 2014, 9:18 AM UTC

rjbwork wrote: post #90

wlesieutre wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.

HuBot and mmBot (a C#/.NET port) has an adapter for hipchat

And for Jabbr, which is a Jabber implementation on Signalr (a realtime thingy of .Net).

It's actually pretty neat, you can try it out on : https://jabbr.net (+ it's opensource if you want to implement your own team chat )

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#175

Post by NicoJuicy » Wed, May 28, 2014, 9:19 AM UTC

cjbarber wrote: post #112

freerobby wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. We tried Slack on our 26-person team and left it after a week. It had a few fans, but most people found the interface to be more complex and noisy than HipChat. Lots of red icons and blue banners that could not be disabled. No ability to see at a glance who is in a room without clicking the list and scrolling through it. The integrations were nice and the search was amazing, but those things were less imp…

I wrote this: https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives/ I while back. This move by HipChat makes me happy. I've attempted to move over, but HipChat is far superior for my needs.

You could add: https://jabbr.net , it's opensource, so people could customize it (it's on the .Net platform)

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#176

Post by mjolk » Wed, May 28, 2014, 9:57 AM UTC

powdahound wrote: post #32

latchkey wrote: post #15

Reminder: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524

Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc ( http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098 ) before the same happens here; In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to make a request by emailing support@hipchat.…

>The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy.

It's nice of you to drop into this thread, but it's exactly as bad people assumed.

If I was an employer and I didn't cover this sort of breach of privacy in my employee policy, and someone at Atlassian bothered to ask (I'm sure that Atlassian invests in lawyers to vet each submitted request), I'd just add the language to the policy document and fire it off.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#177

Post by dkersten » Wed, May 28, 2014, 10:49 AM UTC

wtf242 wrote: post #137

sdm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call Hipchat's OS X client native; it's Flash (Adobe Air). The Slack's desktop OS X and iOS apps, while they are html based, are an order of magnitude nicer to use.

no it's not. their new OSX client is native. the old version is Adobe Air.

Their new windows client (and therefore I imagine the others too) appears to be Qt and Webkit. Most of it still seems to be their web app wrapped in native...

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#178

Post by jsmeaton » Wed, May 28, 2014, 10:53 AM UTC

mplewis wrote: post #128

latchkey wrote: post #15

Reminder: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524

This was the reason my company moved to Slack. There's no way for our boss to turn off the ability to read our PMs, so there's no way for us to know he's not. No one in the company wants this—we expect PMs to be private.

I was concerned too and sent an email to the HipChat team. They responded nearly immediately and updated the original HN post.

To be able to see "private" communications, the manager would have to send an email to hipchat to request certain access. See above for the exact terms.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#179

Post by jsmeaton » Wed, May 28, 2014, 10:58 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #140

gaoshan wrote: post #138

We use a bunch of Atlassian products (Jira, Bitbucket, Tempo, Sourcetree, IDE Connector, Jira Agile, ) but while HipChat never caught on with us, Slack hit a home run. That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it.

> That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it. Hangouts in G+?

We were using hangouts and google chat exclusively until we finally made the jump to HipChat. We still use hangouts for group video (morning scrum mostly), and hipchat for everything else.

Group video in hipchat would be a killer feature.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#180

Post by jsmeaton » Wed, May 28, 2014, 10:59 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #59

We just use Hangouts and everything integrated into Google Apps. What is the advantage here?

Hangouts are really annoying for persistent rooms that others can join and leave at will. We found we had lots of different combinations of people in different hangouts, and the conversations were really fragmented.

We use hangouts for group video, and hipchat for everything else.