
Ask HN: How did slack beat hipchat? - geoffjk
I was never a hipchat user, but I&#x27;m intrigued by how slack beat them (and others) when they had a headstart of several years. Did slack address a pain point that hipchat didn&#x27;t, or was it just a case of better marketing?
======
twobyfour
Much easier signup and onboarding process. Free tier. Mobile and desktop apps.
More modern UI that was easier to get non-technical stakeholders to adopt.

Targeting the startup sector, which was more open to using such tools company-
wide, rather than the enterprise, where Atlassian had already sold into most
of the companies that would consider chat platforms at the time and where chat
usage was largely confined to technical teams.

Yes, there was hype and marketing - otherwise nobody would have tried them in
the first place. They beat HipChat because they offered a 3x better product
with half the hassle. It takes both components to make a software hit in a
market that isn't entirely blue ocean.

------
lustig
We moved from slack to hipchat at my old job because it was cheaper. Hipchat
is just a terrible product, both on iOS and in the browser. Don't even know
where to begin, it was just a pain to use and every employee I talked to hated
it. I'll just give a few examples:

\- Unreliable notifications. Sometimes it notified you about messages
sometimes it didn't, no idea why.

\- You could get a push-notification about a message, then open the app and
have no clue who had messaged you or in which discussion/group.

\- Emojis had really unintuitive shortcuts. I remember people used to send
some kind of skeleton dancing all the time, because it's shortcut was a (Y)
(which is commonly some affirmative/"yes" emoji like a thumbs up).

\- Also it looks horrible.

~~~
kevindqc
Moved from slack to hipchat, or from hipchat to slack?

------
x0x0
I've used hipchat post acquisition by Atlassian. Their android client is shit:
it used to absolutely nuke my battery. Post installation, the phone which used
to last 24-30 hours was barely making it six. Slack's mobile app has been
great to me in this regard. Also, their mobile sign in flow is _amazing_.

The Android app issue -- and it also happened to another person on my team
post acquisition when we were forced to move from Slack to Hipchat -- set up a
6 month long fight over keeping slack. I don't recall ever arguing about a
chat app before but this was a dealbreaker.

~~~
pmikesell
Oh, their ios client was plenty terrible too. I remember having to wait 5
minutes before being able to type the first message character - just watching
a blank screen while my phone got hot.

------
vesak
How did Slack and Hipchat beat (in the short term at least) Basecamp? Basecamp
costs flat $100 per month and has several other tools besides just chatting.

[https://basecamp.com/](https://basecamp.com/)

As an aside, I'd like to see more tools with less predatory scaled pricing.

------
muzani
Hipchat just feels really enterprisey. Like those CRMs when you sign up for a
trial then suddenly some guy just schedules a meeting - would you be free to
Skype Monday or Tuesday? While I don't know whether Hipchat actually does
this, part of the reason I don't want to sign up is because there's some worry
that some guy in a suit would be sending me lots of emails about when a good
time to meet is.

Slack just feels casual, like Trello or Google Docs.

------
jamesmcintyre
I was an early hipchat user and got an IT consultancy I was working with at
the time to use it. It served the purpose well but ultimately hipchat failed
to take the successful execution of a focused product and turn it into a
platform opportunity while slack was very quick to do so. Also slack's
branding was much better, from their design and branding you could get a sense
that they were aiming for more than just chat.

------
chatmasta
HipChat is a good example of first-mover complacency. They had one of the
first really solid workplace chat solutions, grew a big userbase, got
acquired, etc. But they never iterated or kept up with changing trends, so
they got caught off guard by a well-executed competitor.

Another lesson here is that no established product is too big to go up
against. I often see people rejecting startup ideas because there is a single
competitor offering the same service. Competition is _not_ a reason to forego
building a product. If anything, it's a positive signal that your product has
a market.

You can make a solid business just by fixing existing products and/or offering
the same service for cheaper because you have some efficiency that the
incumbents do not. In fact, sometimes the incumbent has set their prices so
high because they have no competition, and inflated their expenses so much
that they couldn't match your prices even if they wanted to.

------
mikelyons
Never even heard of hipchat until after I had been using slack for a while.
Was a user of Campfire before that so not sure how it didn't get to me. When I
finally heard about hipchat there wasn't anything interesting about it.

------
auganov
They communicated the vision really well. Better pricing too. I think,
strictly feature wise - search was the only differentiator.

At the time we were using the rather obscure Flowdock[0]. Didn't feel like
switching. Felt mostly the same. Before you know everybody was talking about
Slack. Everybody understood the value of team chats. They made the competition
irrelevant before anybody even cared to look for alternatives.

[0] have to mention the great support though, helped us a lot even as an
unpaying customer

------
theklub
Something happened with Hipchat, they re-branded or moved accounts. I never
logged back in after that. Moved to discord.

------
sprafa
Far (far) better UX and onboarding, and the free tier. I've only worked in one
place that payed for Slack.

It's easy to underestimate how much UX matters, but it does, as long as the
user has a say in the matter. Otherwise we'd all be swimming in Android
phones.

------
rhlala
I though slack give another service than hipchap

Hipchap =chat Slack = integration of all other services, dropbox, chat, etc in
one place

------
draw_down
Have you used Atlassian products before? It’s never very much fun.

~~~
breakingcups
That's usually down to whoever manages the Atlassian product for you. We're
very happy with the way our Jira and Confluence are set up and wouldn't trade
it for any of the alternatives (and believe me, we've trialled them all).

HipChat is actually the only exception, at most it's "adequate". However, with
Atlassian introducing Stride as the successor if HipChat I'm curious to see
whether they understand what made HipChat fail.

