
HipChat is now free for unlimited users - rbres
https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/05/27/hipchat-is-now-free-for-unlimited-users/
======
aspir
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.

~~~
callmeed
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.

~~~
david_shaw
HipChat has a nice API that allows us to shoot notifications from TribeHR, our
Linux production boxes, code commits, Salesforce, etc. to our company-wide
channels. It's a nice communication tool to use to keep the whole team on the
same page.

------
joeblau
HipChat is probably under fire from Slack. That's why I think they are making
this change, because I just made the transition a few weeks ago and Slack has
been amazing. Once you go Slack, you never go back.

~~~
adricnet
Would you mind linking to the competing service you mention, or perhaps a
review of it? I've been advocating for Hipchat but haven't seen Slack yet.

~~~
davidkuridza
[https://slack.com/](https://slack.com/)

We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we
miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it
(can't find the link at the moment).

~~~
alexcroox
Does it integrate with 3rd party chat clients like Adium or are you forced to
have their tab/client open too?

~~~
bcj
You can connect to it using an IRC client, but you lose the ability to view
history or make edits to posts

~~~
baddox
You also lose the ability to _mention_ other team members, which is huge.

------
OoTheNigerian
Slack surely is putting HipChat on its toes. Competition is really good.

I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to
temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room.

It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like
an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app.

One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their
desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect".

Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.

~~~
baddox
> The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room.

Which really means that you can force people into a room, and there's no way
to say "leave this room and don't let anyone force me back into it."

------
Deestan
Be aware that Hipchat are now rolling out a new "feature" in which the account
admin can read all private 1-to-1 chat:
[http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-
ideas/sugg...](http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-
ideas/suggestions/2757784-ability-for-admins-to-view-search-and-export-1-1)

This could be a significant issue for some, both morally and legally.

If you are using / are going to use Hipchat with this enabled, at least make
sure you are aware of any legalities you need to conform to because of this.
E.g. gather consent from employees.

~~~
djim
if said service is provided by the employer, they own the data/communications
and have every right to monitor the service. same goes for work email:
employers have access to this. it isn't illegal for them to access these
communications done on a work account.

~~~
mikeash
That depends heavily on local laws and you really can't make a blanket
statement like that.

~~~
RobAley
And laws be damned, it's often employee moral that takes a hit when employers
snoop without consent, and that can be just as costly (if not more so) than a
court case in many companies.

------
TallGuyShort
My company recently started using HipChat and I really like it. I expected to
prefer IRC because of the standard, open protocol and the choice of clients,
but the HipChat application works much more smoothly on my Linux desktop than
any IRC client I've tried, and it's been adopted more widely across my
organization than IRC ever was - making it much more useful, even if that
really just comes down to marketing it to appear more accessible. It's working
really well.

~~~
ixmatus
Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first.

Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.

~~~
wlesieutre
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.

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

~~~
NicoJuicy
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](https://jabbr.net) (+ it's opensource if you want to
implement your own team chat )

------
ak217
We switched to Flowdock and never looked back. The SNR advantages of the
integrated conversation threads and "email-like" inbox model are amazing. I
never knew what I was missing with IRC/hipchat.

~~~
akoumjian
Same here. We "inbox" everything from support, to social media shares, some
analytics, as well as code pushes. Love the way Flowdock handles those items
and lets you make reference to them while talking in the main thread.

------
latchkey
Reminder: [https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-
te...](https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-terms-of-
service/) and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524)

~~~
powdahound
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](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.com. As stated
      in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must
      have consent from their affected users in order to obtain
      access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way
      that an entity would have the right to access employee 
      communications is through the entity's employee policy.
      It is standard practice among businesses to state in their
      policies that the employer has the right to access 
      communications occurring on workplace systems. You should
      speak with your employer if you have questions about their 
      specific data access policies.

~~~
mjolk
>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.

------
jedisct1
I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server,
with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit
ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead.

And people used to pay for that?

~~~
freerobby
We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on
every device our employees own.

~~~
zo1
I'm sorry, I don't speak marketing. Care to translate what you just said for
us non-initiated?

~~~
brokentone
Which words are you having trouble with? That's pretty straight forward, but
I'm assuming you're wanting to know more about the across devices thing...
This is actually one of my favorite features. Their system keeps track of
where you're logged in from and whether you're active or idle on that
platform, then if you are sent 1-1 messages or mentioned in a room it will
find you, delivering to a computer client first, then push notifications, then
email--which is really valuable for us.

------
ChikkaChiChi
I just recently compared Slack and Hipchat and Slack seems to be the more
advanced of the two at this point.

The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence
awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't
ever tell who is at there desk when we need them.

Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on
your desktop and your mobile device.

------
hoopism
I tried to sign up. I really did.

First I entered in my own details but neglected my lastname... didn't say I
had to. It's a single name field. It rejected my submission and zero'd out the
fields. Strike one.

Then it asked for my team members names and email addresses. It had a skip
button, that was nice. I added their emails and used again their first
names... let them add their last name or preferred name. Again it failed and
removed all the data I entered. Strike two.

Then I attempted to download the client. It wouldn't let me till I verified my
account. It will let me send solicitation emails to team members... but not
download a client. Ok. Odd. I downloaded the client to my mac entered
credentials and after about 4 minutes it failed to launch with a debug window
displayed. Strike three.

I did try.

------
IgorPartola
Last I tried HipChat, it was a terrible experience simply because I wanted to
not run yet another application and instead use Adium. They do support XMPP
but to get it working you have to do magic. After I did the magic, I had chat
up and running but lo and behold: file transfers did not work. Thankfully,
this is when our team decided the experiment was over. We went back to using
IRC. What fundamental problem do these new chat protocols solve that are not
already addressed by IRC and XMPP?

~~~
brown9-2
Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while
offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the
globe.

Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old
conversations.

~~~
idle_processor
Overnight is covered by leaving a client running, with logging. Offline is
covered by using a BNC[0]. These solutions are years old, but perhaps less
user-friendly than hipchat.

There are a plethora of IRC clients to choose from one various platforms, but
there's only the one hipchat. IRC is also an open protocol.

So, hipchat's only real chance is trying to be the Apple of IRC--they must
_nail_ UX and marketing to the tech-hapless to have a real chance.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_\(software\))

~~~
eddieroger
That's pseudo-persistence, and it's only as stable as the client or bouncer.
HipChat and Slack provide actual, stateless history, so you can reboot,
logout, sign in from a mobile device, whatever, and pick up where you left
off, with notifications in the meanwhile.

------
phamilton
I've found Video Chat to be pretty terrible. I find it weird to market that as
the upsell. Most of the time, we give up with Hipchat Video and switch to a
Google Hangout.

~~~
fixie
I think their video chat is or was recently in beta. I imagine their biggest
upsell in their 'HipChat Plus' package is searchable history which is a pretty
important feature.

------
kolev
My biggest issue with HipChat is the inability to run multiple organizations
on the same client. The video and audio "premium" features are really a
terrible idea as there's Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference, and similar
for that and they are free and core businesses and Atlassian cannot and should
not attempt to compete with those!

~~~
chermanowicz
Have you tried [http://Kato.im](http://Kato.im) ? They're the only product
which supports multiple organizations in the same client -- and it's done in a
really powerful way that doesn't force you to switch between orgs. You could
have one or four open and still communicate effectively.

~~~
mutru
Flowdock also supports multiple organizations in one client.

~~~
rekoros
It's true (and great!), but you can't see two conversations from two different
organizations at the same time - have to click.

------
smethod
I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack
is the ability to have custom emoticons
[https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-
everywh...](https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywhere).
Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature
currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...

~~~
nikhilpandit
Slack lets you add custom emoji too:
[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504)

~~~
smethod
Oh cool, thanks I missed that update

------
JGuo
Just moved our team to slack as well. Has definitely been a better experience.

------
rdschouw
We moved from HipChat to Slack. HipChat desktop clients on OSX were crashing
all the time. Most notably after waking up from a suspend. Slack is much more
stable. The transition was pretty smooth.

------
mavci
I'm still with Slack. Can't make a webhook with HipChat, it shouldn't be hard
this much.

------
bokglobule
Do you guys worry about confidentiality with these services?

~~~
njharman
Yes. Every company I've worked for that had established (read not startups/not
tiny) companies as customers could never use any thing like this due to
contracts saying we won't be storing/transmitting their "stuff" on servers we
do not control. [everyone hand waves email delivery but we can't use something
like gmail].

These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just
work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".

~~~
tomschlick
They have a behind the firewall version of hipchat for security concious corp
customers.

------
Dorian-Marie
I think they should learn from Slack and make all the integrations at least as
awesome as them, and also have some kind of more modern interface.

------
fekberg
HipChat is great, but I've found myself much more often on JabbR
([https://jabbr.net/](https://jabbr.net/)) to be honest. Might be because I am
a sucker for SignalR.

JabbR is also free to use, you can have private team rooms if you so like and
it integrates with a bunch of auth services.

------
Fizzadar
We use HipChat at work, and I use Slack for some other projects; both pale in
comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC. But for
those less technical it's a fantastic and easy to setup alternative. Pointless
in an all-dev company, but anywhere else, priceless.

~~~
gtaylor
> both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of
> IRC

I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way.
HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite
comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a
password. Ditto for the mobile apps.

I love IRC, but it's a very different thing.

------
bmurphy1976
I like HipChat but I really really wish it integrated with an irc client. I've
spent hours trying to get a good experience with BitlBee and, well, it's
anything but smooth. The single biggest thing they could do to help me and my
coworkers out would be to allow our IRC clients to connect to the service.
Other than that I love it.

------
gorax
I wonder what the hosted pricing will be when it comes out of beta. At my work
we will not even entertain something that cannot be hosted by us. Hipchat has
saved 3 members of our 15 man team countless hours by integrating it into our
workflow.

I if slack could be self hosted I would consider it but Hipchat has our
support.

------
jess1003
Has anyone checked out Hall? It's chat, text, and file-sharing for teams. Free
for teams for an unlimited time. But with the added bonus of being able to
talk with ANYONE from ANY email address, instead of switching in and out of
teams like on Slack. Try it out: hall.com

------
gaoshan
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.

~~~
munificent
> That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we
> will likely jump for whoever offers it.

Hangouts in G+?

~~~
jsmeaton
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.

------
Thaxll
Is Slack cloud based? If so it's a big problem for a lot of compagnies, most
of them don't want to host their chat service to an external provider, that's
where Hipchat is very useful. You can host your own server in-house.

------
dahdum
This is awesome, we've been paying $100+/month for our company but never use
video chat or screen share (nor did we want them) and have turned off history
retention since day 1. Sounds like we can downgrade and pay nothing now.

------
larrybolt
I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about
HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves,
but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to
get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than
what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would
need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do
that.

I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying
for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's
relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.

[1]: [http://hackerchat.co/](http://hackerchat.co/)

------
skizm
Maybe I haven't read enough about HipChat, but what is the advantage over
google's chat? That you don't need a google account?

EDIT: ah, integration with other Atlassian products. got it.

------
programminggeek
The biggest feature HipChat lacks is chat room sounds. That was my favorite
feature of Campfire. Otherwise, HipChat is pretty cool, I guess.

I really miss chat sounds.

/sadtrombone

------
machbio
Slack has a problem with retrieving deleted team URLs, seems like they have
not covered all the test cases for the signup process..

------
torbica
What would be best HipChat alternative for self-hosting? At my organization we
are not allowed to use any external service.

~~~
veesahni
HipChat Server

[https://www.hipchat.com/server](https://www.hipchat.com/server)

------
ansimionescu
Two questions, if I may:

What are HipChat's advantages over other chat services?

What's a good, mainstream-ish, secure/encrypted chat service?

------
jitbit
The only reason my team prefers HipChat over Slack is because Slack doesn't
have a Windows-client

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

~~~
jsmeaton
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.

------
CMCDragonkai
We moved from Hipchat to Kato, mainly due to the bugs and frequent servers
going offline.

------
notwhyships
Hard to imagine that Google isn't going to weigh in soon with its own
offering.

------
mutant
this still doesn't fix the fact that there is no longer private 1 on 1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524)

------
rahilsondhi
That's great HipChat. Now can you do emoji autocomplete?

------
DanBlake
It feels like they are pulling a amazon, ala diapers.com fiasco. *

Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was
doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that
sector

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_book_how_jeff_bezos_went_thermonuclear_on_diapers_com.html)

~~~
te_chris
It would seem that you don't know much about Atlassian, JIRA and Confluence is
their core business, not HipChat.

------
tomkin
Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get
nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of
communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy.

On to the service itself:

I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new
account with a _different_ email address. Annoying and incredibly short-
sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside
of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people.

Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a
HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping
HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.

~~~
yaur
The way we used it. There was a dev+qa channel and a dev+support channel with
no one above tech leads in either group and it replaced Skype for a lot of
work the devs did with support. Though we ultimately didn't use it beyond the
trial period the key value driver for us was that a dev could step into an
ongoing issue and get a of context very quickly even if they didn't have
HipChat running. This means that as an IC you don't need to have the client
running when you are "trying to think". That, along with the lack of
management types in the communication flow meant that it was minimally
distracting and mostly used as intended.

You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on
peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with
remote QA and support teams.

~~~
pyre
With IRC, you need a bouncer (e.g. znc) to get the functionality of seeing
history without having the client open (and technically the bouncer _is_ just
the open client).

