Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

HipChat

1.3K
891
+ 1
684
Slack

117.6K
94.4K
+ 1
6K
Add tool

HipChat vs Slack: What are the differences?

HipChat and Slack are two popular team communication platforms that help teams collaborate and communicate efficiently.

  1. User Interface: HipChat has a simple and straightforward user interface with a focus on conversations and messages. On the other hand, Slack offers a more modern and visually appealing interface with features like colored themes, emoji reactions, and customizable layouts.
  2. Integration and Customization: Slack provides a vast array of integrations with various third-party apps, allowing teams to centralize their workflow and access everything in one place. HipChat also offers some integrations but has a more limited selection. Additionally, Slack allows users to customize their workspace with custom themes, emojis, and shortcuts, while HipChat has limited customization options.
  3. Pricing: Slack offers a freemium model with limited features for free and tiered pricing plans for additional features and capabilities. HipChat, on the other hand, offers a more affordable flat-rate pricing model with access to all features for all users, making it more budget-friendly for larger teams.
  4. Search Functionality: Slack has more advanced search capabilities, allowing users to search for specific messages, files, or even conversations within the platform. HipChat also has a search function, but it may not be as comprehensive and powerful as Slack's search feature.
  5. File Sharing and Storage: Slack provides users with more storage space for files, allowing teams to upload and share large files easily. HipChat has more limited file storage capabilities, making it less suitable for teams that frequently need to share large files.
  6. Video Conferencing: Slack offers the ability to have video conferences with up to 15 participants in its free plan and up to 250 participants in paid plans. HipChat, however, only supports screen sharing, and its video conferencing capabilities are not as robust as Slack's.

In Summary, HipChat and Slack differ in terms of user interface, integration and customization options, pricing models, search functionality, file sharing and storage capabilities, and video conferencing capabilities.

Advice on HipChat and Slack
Needs advice
on
MattermostMattermostRocketChatRocketChat
and
SlackSlack

I've used Slack for team communication but I'm looking for a new collaboration tool that allows advanced permissions.

  1. Enable/disable DMs.
  2. Private room, where only allowed members can communicate but still can't send DMs if it's disabled.

I'm considering Mattermost or RocketChat. Does anyone have experience with them? Otherwise, any recommendations?

See more
Replies (2)
Dmytro Shamenko

Depends on what you wanna achieve, Slack isn't ready to be installed on your private serves for example, so you may chose RocketChat/Mattermost over Slack. Which is also good in case if you wanna control upgrades, where the Slack way often can bring you something new which you don't like at all.

See more
Evgenios Skitsanos
Recommends
at

I have a background in ChatOps on Slack and Mattermost; one of my clients had a few concerns about how things were done on Slack, so I needed to find an alternative to migrate into. After some evaluations and trials, we agreed on Mattermost.

We had many integrations mainly driven by inbound and outbound webhooks, besides those standard ones like GitHub integrations and so on.

Also, it was crucial to keep the same look and feel so people could use their Slack themes as is.

Because data ownership especially when it comes to files sent within chat sessions is a big deal, I've made the following config:

⇢ Mattermost runs on computing instances on Oracle Cloud (you can run one or more instances and put the load balancer in front of your backend sets, otherwise you can go with OpenResty/nginx)

⇢ Chat data is stored in Oracle Cloud's MySQL Database

⇢ Files were stored on S3-compatible storage implemented using MinIO (https://min.io/), you need a minimum of 4 computing instances to implement a cluster.

⇢ OpenResty that I used for upstream load balancing was also responsible for handling webhooks and bots, written in Lua (OpenResty is nginx+LuJIT)

Mattermost is extremely well documented on its own website and on IBM ChatOps documentation, so installing and upgrading/updating it is a very smooth experience.

See more
Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

See more
Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

See more
Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 193.3K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

See more
Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

See more
Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 188.8K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

See more
Decisions about HipChat and Slack
Kamaldeep Singh

I still use slack, although I prefer discord. It can be intergrated with discord to work with clients who only want to use slack or even any other platform. API integrations are possible over at Discord.

The awful crappy dependency hell of a thing they call an API. Everything sucks. Slack is one of the worst messaging apps I have ever seen. It's incredibly slow and laggy.

Let me rant about everything I hate about slack. Even though I use it as an integration for another platform and will recommend it even though it's horrible as a whole. They are unstoppable towards companies who don't have people technically savvy enough to transition any other software.

It's so bad I am considering making my own mix of discord and slack.

Finding conversations you know you've had - but search is (Still) terrible, and if it was a direct message with a group of people, you have to remember exactly which group of people it was with

Search...absolutely awful. If they could figure out search, Slack would be unstoppable. it got better with ctrl f in conversations, but still isn't there

Badly arranged Chinese buffet of people, conversations, channels, files and links.. and search sucks too.. Break up the people into a separate window so I can have a buddy list ala Communicator or Skype. Give me some freaking organization and curation to the conversations - otherwise it's 1000 person cocktail party with everyone playing drinking games.

AGAIN! Search sucks. Spellcheck is still broken. Too many notifications.

Interface ist inconsistent between devices.

No way to forbid slack to touch my microphone settings (seriously, dont autoadjust my microphone level, it never works and i hate you so much for it)

Still no good screen sharing on linux.

The buggy red dot. Usually shift-esc will clear it (in itself a pain), but now even that hack won't help. The red dot number keep climbing even though I've read everything and used shift-esc.

I miss some features but I wish slack had a little more ability to organize, group channels, and navigate a little better.

user groups need work... If I search for a group, open it, I want to be able to not just see who is online from that group, but also a message button. I'm sick of searching that person, which closes user groups and if that person is actually AFK, I have to search for that group AGAIN and do it again... What a waste of time compared to other tools which are supporting this.

Date stamps needs to be more visible, or give us option in settings to make it more/less visible

Scrolling needs to be improved, I don't want random jumps there. Especially when time and date stamps are so tiny so it takes a while to get oriented again.

I used to really hate slack, but that's mostly because I have to use user groups a lot, most of the time I'm using slack it's to find someone who belongs to some group and message him... and that stuff is still pretty bad, even tho it was changed a bit...

oh and microphone settings... that hurts bad...

It's slow and laggy if you ever used a native program and got used to responsive user interfaces.

You can't remove someone from a call if they join by mistake

(or, to put it another way, if you start a channel call, you should be able to moderate it and remove those from it who are to meant to be there)

Video calls (using the "native" app on macOS) consume so much resources that the whole machine becomes unresponsive. A video call with the same number of people in a true native app is not a problem. So it's not the inherent bandwidth and processing power required. I mostly like Slack but for remote teams this is a problem.

You really want to know what I hate about SLACK...

The inability for the app to BLOCK DIRECT MESSAGING when outside work hours... I work for global company and I constantly get messaged after midnight by morons who think i am up at 3am

It has this Bullcrap Send Anyway function on messages which totally overrides my Do Not Disturb settings if said moron is blind of what time they are sending their damn message... I worked oncall before so the slightest him of my cell at night will wake me up...

Another annoyance on messaging... Idiots who message direct over chatting in the team channel for stuff that should be seen by the whole team working a ticket .... Or classic hey I opened a ticket not two minutes ago ' can someone look at this ticket pleaee' blah blah blah blah ... People who I don't know sending a random 'HI' and no other info about wtfh they are reaching out to me about ...

If SLACK wants to add a function to fix this I want control to block direct messages from anyone truly outside my direct team and line of management that is not a member of a group that can engage onCalls for issues ... I am so sick and tired of this I literally have to uninstall the app everyday to ensure no one bothers me after I am off work and then redownload it before the start of the next day... It's pathetic!

See more

As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.

See more
Hirotaka Ishihara
Undergrad at University of Toronto · | 3 upvotes · 175.7K views

Communication We have chosen two tools for our team communication.

  • Slack

We choose Slack since all of us are familiar with this communication tool. We have a private channel for our team Sphinx for text messages. We added Github apps inside our private channel for repo update notifications. Furthermore, we could contact the subject matter experts within the workspace DCSIL directly for the issues we meet.

  • Microsoft Teams

We use Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings for its fast connection speed. In addition, the call feature in Slack is a paid feature, and we could have virtual meetings and share screens for free in Microsoft Teams.

See more
Remotor Consulting
at Remotor Consulting Group · | 13 upvotes · 116.8K views

Keybase is a powerful and secure team-organizing software. And because Keybase is so transparently good at what it does, Keybase is a foundational software that facilitates the future of work: effective, inclusive, secure Remote Teams.

Keybase is a free, end-to-end encrypted, open-source program with almost limitless flexibility. Each Keybase user or team is a unique cryptographic identity. Each message or interaction that a user has with a team or other user, is verifiable and digitally-signed. Custom combinations of users/teams/bots, can be designed to catalyze Remote Teams of all kinds, this process can also be automated. Keybase includes Git integration for versioning, bots from multiple platforms to facilitate audio/video-conferencing, a Cryptocurrency wallet, and many advanced privacy features to make you more or less traceable.

Services like Slack and Discord are centralized platforms that perform analytics on your behavior and can sell or leak this data to 3rd parties. Any audio/video features available within Slack or Discord, are bound to be less secure and less flexible than excellent alternatives such as Jitsi. Slack and Discord do have a fun, causal feel to them, which can potentially facilitate social engagement in certain conditions (also many users are already on these platforms).

Centralized and Proprietary team platforms such as Discord and Slack have a large market presence (at least in the USA) based on their first-mover advantage, name recognition, and network effects from size. However these products do not have the flexibility or power of Keybase. Keybase excels on its own excellence, and also has an open and active developer community.

Find us on Keybase: @remotorteam (Keybase username) @remotor.public (Public Keybase Team)

See more
Stefan Schuchlenz

We chose RocketChat over other communications suites like Cliq or Slack mainly because we can self-host it on our own infrastructure. Since we have quite some projects going on which demand that we stay in touch with a lot of different stakeholders, pricing was an issue, too. With RocketChat, we have a huge set of features basically for free, RC offers apps for all major devices and systems and overall, we're very happy with it. The only downside is the limited amount of apps and integrations, but we can make due with what we have available.

See more
Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 240K views

we were using slack and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.

on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.

we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More