HipChat [EOL] Reviews and Pricing

VP of Systems Engineering at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Oct 14, 2013

Alternative to Campfire, IRC, or even iChat

As we’ve been getting started with development at our new company I have taken the opportunity to re-evaluate developer tools and workflow. At Hyperpublic I had the chance to try a lot of the tools that emerged as part of “make everything a cloud service” trend that was sweeping the late 2008-2010 era. I have stuck with many of the old stalwarts – Github (source code hosting), Pivotal Tracker (feature and bug tracking), Dropbox (files haring) – however one welcome new addition to the workflow is HipChat.

HipChat is a private group chat client developed by Atlassian, the company who brought us Jira (ticket tracking) and Confluence (information collaboration). It runs natively as an Adobe Air application, and there’s a browser based UI for search and history should you need to access a piece of information on the go. It supports multiple rooms for group chat, one on one private chat, file and link sharing, and has a useful API for integrating with other services in the workflow.

A nice benefit of integrating our other services with HipChat is the activity stream that is produced which helps everybody observe progress. When code is pushed to Github, a new pull request is issued, new comments are left, new stories are created, Chef finishes running, integration tests fail….everybody is kept up to date on progress in a way that isn’t obtrusive and doesn’t clog the inbox. I’ve noticed an increase in engagement with code reviews and an increased commitment to our intended workflow – both huge benefits. If you’re looking for a team alternative to Campfire, IRC, or even iChat I’d recommend checking out HipChat.

* Hat tip to our team member Jamie for bringing HipChat to the team.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Apr 16, 2014

Compared with other tools, HipChat is more useful based on the following reasons: integration with external tools like: pivotal tracker or codeclimate, one common room for all users that work at the same project where they can chat about everyhing, usage of hipbot, a really smart bot and the ability to create trading rooms to use for code reviews. I think only one feature is missing at the moment, and this feature is the ability to log on to multiple accounts.

it_user530142

Search CX Support Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Nov 17, 2016

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Instant alerts and channels for communicating with teammates about updating tickets and code improved our productivity.

What is most valuable?

We use a robot integrated with JIRA and BitBucket, a customized robot, and hubot.

How has it helped my organization?

We receive instant alerts from HipChat on iPhone. As a system engineer, we need to get the notification immediately to update tickets from JIRA and update the code from BitBucket on mobile. We could check this from email, but there are a lot of emails that we would just ignore. For HipChat, we can create a specific channel for the update. We communicate with teammates instantly within the channel, which helps us to be productive.

What needs improvement?

What I had dealt with hipchat was integrating hipchat with our operational server (hubot + jenkins) at the backend. Thus, we could run some non-critical operation on top of the mobile, such as resource check, availability check, owner check. Due to the security reason, we should not allow to run some crucial cmd like reboot. There are some build-in feature for JIRA and bitbucket helping us to send out notification to hipchat room. Therefore, we can directly give a instant response via the room instead of sending out massive emails.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using HipChat for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There was some problem with the company firewall. It was not stable in some versions.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I did not have any scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support was slightly above average.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Before HipChat, we used Lync without a built-in robot.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation was simple. I did it without reading the manual.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Slackbecause it is free for basic usage.

What other advice do I have?

Study customized robots for further automation.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.