Likelihood to Recommend Large teams with dedicated design operations support UX managers that want a facilitated workflow for their teams Disciplined teams of individual contributors that want to adopt a process in their UI workflow Cross-discipline teams that want a central collaboration space for reviewing and critiquing UI artifacts If your files are named "FOR-REALS_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL_Super-Important-Project (copy).sketch" If you're managing multiple pattern libraries Read full review Well suited for
Cross-teams communication.
Webhooks support. Easy integrations with Atlassian products and other systems as well. File sharing directly or in a group. Video/Audio calls.
Not suited for:
Lacks apps integration like
Slack .
Lacks quality with video calls.
Slow file transfer for large files.
Frequent downtime due to app instability.
Read full review Pros Versioning for desginers Collaboration between team members Read full review HipChat is very stable and reliable. I have never had issues with not being able to connect or being able to communicate with others on HipChat. HipChat integrates quite well with other applications, such as Jira and Stash. This is a main selling point for my team. It provides a convenient feed of actions on a JIRA story or Stash pull request. HipCat does a good job of allowing 1-1 and group chats. It is simple to start a new conversation and it is easy to hold a group conversation and keep track of who is in the room. I like how HipChat has away/here/on mobile statuses. This makes it easy to see if a person is available to be contacted. Read full review Cons Asset exports are not as great as Zeplin and others. Filtering within files. Read full review Mobile app is not very responsive on iOS. Sometimes connection to Hipchat servers is taking too long even on good networks. Both mobile and desktop versions have no alphabetical or recent sorting for groups and chat rooms. Video and audio calls are pretty useless, they're slow and not always work. The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years. Read full review Likelihood to Renew If they fix the bugs the last update gave that are causing hipchat to crash more often.
Read full review Usability Abstract has a difficult learning curve. If a feature-branch workflow is new to you, then it will take some getting used to. They make a lot of updates to the interface and these feature releases get ahead of their documentation. They rely heavily on an excellent customer support team and are present on various Slack channels to help design professionals with issues.
Read full review The app itself had a pleasant if not generic interface. As a user experience expert and engineer I can say the interface is fairly intuitive if not bland. It does what you expect it to do and it's available on iOS and Android devices. If I recall it was generally pretty light weight in terms of installation size.
Read full review Support Rating Abstract by nature is complex and has to respond to whatever changes in Sketch. So there are frequent issues. Support can be slow to respond and are not always helpful, but they are quick to find and patch the bugs. Overall, it's not the best support, but it hasn't been detrimental.
Read full review HipChat support is good . Responds in timely manner when ever we have raised the request via email , phone and gives us continue update on the request .Though most of the questions are answered by HipChat FAQs , but they can still improve it and add more to the knowledge base .
Read full review Implementation Rating I don't have insights as I was not a part of the implementation. However, I love the end product
Read full review Alternatives Considered I purchased and administer Abstract. It was requested by our design department who evaluated it.
Read full review We tried a lot of chat clients before choosing HipChat. The
Skype for Business UI on the Mac side was 5 years old and terrible. Mac users hated the app including our CTO. Cisco
Jabber was expensive to license and maintain;
Skype was open to the public which took time away due to users dealing with spam and could allow viruses and malware. HipChat being a closed product, centrally managed and available to try without an upfront investment was perfect for our environment. All our Agile teams have their own room, chat and can communicate with others quickly and easily.
Read full review Scalability Actually I never shared of HipChat using with more than 25 persons in team simultaneously, but I believe it can be scaled for much largest collaboration teams. At least it works flawlessly for us, with transparent integration with Jira, and I am not see any reasons for some troubles for work at big scale.
Read full review Return on Investment Single source of truth for the team. Could quickly get expensive with corporate accounts. Read full review HipChat has increased the effiency with which I am able to communicate with my coworkers, particularly those who work out of other offices. Having a light, portable messaging solution has been beneficial for checking in on small things without the need to send emails or schedule phone calls. Read full review ScreenShots HipChat (discontinued) Screenshots