Likelihood to Recommend 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 If you cannot use another more common solution on the market or are looking for an alternative to the known solutions, it is a great alternative. If you have other tools already, and just want to test [them], that's fine, but I think the better-known ones have a better chance of using, knowing, and the learning curve will be shorter.
Read full review Pros 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 Easy to use: The app is very, very easy to use. Literally just create a chat room (input a name) and access it to chat. Call/video quality: I've experienced better call quality on appear.in than in almost all other chat and video conferencing services out there. Read full review Cons 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 The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years.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 The paid version may have dial-in. But I have always used the free version. Dial-in is typically required for an "official" multi-purpose teleconference platform. I did have some trouble with larger groups (5+) when it was Appear.in but almost always use it for small 1-on-1 or 3 person meetings. 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 We are using a larger tool suite that already includes video conferencing instead of our older approach of using different apps from different vendors. appear.in has a simple but great set of features but its pricing scheme is not as scalable as we really need in a 500+ employee company.
Read full review Usability 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 Very easy to use, technical and non-technical colleagues have used it with no instructions needed. That says all about the app and services.
Read full review Support Rating 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 Never had to contact support, so we cannot give a rating for their overall support. When we noticed the audio was not always great quality, we simply educated our users to mute the mic and use the in-room conference phone which is connected via a dedicated VOIP link and had much better voice quality. The video performance varied by locations network speed and found it got much worse when the room size increased to over 4 connections.
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 After a recommendation from a partner, as the system is very easy to use, we simply start. Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 I find Zoom more complicated to use and harder to use because a lot of people do not like having to download things to their computers or devices and Whereby is so easy to get connected with . I like that Zoom offers larger rooms, but at this point the cost is not worth the extra expense.
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 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 In general, any sort of online collaborations saves a lot on your budget. The meetings are rather more on time and can be efficient and short. Easy to drop-by and have a small talk with clients/teammates within COVID era. The URL makes you look fancy instead of a random hash. Read full review ScreenShots HipChat (discontinued) Screenshots