Atlassian Confluence vs. HipChat (discontinued)

I would recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies that want to have internal documentation and minimum governance processes to ensure documentation is useful and doesn't have a lot of duplicated and non-updated content. I wouldn't recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies with a low budget since this product might be a little costly (especially with add-ons).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Cross product linking - If you use other Atlassian products then Atlassian Confluence is a no-brainer for your source of documentation, knowledge management etc. You can show previews of the linked asset natively E.g. showing a preview of a JIRA ticket in a Atlassian Confluence page.
• Simple editing - Though the features available may not be super complex right now, this does come with the benefit of making it easy to edit and create documents. Some documentation editors can be overwhelming, Atlassian Confluence is simple and intuitive.
• Native marketplace - If you want to install add-ons to your Atlassian Confluence space it's really easy. Admins can explore the Atlassian marketplace natively and install them to your instance in a few clicks. You can customise your Atlassian Confluence instance in many different ways using add-ons.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• UI Design is very simplistic and basic could make use of more visually interesting colour choices, layout choices, etc.
• Under the 'Content' menu, it defaults to having a landing page for all L1 and L2 category pages. Meaning as long as the broader content category has a sub-category, it still creates a separate landing page. In my team's case, this often creates blank pages, as we only fill out the page at the lowest sub-category (L3).
• Hyperlinks are traditionally shown as blue, however, this results into very monotonously blue pages in cases where a lot of information is being linked.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.

If they fix the bugs the last update gave that are causing hipchat to crash more often.

Incentivized

Great for organizing knowledge in a hierarchical format. Seamless for engineering and product teams managing software development. Helps in formatting pages effectively, reducing manual work. Tracks changes well and allows for easy rollbacks. Granular controls for who can view/edit pages. Search function is not great which needs improvement. Hire some google engineers

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.

Incentivized

We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.

Incentivized

This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.

Incentivized

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 .

Incentivized

Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).

This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!

Incentivized

I don't have insights as I was not a part of the implementation. However, I love the end product

Incentivized

We chose Atlassian Confluence over SharePoint because it's much more user-friendly and intuitive. Atlassian Confluence makes collaboration and knowledge sharing easier with its simpler interface and better search. While SharePoint can be powerful, it often feels clunky and complex, making it harder for our team to actually use it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• The AI feature which lets me find relevant documents while reading one document is really beneficial.
• Centralising of knowledge systems is one of the key differentiators for large organisations.
• As long as folks keep using Google Docs and Atlassian Confluence, there is going to be a challenge in building a continuum.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized