Likelihood to Recommend Specific scenarios where Communifire would be well suited to an organisation, would be companies that are people focused and committed to frequent and open communication channels from both the top-down and bottom-up. It also would suit organizations that are committed to providing the staff opportunities to collaborate, share and actively contribute to company initiatives and planning. If these aren't elements of your organization's culture, the system would still work for you or those companies who just want to push information out and have an effective intranet. Communifire would cater to these scenarios just as well and is more than capable of providing that type of simple solution.
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 Communifire allows people to connect easily through instant chat and messaging. It works similarly to other social media platforms like Facebook so its not hard to learn. Communifire makes it easy to share news and events with our community and the presentation of this information looks very professional. I found Communifire quite easy to configure to our individual needs. There were a lot of options to turn things on or off. This was important to us because in some areas of our community we wanted to allow our contractors many features and in other areas we wanted to really limit what was on offer. We had a big list of things we needed a platform to do. Communifire ticked all the boxes. 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 Some UX issues that could be improved Some architecture decisions don't make complete sense to me (though that's just one man's opinion) 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 Our business depends upon this software to provide information on all aspects of our business. The future of business is a marriage between web site and customer interaction. This software will allow us to move in that direction.
Read full review If they fix the bugs the last update gave that are causing hipchat to crash more often.
Read full review Usability This rating has a caveat - there is always room for improvement, and this team gets it. You always learn from customers how to do things better and easier, so it is a constant learning of how people use the site. Although the search engine is exceptional, most people do not use it as their first line of research. Much of the usability has to do with layout - and is not just a software usability item, so the rating is severely dependent up on the layout/options you choose for your usage. And their team will do anything in their power to get the results and layout you want. The areas that need improvement - and acknowledged by the team - are the administrative tools. There are a ton of options, and it takes a little to learn some of those. For most people, however, this won't be an issue, because the support team will always help you. This is always the case with more power. If there were fewer options it would no doubt be easier, but they give you the keys to all of the cars in the lot; so a little more to learn.
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 Reliability and Availability Never any problems. Quite impressed
Read full review Performance Works in real time.
Read full review Support Rating I have always found Communifire support to be exceptional. We have had a personal account manager who has been very helpful.
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 found the system to be very flexible and the Communifire team very supportive in helping me identify solutions for my goals.
Read full review 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 We selected Communifire for the excellent sales support, strong feature set and quick set up time. We were able to get started immediately and build out features as need required which led to faster execution and higher adoption rates among our team.
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 We are still building out features of the platform but with implemention of paid features by members, we will be able to cover our operating cost of the platform. 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