Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
N/A
HipChat (discontinued)
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Hipchat was discontinued by Atlassian. Users are being migrated to Slack.
$0
per user
Slack
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Slack is a group messaging or team collaboration app that aims to simplify communication for businesses. Features include open discussions, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as deep contextual search and message archiving, and file sharing. Slack integrates with a number of other tools, such as MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Slack was acquired by Salesforce in December 2020.
The product is free to use, and also has paid plans with more features and greater controls.
The…
$8.75
per month per user
Pricing
Google Chat
HipChat (discontinued)
Slack
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
HipChat Basic
$0
per user
HipChat Plus
$2
per user
Free
$0
Pro
$7.25*
per month per user
Business+
$12.50*
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Chat
HipChat (discontinued)
Slack
Free Trial
No
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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For Server pricing info please visit https://www.hipchat.com/server (Only $1.20/user/month at the highest user tier!)
*Per active user, per month, when paying once a year.
Pro is $8.75 USD per active user when paying month to month. Business+ is $15.00 USD per active user when paying month to month.
Google Hangouts is the better app for saving chats. With Slack, you'll need to buy a premium license and if your team reaches more than 20 members then things can get expensive. Slack may be cheaper initially but as soon as somebody adds new employees or contractors they will …
The main reason why we chose it - the overall G Suite solution, that we bought. We have Google Calendar, GMail & Chat built in. In order not to waste money - we decided to use Google Chat. It works fine, however, as said before, if you had experience with Slack - then you might …
Slack is actually expensive for larger teams, and their free plan has limitations on message history and file storage so that is the we moved to Google Chat.
Slack has a few more features than Google Chat. Slack, for a long time, had thread chats that grouped a thread of thoughts together, making the main chat group space a lot less cluttered. A while back, Google Chat implemented a similar thing in a different but similar way, …
It doesn't need to much to get started if you have a personal Google account. If you have a business account setup by your organization, you need permissions to use it, however this is something good to have this customizable part from Google Chat. We can create groups, attach …
Google hangout is very easy to install and you do not have to purchase this feature additionally, this comes with the google product. You can use this product even without installing the additional software. You can work while chatting with your colleagues easily. It can work …
HipChat might have a slight edge over Flowdock because of the larger number of integrations available in the marketplace. Otherwise Flowdock is a way better tool out of the box. It has the best solution for separating multiple conversations/threads in the same room. It's email …
Slack is more fun to use, however, each channel you open doesn't feel like something you want to close, so they stack up quickly. Hipchat feels much more focused.
HipChat stacks up really well against Slack. Many of the same features, look and feel and performance. Although we have about half of us on Mac and half on PC and several times we hear complaints of the desktop app not connecting soon after updates are released. Slack also …
Hipchat was selected by my superiors and works fine, though we are limited to the free version with only 10k message history. I prefer Slack or Telegram, though Telegram would require quite a bit of customization, Slack is a superior, cheaper option to Hipchat.
At the time we looked at Slack there wasn't an on-premise option. Hipchat also had a better client at the time. We had issues with notifications on Slack.
We left HipChat because of ongoing support issues and it didn't seem to be exactly, cutting edge. We now use Slack which seems to be much more in line with our organization as a whole. The features we use on slack were not offered at the time on HipChat and I think they had …
HipChat offers a good advantage for organizations looking for a low cost communication tool. The integration is easy and widely supported by many forums. Though, the technical issues are less reliable. Due to technical failures, Slack and Skype take the cake. Slack offers many …
Slack is by far a better alternative, and HipChat was only developed as an alternative to Slack. It certainly falls short. The platform is not user-friendly, it is generally a bit buggy, and it doesn’t organize conversation threads in an efficient way like Slack does.
At the time, our organization was using Jabber for communication, which wasn't suited well for teams. HipChat brought a ton of great features when moving from Jabber, such as the ability to make rooms for each of our projects.
Rocket Chat is an open-source Slack clone, which …
Slack is better developed then HipChat. It's better and faster for connecting with people. HipChat is also good but needs to be developed. The company has to update their software regularly to reach the level where Slack is now.
HipChat really cannot compete with Slack so it doesn't surprise me that they've purchased the code base from Atlassian. As I mentioned earlier in the review it's screen sharing, video/audio quality and file transfers abilities are almost universally done better by the …
I've used Slack and it's much better app in comparison with HipChat. Slack is much faster than HipChat. Slack has strong user community and lot of documentation around how to use it. Product functionality and performance is superb with Slack compared to HipChat. Slack has more …
We selected HipChat because it was an enterprise solution to our organization. It allowed us to connect our enterprise ticketing software (which was used for everything) to communicate updates/patches and solutions to our clients. HipChat was a great tool because we were able …
Aside from HipChat we used Slack and Cisco Spark. Cisco Spark doesn't look as outdated as Hipchat but still is very limited with integrations and requires a paid version to take full advantage of it. Mobile version of Cisco Spark is limited and doesn't have many settings. Slack …
I used HipChat in a company which was pro "open source" and another one which is pro Atlassian. For the "open source" company I was not involved in the decision of selecting HipChat but I know that the integration with Jenkins and other internal tools were drivers for selecting …
We used hipchat because it is part of the Atlassian family of products, so integration was probably the easiest than if we went with something else. It's easy to for non-technical people to pick up and start using without much difficulty and allows flexibility in customization, …
Hipchat works about as well as the other products (Skype and Google Chat). The other products have the advantage of video chat embedded into the system. I couldn't see HipChat as a stand alone product, we mainly use it because it matches with other software like JIRA, though …
I haven't evaluated any similar products. HipChat is really just perfect for the Atlassian user. Before my company used HipChat we were using Google Hangouts.
Technical Lead Datastore, Site Reliability Engineer
Chose HipChat (discontinued)
Hipchat behaves equally good among several other platforms used at my company (OSX, Windows, Linux). It brings us the possibility to integrate with most of our used tools, and the cost is lower than other options. Chat history and encryption makes it easier to find previous …
I think obviously Slack is much much better than Google Chat, in my previous organisation, we used to communicate everything via Google Chat or email or Google meet, it was difficult to manage because those application combined had less options and features than Slack.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Slack
I evaluated Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. Slack stood out for its user friendly interface, powerful integrations and fast flexible communication. Microsoft Teams felt more formal and complex, while Google Chat lacked features. Slack best matched our …
Slack is a much more robust solution (in the case of Google Chat), and must easier to use than something like Microsoft Teams (which is a literal nightmare to use, not to mention expensive!). I would choose slack every day of the week, and I believe my coworkers would too.
Slack offers a fresh look and feel, and has felt more natural and engaging when compared to Teams or Google Chat. Teams felt heavy and less intuitive while G Chat lacks integrations and community feel. Slack strikes a balance by being simple enough for everyday use while strong …
Having had a lot of experience with Google Chat and Teams, Slack is far and away the better option.
In comparison to Teams, Slack is much cleaner with a far more user friendly AI, Teams is far too clunky and feels tiresome to use, whereas it is super easy to pick up Slack and …
I really prefer Slack the most! I appreciate how it's portable and lightweight while still having a rich feature set that isn't overwhelming. I like that it's a separate application on my computer and phone, rather than being built into the browser only. I personally don't like …
It is the best for chat based communication with a high level of security and compliance.
I think the user experience is so much better than Google Chat and Discord. To me, there is basically no comparison - the others feels not intuitive with a cluttered interface.
Slack holds up fairly well with the others. They all have the same basic features. Where they do differ is the execution. You can tell that for Teams and Discord, they had Slack in mind when they were designing their system. These two would be the closest to Slack, even in …
In my opinion, the closest to Slack in terms of UI is Discord. But Slack is much more professional with more functionalities that doesn't require very technical knowledge (good for our older staff who began their digital journey within the last decade). In terms of workflow …
Slack offers great user interface that is easy to navigate through. Customer support team are very user freindly and helpful. The pricing of Slack is fairly affordable compared to other product. Great integration capabilities with other products and the search feature is …
Slack is better suited for actual work teams rather than communities, so it wins against Discord. About HipChat - in my opinion, it was a dinosaur that is not discounted, and it's obvious why, considering the type of product Slack delivered!
It's just an actual messaging soft ware to use, compard to other that can be underwhelming or just not useful when your company is growing, Slack keep unity and option for communication that caters anyone, depending on what they feel comfortable and with what type or works they …
I have yet to try any of these but for my needs and our smaller team - I suggest going with the simplest tool is the right choice for us. As we expand moving to a more developed tool with deeper integrations would make sense.
Slack has had strong market penetration so I've found that staff are generally already familiar with it which is helpful in terms of quick, easy adoption. It was generally less expensive, more powerful, smoother to integrate and easier to adopt than competing options.
Slack is like an advanced version of any tool that I've ever used in the past. It's super simple and clean and makes chatting and organizing tasks, projects and content super easy. I think every company should be using Slack if they want to truly have their team be the most …
Google is only really useful if you’re heavily invested in their ecosystem. Teams exists as a part of enterprise licensing for Office. Slack exists because people were tired of poor options that seemed to only really come up as a part of something else. Slack is what they do, …
It is a easy and quick way to chat and send instant message using the Google account, even send files, emojis, create groups. I have used it to communicate even with external people with a personal gmail account and is great to stay in touch with all around. I recommend it for anyone who wants to stay communicated using a google account.
Slack is great for tracking commits to new coding projects. You can take parts of code that still need to be implemented later and easily search through the history of comments if there is something that goes wrong with a code commitment. It can be difficult for people that only like Teams to adjust to a new platform if you are using both to communicate.
When discussing about a specific project, I can quickly share google docs or sheets within the chat which helps my team to view the document in real time and they do not have to leave the conversation.
Scheduling a meeting with someone is very easy on Google Chat.
We have remote team members in different time zones and instead of waiting for emails we use Google Chat to quickly discuss anything.
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.
Google Hangouts Chat has a room for improvement in customizing the themes background.The themes are outdated and hard to change if you don't know the right key to change it.
It could be more user friendly if there will be no hidden features. Formatting messages is very likely to use and fun.
With conversations going on about everything all the time, it's easy to get pulled into far too many discussions but sometimes its hard to mention names because it shows many result even the users are not included on the chat room.
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.
Would love a better integration with GitHub. For example, notifications when your PR is updated, when review is requested, @-mention in comments, etc.
Improved "Later" tab, for example the ability to create to-do lists or making the "Later" tab into a more powerful to-do list (annotate items with notes)
More powerful integrations, e.g. Google Calendar could render a calendar view within Slack, rather than sending the daily schedule
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
To be more transparent, I give 10 because Slack serves our collaboration needs. It provide us a good platform for team communication relaying important update within the company, it has even mobile app where you can install in your phone to monitor any updates within that team that needs your immediate attention and intervention.
As stated from the starting we found this application is well suited for a small audience and a group of people across the organization can be communicated easily with no additional hectic of doing any setup. When you have a Gmail account ready then you can easily access google chat and continue the communication. This tool is simple,secure and robust helping the global leading partner for their internal precise communication and handling the tasks in a great way
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.
My rating was 7. Its intuitive interface and user-friendly features like channels, threads, and integrations make it excellent for team communication and onboarding. However, its usability is held back by the resource-intensive desktop app and cluttered feeling in large workspaces. The mobile app's performance and unreliable notifications have also been noted as weaknesses.
Yes, the app works 24/7. I don't even recall having any period that we could not use since the implementation. Even the maintenance periods are barely noticeable and our work is not impacted by it when it happens.
Slack is a soft app, we don't have many issues with it. I recall one or two people complaining about something during our usage period, but I didn't have a bad experience. When the app is slow, usually the problem is with my computer or my internet. The app works just fine.
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
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 .
Whenever I've had to troubleshoot an issue with Slack (which, to be honest, has not happened very often), their online documentation has been easy to locate, easy to understand, and effective in resolving my issue. Slack's ever-growing popularity also means that there's a large community of practice out there that can be depended upon.
Slack has a few more features than Google Chat. Slack, for a long time, had thread chats that grouped a thread of thoughts together, making the main chat group space a lot less cluttered. A while back, Google Chat implemented a similar thing in a different but similar way, making the group less crowded. They are catching up.
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.
I like Slack better than ClickUp, because I would spend 30-60 minutes a day updating my ClickUp tasks. The way ClickUp was used was very micromanaging. I billed by the hour, so I was willing to put in the time to alert the boss what tasks I was working on.
One of my jobs used Hive - I mostly just ran it in the background in case anyone messaged me. I did not use it often.
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.
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.
Slack has been incredibly helpful in connecting various tech apps and ecosystems, creating a more streamlined and responsive process.
Slack has made it significantly easier to communicate with our team members across multiple time zones, creating a more engaging environment for our all-remote team.