What users are saying about
55 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 9.4 out of 100
Based on 55 reviews and ratings
575 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 7.6 out of 100
Based on 575 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
Project Management
HCL Connections
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
7.3
HipChat (discontinued)
73%
HipChat (discontinued) ranks higher in 2/2 features
HipChat (discontinued) ranks higher in 2/2 features
Mobile Access
N/A
0 Ratings
7.3
73%
98 Ratings
Search
N/A
0 Ratings
7.2
72%
104 Ratings
Communication
HCL Connections
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
7.3
HipChat (discontinued)
73%
HipChat (discontinued) ranks higher in 6/6 features
HipChat (discontinued) ranks higher in 6/6 features
Chat
N/A
0 Ratings
7.7
77%
134 Ratings
Notifications
N/A
0 Ratings
7.7
77%
132 Ratings
Discussions
N/A
0 Ratings
6.5
65%
112 Ratings
Surveys
N/A
0 Ratings
8.0
80%
36 Ratings
Internal knowledgebase
N/A
0 Ratings
7.0
70%
43 Ratings
Integrates with GoToMeeting
N/A
0 Ratings
7.0
70%
23 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
HCL Connections
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
6.3
HipChat (discontinued)
63%
HipChat (discontinued) ranks higher in 6/6 features
HipChat (discontinued) ranks higher in 6/6 features
Video files
N/A
0 Ratings
6.5
65%
86 Ratings
Audio files
N/A
0 Ratings
6.8
68%
74 Ratings
Access control
N/A
0 Ratings
6.5
65%
61 Ratings
Advanced security features
N/A
0 Ratings
5.8
58%
51 Ratings
Integrates with Google Drive
N/A
0 Ratings
6.0
60%
28 Ratings
Device sync
N/A
0 Ratings
6.0
60%
56 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- HCL Connections is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
- HipChat (discontinued) is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Renew, Implementation Rating, Product Scalability
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
HCL Connections
90%
20 Ratings
6.8
HipChat (discontinued)
68%
135 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
HCL Connections
77%
7 Ratings
9.8
HipChat (discontinued)
98%
2 Ratings
Usability
9.0
HCL Connections
90%
4 Ratings
7.2
HipChat (discontinued)
72%
8 Ratings
Availability
10.0
HCL Connections
100%
2 Ratings
HipChat (discontinued)
N/A
0 Ratings
Performance
9.0
HCL Connections
90%
2 Ratings
HipChat (discontinued)
N/A
0 Ratings
Support Rating
8.0
HCL Connections
80%
8 Ratings
7.0
HipChat (discontinued)
70%
10 Ratings
Implementation Rating
7.3
HCL Connections
73%
2 Ratings
8.4
HipChat (discontinued)
84%
6 Ratings
Product Scalability
7.0
HCL Connections
70%
2 Ratings
7.2
HipChat (discontinued)
72%
10 Ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
HCL Connections
IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.
Associate Director IT Infrastructure
Mennonite Central CommitteeNon-Profit Organization Management, 1001-5000 employees
HipChat (discontinued)
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.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Internet Company, 5001-10,000 employeesPros
HCL Connections
- The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
- The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
- The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating

Verified User
Administrative Assistant in Human Resources
Education Management Company, 51-200 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
- HipChat is the first enterprise team chat application, hence it invented the idea of itself.
- Cross-platform support and hence runs on most of the computing devices
- Efficient search
- Completely free for smaller teams
- Webhooks +1
- Integrations with Atlassian products and other systems as well. For example, Infra monitoring applications.
- Custom emojis
- Media and file sharing directly or in a group
- Video chat
Development Lead and Developer
IYBAInternet, 1-10 employees
Cons
HCL Connections
- The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
- The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
- The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
- Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
- IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
- Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
- Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
- The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
- IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
- An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
- 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.

Verified User
Program Manager in Customer Service
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesPricing Details
HCL Connections
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—HCL Connections Editions & Modules
—
Additional Pricing Details
—HipChat (discontinued)
General
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$0 per user
HipChat (discontinued) Editions & Modules
Edition
HipChat Basic | $01 |
---|---|
HipChat Plus | $21 |
- per user
Additional Pricing Details
For Server pricing info please visit https://www.hipchat.com/server (Only $1.20/user/month at the highest user tier!)Likelihood to Renew
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 7.7
Based on 7 answers
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.

Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology
Sports Company, 501-1000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
HipChat (discontinued) 9.8
Based on 2 answers
If they fix the bugs the last update gave that are causing hipchat to crash more often.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employeesUsability
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 9.0
Based on 4 answers
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
HipChat (discontinued) 7.2
Based on 8 answers
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.
Sr. Visual Design
GLGComputer Software, 501-1000 employees
Reliability and Availability
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 10.0
Based on 2 answers
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Performance
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 9.0
Based on 2 answers
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 8.0
Based on 8 answers
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
HipChat (discontinued) 7.0
Based on 10 answers
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 .
Sr application support engineer
Albertsons CompaniesRetail, 1001-5000 employees
Implementation Rating
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 7.3
Based on 2 answers
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Government Administration Company, 10,001+ employeesHipChat (discontinued)
HipChat (discontinued) 8.4
Based on 6 answers
I don't have insights as I was not a part of the implementation. However, I love the end product
Software Tester
Nelnet Business SolutionComputer Software, 1001-5000 employees
Alternatives Considered
HCL Connections
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
Lead Consultant
Best MethodsInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
HipChat (discontinued)
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.
System Administrator
Turning TechnologiesComputer Software, 51-200 employees
Scalability
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 7.0
Based on 2 answers
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesHipChat (discontinued)
HipChat (discontinued) 7.2
Based on 10 answers
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.
Programmer Analyst, Product Manager
Bee RoboticsComputer & Network Security, 11-50 employees
Return on Investment
HCL Connections
- Positive - Using IBM Connections has reduced the number of directories and file share repositories previously used for collaboration.
- Positive - The direction is to stop relying on email for the only method of communicating and sharing knowledge. IBM Connections is in the right step.
Project Management Office (PMO) Manager
CarestreamMedical Devices, 5001-10,000 employees
HipChat (discontinued)
- 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.
Senior Technical Account Manager
LotameInternet, 51-200 employees