HipChat (discontinued) vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor

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

Having experience of SharePoint On Premise and also SharePoint Online, there isn't an out of the box app/webpart that enables you to 'roll up content' from a variety of source's (in my case SP Lists, but there are many other data sources it works with) across site collections with an easy to use and intuitive interface which is what Lightning tools excels at.

• 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

• Aggregate documents across SharePoint site & libraries
• Filtering for owner/person responsible & due dates
• Ease of end-user filtering on columns
• Color-coding & other formatting

• 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• The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years.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

• Mobile Friendly
• Calendar/Gantt views
• Complex/Custom Logic

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

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

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

The Lightning Tools support team responds quickly, and team members are very friendly and helpful.

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

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

I haven't found another product to compare this one to. Only in SharePoint Online which has a similar App 'Highlight Webpart' ... it's far too complicated to set up and requires learning yet another language and exporting and importing via PowerShell to get any real results that would be useful.

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

• 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

• Policies easier to portray