It's fantastic for folks who have conference calls with folks outside your organization throughout the day. It does not have a video option though, so if you need that, look elsewhere. After each call, I get an email "receipt" which shows the length of the call and all participants.
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.
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The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years.
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.
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 .
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.
Loopup is a cheaper alternative than GoToMeeting. You do sacrifice some of the features, but for most staff requiring a dial in and screen sharing it does the job. If cost reduction is at the forefront, you may want to look more seriously at LoopUp as a screen sharing tool.
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.
