Hipchat was discontinued by Atlassian. Users are being migrated to Slack.
$0
per user
Zimbra
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
Zimbra is an email and collaboration platform and productivity suite that includes contacts, calendar, tasks, chat and file sharing, plus videoconferencing, document editing, and file storage.
N/A
Pricing
HipChat (discontinued)
Zimbra by Synacor
Editions & Modules
HipChat Basic
$0
per user
HipChat Plus
$2
per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HipChat (discontinued)
Zimbra
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
For Server pricing info please visit https://www.hipchat.com/server (Only $1.20/user/month at the highest user tier!)
We were originally a Groupwise shop before changing to Zimbra in 2008. Zimbra, from an end-user standpoint, pricing, system administration, and management is a far better system.
We use Google Apps for our students. We did not find it to be suitable for faculty and staff due to …
Zimbra is great for an email system for a medium or large organization with appropriate IT staffing. The system is easy to use for end-users, and has a fantastic web interface. Unfortunately, it is overly complex, when considering staffing requirements and price, when compared with Office 365 or Google Apps for smaller organizations. For other education customers, it is hard to compete with Microsoft and Google providing their services for "Free" now though
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.
Zimbra's mobile application leaves much to be desired; it is its weakest point.
This forces the use of third-party applications on smartphones, which only offer a more or less complete integration with the ActiveSync protocol.
Zimbra allows for an on-premise scenario, which is not for everyone, especially considering that the trend nowadays is to outsource email; in any case, it also offers this alternative.
The cost of Zimbra as a SaaS solution comes too close to that of more widely adopted competing options.
Zimbra lacks a robust integrated chat system, which its competitors offer.
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.
The web usability of the solution is adequate, with all functions integrated into a single interface. However, it is important to note that in the desktop environment, it lacks its own application and relies on ActiveSync synchronization with reference solutions like Outlook or Thunderbird. Some features, such as the briefcase, will be excluded. The same happens on smartphones.It is also common for competing solutions to include integrated chat or video call tools, which Zimbra lacks. These shortcomings are among the most frequently requested by users.
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 .
Overall, we were satisfied with the implementation. We perhaps should have spent more time consulting with Zimbra or others regarding best practices but as we got to know the system better we were able to make changes relatively easily after the fact.
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.
Zimbra is a significantly cheaper option than one of the Microsoft solutions, such as Exchange. It is able to run in a free environment, as it is in the case of Linux. It offers the advantages of a powerful mail manager, such as indexed searches and the integration of contacts and notes, all in one platform. It is constantly updated and the operation of its connection in mobile equipment is remarkable and very efficient. Additionally, it is able to easily integrate with Outlook solutions with its connector, which brings all the benefits of Zimbra to the user under the interface known as "mail manager." So far, I have been using Zimbra for several years and I have not missed my previous work platforms.
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.
Zimbra is a cheaper email service than other similar platforms and in my point of view offers better features, that's why the company migrated services to this platform several years ago and without a doubt, it has been the best investment.
Zimbra has a more user-friendly interface for employees, this has improved response times to external customers of the company.
The implementation of Zimbra in the company motivated the IT engineering department to make improvements in open source to adapt it to the needs of the company.
