Very solid business chat solution with one major missing feature
June 30, 2016
Very solid business chat solution with one major missing feature
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HipChat
HipChat has long been a very solid standard for prompt business communication. It's full of features, both used to improve workflow with various integrations, and also to provide humor and provide a more human emotion to the standard text communication of chat. On the surface it's really great, and fairly reliable (there are bugs like any software), however the lack of proper message syncing on the back end commonly leaves me looking for a better tool. Push notifications for direct user conversation (@username) is great, but opening up their mobile app and having no room or user badges is a huge disappointment. Especially considering so many other chat providers (free and paid) have done this from their inception. I started using HipChat in 2011, and it's surprising that in 2016, this still isn't a feature. If I don't have a computer left online and logged into HipChat constantly, I miss a lot of important conversations and have no great way of knowing they occurred unless I go looking through our (>100?) rooms. Such a great tool with lots of capability, yet this single feature which seems so common place is severely limiting it's potential.
- Emoticons! Plenty to choose from, and the ability to make your own is really great.
- @all, @here, @username - this notification system is very useful and well thought out.
- s/change/change words inline is great for quick typers!
- It may seem small, but the alert tone they have decided to use is really great. It's bright enough to hear well, but not a very high register, so it's not annoying.
- The interface is well thought out, and easy to navigate.
- Keyboard shortcuts to jump between rooms (up/down a single room, or cmd-1/cmd-2, etc for each item on your sidebar, users and cmd-t to jump to a specific user or room.
- Topics are quick/easy to update... we use/change these a lot!
- Notifications, alerts and push notifications are great, but upon logging into a client, no room or user badges for the number of missed messages? How is this such a difficult task?
- Page Search! It's nice to be able to go back and see history for several days, etc... but I often want to just reference something from earlier in the day that's still cached above... I'd hugely benefit from a "Find on page" instead of being taken away from the room I'm in to view a much larger amount of history.
- I will occasionally be set to "Away" and not notice it for many hours to many days... I'm not sure why this happens... but it somehow gets stuck in a status that I didn't manually set, and only can tell if someone mentions it, or if I happen to notice the small orange icon in the top right of the mac app. It should be better at alerting if you're actively chatting or viewing the app (on any platform) and set as Away or Do not disturb.
- Google Hangouts and Slack
The only thing it truly lacks is message syncing. It would be the top chat solution all if it could do this reliably.