HipChat is chatty and hip, but not perfect
June 30, 2016
HipChat is chatty and hip, but not perfect
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HipChat
We are a software design/development agency. We use HipChat with one client to facilitate communication within teams and one-to-one. Members of these teams are on at least two continents and spread across 8 or more time zones.
- Integration with other Atlassian products means that we see development "events" (e.g., pull-requests merged in Stash) in real time, without having to move to another tool.
- The UI for HipChat is quite clean. I always know what room I'm in, which ones I can "jump to" quickly, and which rooms I haven't visited in a while.
- HipChat on the desktop (I'm on a MacBook Pro with OS X El Capitan) is almost instantaneous. There is very little delay in the sending/receiving of messages (which can happen in some other chat/messaging platforms).
- While the UI is quite clean (which I mentioned already), it can be hard to figure out how to join a new room or how to start a chat with another individual. I've struggled each time that I've wanted to do this, and I've puzzled through it with coworkers when they've been stymied by the same issue.
- Mobile HipChat is terrible at notifying me -- even if a team member has @ messaged or direct messaged me. I get the notification on my phone (I use both an Android and an iOS phone), but I don't know which room or person has the message that caused the notification.
- If I'm logged out of HipChat for a few hours or couple days, I get no indication which rooms have had activity since I was last logged in. I have to remember when I last visited each conversation and parse back through to see what I might have missed.