Hipchat vs Slack
Short Intro
Long-waited post for me. So hipchat was something I used a several years back before slack ever came out and that was my transition from IRC chatrooms. I was like, wow this is cool, the idea of chatting efficiently online with notifications. Years later, come slack, and I like it and its special integrations with tools + webhooks. I never managed slack but I think I can totally dig its greatness.
Finally come 2016, I join a new company and they use hipchat. I thought I had no problems with it despite having used slack previously but... damn, I dislike hipchat and not just hipchat but Atlassian products overall with a vengeance. It’s not like they’re terrible but they’re definitely not the most popular products in any way. Atlassian products are just very...subpar in standards in my opinion. They’re working many products and don’t seem to produce what is more important. Oh well, I don’t work there so I don’t know what their aim actually is, so I can’t judge em too hard.
Let’s get started with the list of how slack beats hipchat.
UI
Hipchat’s list of small UI hindrances drives me crazy because they’re so simple to fix and yet, they make no sense and slow you down. On top of that, they’ve been adding new features that make it worse to work and that no one asked for.
- when i fail to upload on hipchat, an ugly block prevents me from clicking the upload button again on my regular mac screen size.
- hipchat decides to only have your profiles show by avatar and throw away the name unless you cursor over them. with no option to switch back. talk about shoddy.
- special added hacks with emojis while other important UI issues aren’t fixed
- gif profiles.. really hipchat? you can’t fix the other problems (the ones i described earlier) you have and you decide to add this? and when you “disable gifs,” gif profiles are annoying as fuck. and slack is KNOWN for being disruptive but they understand there’s no need to add this.
Usability, and Overall Quality
- hipchat’s /code vs slack’s backtick wrappers for code (such a disturbance because i can’t mix in the code along with the comments and they always lead to mistakes) because i mentioned the backslash, i can only imagine that things like quoting and private messaging are done a lot better in slack
- hipchat has gone down almost every week for a few hours. imagine if our whole team was remote the entire time...hours thrown out the door. haven’t had that happen in slack cuz they seem to handle these issues very well
- 404 error happened a few times when search failed, probably related to their status problem.
Security
- amazon s3 vs ... well i actually forgot what slack does. granted, i have no way to hack into these special s3 url addresses...yet...but regardless, a product’s job is to not scare its consumers in any way.
Customer Support
- obviously very little to none. if you’ve ever tried to make a post on one of their products... i only tried posting on Bamboo so it may not be related but wait... it’s an atlassian product so ill just comment anyways. Your post not only fails but it says something about an error occurring after you submit. (feels very unprofessional there)
____________________________________________________
Conclusion
So this was actually a really small list thought up and written in about 10 minutes. If I can concoct this kind of post in 10 minutes, you know you got problems with your product. you’ll see that i wrote very little about slack. the only thing i can say about it is that it’s known to be more disruptive and fairly so because they offer those opportunities to be more disruptive and leave it up to the owner to provide the proper env. alright then, peace out.