Long time hipchat user here (both DC and Cloud), the rollout of Stride rubbed me all kinds of wrong ways. They 'replaced' HipChat w/ Strie but didn't keep many of the same features/integrations and then FORCED you to switch by a deadline. I get upgrades and progress, but how about rolling upgrade, swap out the client, move everyone over automatically and not pain your users? For my team, we said screw it and 'migrated' to Slack. Give us a chance to switch, we switched.
Same. Stride is just a worse implementation of Slack with less features. They even got rid of the “good parts” of HipChat, mainly that the macOS client doesn’t idle at 5% CPU, and replaced it with a full blow Electron client that had the same problems as Slack.
Honestly I’m a bit dumbfound how they are handling the transition. I bet they end up losing a lot of customers to Slack.
I also don't think anyone was forced to switch but I could be wrong. An email requesting or encouraging some action is different from being forced to do something.
It seems it stagnated. There wasn’t a real competitor to it until Slack turned up and developed a fantastic integration ecosystem (I don’t think there would be such a focus on conversational UI were it not for Slack, whether or not they intended that). By that time it was already too late, HipChat is old school, Slack is the new hotness.
Anecdotally, anyone working in a startup with an opinion on design will know how shallow a judgment has to be to switch to a competitor. App is functional but has 2008 design? The less functional equivalent with 2017 design is better because it looks up to date
There were also performance issues with HipChat, that Slack didn't have: messages went undelivered, load times unbearable etc. (at least in Sydney where we only just got speeds faster than broadband)
FWIW, I observed that 'conversational UI' and chatbots came from the western tech industry trying to 'learn' from the successes of Asian platforms like WeChat.
Yeah, no kidding. My last company was up in arms to replace HipChat with Slack even though they were 99% identical. There hasn't been a significant innovation in chat technology in like 30 years yet the business sector is more frothy than ever.
The core tech hasn't changed a ton, but slack is a good chat program for how people use computers in the modern age. If it encourages communication among your organization it's probably worth adopting, even at the higher price. I don't have numbers, but I was in an organization the switched and mobile use of slack was higher than hipchat.
Having extensively used both, Slack really is much better. Hipchat has a ton of reliability/usability issues and it’s clear _consumer-like_ product design is not Atlassian’s forte.
Also, HipChat circa 2016 was forced on my acquired company that had previously used slack. What a piece of shit that app is. HipChat just nuked the battery life on my stock nexus phone.
I had never before gotten in an argument about a chat app, but HipChat made me passionate about using anything else.
That’s exactly the point, right? Slack turned up and offered more and HipChat didn’t respond in a meaningful way except to rewrite all their clients in JS. At that point they had a buggy client and fewer features, while Slack had an inefficient client with lots of features.
Before I list everything: posting gifs is garbage. Things like giphy integration degrade the signal-to-noise ratio, and I rage against it in every chat app I use. Even in off-topic rooms it'll random make following a conversation annoying at best.
Anyway, hipchat's faults:
Search is garbage.
Editing a message is garbage.
Joining a room/messaging a specific person on mobile is annoying.
I'm not sure about how Slack handles it, but when a person leaves our company, our Hipchat chat history completely disappears. All those decisions we made with our old Product Manager via private message? Into the ether.
Want to delete a file you uploaded? Too bad. Maybe you can do it via the web interface?
I was really disappointed when noticed they didn't have a way to report bugs. They had some kind of "Suggestions box", so I used that to report mine:
Images wouldn't upload correctly when the chat room name started wih a slash (/dev/null in my case).
They deleted the ticket and a few days later it was magically fixed.
You will find pretty annoyed people if you search for "report hipchat bug".
> "I'm annoyed they didn't use my wording. They did fix my bug but I'm still annoyed."
In what world would one imagine that a suggestions box was in any way different from reporting a bug? "Suggestions box" is a bug report but renamed to be understood by Joan from accounting.
The thing about the HipChat suggestions box is that you had to collect "votes" for your "suggestion" to be considered.
So you could try to get their attention to the bug of "when you paste XML into a code block, it replaces it with subtly different, broken XML, my suggestion is to stop doing that", but it's going to be sitting several pages beyond "please add a left shark emoji!!!"
You can try to get your whole office to stack the vote, but why? I only have to be one person to report a bug to Slack.
I don't know about Stride, but the quality of Slack has really been declining lately. Especially the quality of the desktop client.
If I was in charge of the decision for what communication tool to use at my company, I would take a long hard look at every single alternative to Slack.
More likely it's just that HipChat isn't a great product experience.
As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style "s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever
One time I was trying to correct and "its" that should've been an "it's", but I didn't realized there was a preceding, correct "its" in the post. I ended up changing that "its" to an incorrect "it's", while also leaving the following incorrect "its". It was inconsequential, but very frustrating.
As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use it.
Yeah. HipChat's stability was absolutely abysmal for quite some time. They seem to have finally gotten it under control. That or a majority of their user base went elsewhere.
Stash works fine in precisely the same sense that lynx is a perfectly capable web browser. It's not wrong, but you have to admit that it's missing a number of 'modern' features that many users have grown accustomed to.
The more recent offering (Bitbucket Server) falls behind the curve as well, even when compared to their own Bitbucket Cloud service.
We are considering this for the solely because it is has screen sharing built in at the free level. In Slack, we would have to bump up to the paid level, and for our small team, the price jumps from free to $600+. The "decisions" and "tasks" features look like they might be nice (in theory). The largest thing holding us back is that many of us use Slack for other groups, which means Stride would be one more thing to run. A killer feature would be the ability to participate in Slack workspaces.
Any sources on that? I'm pretty sure it's a heavy re-architecting at the very least, but if it's the same team and lead, have they gone entirely from scratch or repurposed some of Hipchat's code? (just questioning)
Not curious enough to do the kind of blackbox exploration folks at https://webrtchacks.com or other sites do :)
Stride is a brand new product (not a rebrand of Hipchat), we did not repurpose Hipchat's code. It's built from ground up on Atlassian platform - new protocol, clients, platform, etc. One exception is the video bridge technology which remains powered by the Jitsi.org open source product (which we acquired in 2015). I do look after both products (Hipchat Cloud and Stride) for Atlassian, happy to answer questions.
Thank you, indeed you are :) . Good luck ! Maybe you can convince the higher ups at my office that Microsoft Teams is an inferior product :) (we're already invested with Jira and Confluence so it's not a stretch...)
Would have been a shame not to use the Jitsi technology for sure, I deeply respect Emil Ivov and team.
Stride looks first-rate. Hopefully opening up APIs will bring integration on-par with Slack. What's the plan for bringing Stride to self-hosted options?
So I was told at your last conference that your going to be going to a RHEL instead of the current Ubuntu. I can’t seem to get an answer on what the timeline is for that. My director is signaling to look at other options and I really don’t want to do that. I mean will it be in next 6 months? We are looking at a huge commitment.
Haven't used Stride yet but as someone who hates always-on chat I could see myself really appreciating its deep work oriented features: mute notifications, allow others in the channel to mark things as "task", "decision", "outcome" so you can go back and find important things you missed while deep working.
But can Slack help you rethink team communication, or redefine the way teams move work forward, together? I know I want a messaging tool that delivers results.
I have no connection of any sort to Stride (or any chat app for that matter, other than a few I use, which doesn't include Stride yet). This aspect of chat has just been a point for me for years. Looks like Stride and Twistapp are both attempting to solve it, among others. Wouldn't surprise me if there were some Slack plugins to do similar things as well.
Trello seems to have lost it's use after it got made into a separate company. It seems to have gotten worse after it got bought out by Atlassian. No real intriguing features.
Also, Atlassian used to be loved by developers, after it ipoed it just seems not loved
from Atlassian last earnings release in Oct 2017: "Trello continues to grow its user base at an impressive pace with more than 25 million registered users in over 100 countries, up from approximately 19 million at the start of the calendar year"
Gotten worse? I haven’t noticed anything worse, hasn’t seemed very different at all. I don’t have a business account though - do you have anything specific in mind?
"Lost its use"? What kind of bizarro tech bubble is this where something solid which works and has stayed true to its essence is considered bad, and instead we demand an unrelenting churn that results in limply overcooked products inevitably jumping the shark (JIRA redesign I'm looking at you).
Sad thing is there isn’t even baseline feature parity. Not sure what’s going to happen when they give my org a date to move by. Without some of the more enterprisey features, we can’t move to Stride.
Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.
They should have released it as a UI improvement for HipChat, not a whole new ecosystem.
> Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.
I certainly didn't appreciate it. As someone who invests significant portions of time building integrations between various systems in our development team, I quickly hit the brakes the second I heard the Stride announcement.
Since our organization is being forced to move from HipChat, we're reviewing alternatives rather than blindly continuing onward toward Stride.
I strongly doubt that this will have any impact on Atlassian's bottom-line, however.
biggest gripe with Atlassian is all their products are slow as hell. Hipchat was sluggish and buggy but at least they were steadily improving. Now everyone has to start over on a new platform (?) Confluence, how freakin long does it take to return a static info page, Seconds? As if visiting the HR subdomain wasn't painful enough already. Heaven forbid you click on something makes a POST request in JIRA, RIP developer.
Agreed. If anyone from Atlassian is reading this, the changes to Jira and Confluence make me think something is wrong there. I have been a faithful Jira user for over a decade and it has gotten markedly worse as a product in the past year. Maybe it's more profitable with app/marketplace, but the experience with multiple integrated apps is dog slow. Navigability has gotten worse. HipChat had uptime issues to the point my company moved to Slack. I am worried for you guys.
I agree with this. In 2006 I was a huge fan of JIRA and it just felt like such a well designed app.
Now it has some kind of Designer disease, where it looks beautiful (truly, I love the style and fonts and colors), but I simply can't find my way around it. And I get very frustrated trying to do basic things because the app is also really slow (clearly 500ms+ per request). It's clear that it's still a server-side app and not a SPA which is the kind responsiveness everyone expects nowadays.
So our two person team went back to using Excel. Jira just takes too long to get things done with.
Michael Tiemann used to say that he wasn't interested in trying to pitch to a company unless he thought his product (Red Hat Linux) was four times better than what they currently had: the costs and risks of a switch can easily negate the value of changing to a product that is only somewhat better than the incumbent. Unless Stride does something massively better than Slack, I don't see how Stride can compete.
Slack's challenge is that it's just Slack. It's an extra monthly cost, extra thing to the manage.
Atlassian can sell you the integrated package. One price, one invoice, tight integration between products.
I don't have any data on this, but I think one reason for Slack's success was that people could just start using it without going thorough the IT. I'd assume there's still a huge number of companies who haven't made an official choice on this space. Those might be tempted to go with offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft.
Slack could be interesting acquisition for Dropbox (haven't thought out if it could work financially).
It’ll be bundled with other atlassian products. Less hassle to integrate with those, one less service to log into, one less monthly payment, etc. Slack is possibly better for someone who doesn’t use atlassian products.
Also, many people use skype for business, and so slack faces the exact same problem.
I don't know what it is about Atlassian's branding but it always feels uncomfortably corporate to use any of their software. I'm worried that if I start using Atlassian software I'm going to have to buy inexpensive business-casual clothes, commute an hour and 15 minutes both ways, make small talk with Janet from accounting by the coffee machine while my mocha latte brews, and get Greg my middle-manager my self-assessment by EOD.
The primary function of Atlassian software is to say "Access denied." You tell Greg he needs to give you permission to do whatever. Greg says he'll do that after he gets your self-assessment. He later writes on your self-assessment receipt that you're a whiner lacking self-motivation.
I've used Confluence for two years. It's slow and the editor is buggy. The primary function is to prevent me from making a document public. I've used JIRA for 8 years. JIRA's primary function is to send email.
80% of my coworkers do not read them. I read the ~5% of them that contain more than "Status: -Open- Assigned." Of my remaining coworkers, there are a dozen that reply from their mail client, which just makes everything worse.
Honestly, in a way it's kind of refreshing. They're not trying to be all cutesy and hip like so many startups, which usually just seems unnecessary and almost gets in the way.
I don't need any more bright, pastel colours, cute little characters, etc.
And here I am, sitting during my 1.5 hour commute, thinking about how I should buy some more work-appropriate casual clothes because no one else wears suits at this site, and what free or inexpensive software we could use to make a project team collaborate more effectively...
What other "enterprise ready" solutions are there for this purpose? My other options based on the team's familiarity with them are are O365 (SharePoint/Outlook/Teams + MS Project), ServiceNow (I guess?), or HP PPM. I'd rather use something hosted because getting internal infrastructure is hard.
You're like that person who laughed about Hotmail when it came out, because why would you want someone else to host your e-mail, and why would you want to access it in a browser instead of via a full-featured client?
There's a difference between being "wrong" (which you're not), and realizing that 99,9% of people in the world aren't you.
IRC will never be used for corporate communication. IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003[1]. It's over.
Facebook solved a problem that many people had, despite the fact that Myspace, group e-mails, real-time chat and online photo sharing already existed. That's why they today have a market cap of over 500 billion US dollars.
Slack made the concept of IRC usable for "normal people". You're not normal people (that's meant as a compliment), so your capabilities aren't really relevant when looking at why things succeed or fail on a larger scale.
> You're like that person who laughed about Hotmail when it came out, because why would you want someone else to host your e-mail, and why would you want to access it in a browser instead of via a full-featured client?
And, to this day, Hotmail is still significantly slower and harder to use compared to Thunderbird. The only advantage is that it still has emails that I received almost 20 years ago.
> IRC will never be used for corporate communication.
As recently as last year, we were using IRC for corporate communication where I work. Fortunately, I'm still able to use the IRC gateway with Slack, but I really don't see any real advantage to using Slack over IRC on a work computer that's always connected. My client's logging easily beats what Slack provides.
> That's why they today have a market cap of over 500 billion US dollars.
I don't think it's because it solved a problem about keeping in touch. It's just an advertising platform and the reason why it has a market cap of that value.
> Slack made the concept of IRC usable for "normal people".
A decade or so ago, I communicated with many normal people over IRC and Usenet. More normal people were able to use chat clients like ICQ, and the various messenger clients (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google).
I simply don't see why people keep saying that Slack and hosted chat providers like it are some new innovation that people can finally use when they've been able to do so for the last several decades.
Slack is a quick sign up, and pay if you want history over 10,000 messages, all on day one less than five minutes. IRC, possibly available by hacks/add-ons and not by default or available via quick button, is missing chat history, loses messages when offline, doesn't support uploads, I'm not sure if there's any good mobile apps, but without some of the above, they'd be broken anyways. IRC's only real advantage over slack is that it's not Electron/Cordova based.
You don't even have to sign up to connect to IRC (though you can register with a nickserv if you want).
> and pay if you want history over 10,000 messages
IRC is only limited by disk space on your local machine.
> IRC, possibly available by hacks/add-ons and not by default or available via quick button, is missing chat history
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every client can keep a log of messages sent and received separated by channel/dcc session.
> doesn't support uploads
You can send files to others via DCC.
In any case, the other messenger services I mentioned did not have a long sign up process either. Creating new accounts for AOL instant messenger didn't require much effort at all, for example. Their clients also handled logging much like an IRC client would.
The problem with IRC is that you cannot get chat history of a channel unless you configure a bouncer to do it for you. On that note, what's your opinion on XMPP? We used to use a XMPP server for internal company communication and the server was configured to replay the chat history to a client when it connected.
> Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.
That has a similar problem to IRC which is that new members cannot easily access messages sent before they joined. A better option would be an internally hosted NNTP server.
You mean replaying channel chat history on the server side without having to use a bouncer?
> I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw telnet session live.
That is true and it makes writing bots relatively easy. From what I've read about XMPP, it appears that most languages have libraries to abstract the XMPP protocol to make writing a bot easier.
Perhaps, but a lot of times, certain discussions take place over chat, and it's beneficial if someone who happens to join a little later in the conversation can simply read through the chat history to get up to speed rather than interrupting everyone to get some context to the conversation and proceed to ask questions about things that had already been discussed (rather than simply reading and getting the answers that way).
I think Riot/Matrix is a happy compromise. I've been hosting a couple of servers (one for fun, one for work) for about half a year now, and it's working well.
I agree, I hate all the constant spam of messages but my company uses Slack so I have to as well. Slack does have a colorblind theme, so I guess I got that going for me, which is nice.
sometimes, you need to use a chat app to talk to other people. in those cases, an app that the person at the other end of the conversation can have a fighting chance at figuring out how to use it can be a good thing.
everybody here seems to be griping about it, but from the overview on their website it seems like a reasonable alternative to slack, and the free tier includes group video chat and screen sharing. that sounds pretty sweet to me.
If I am going to consider using something other than Slack, probably the only thing I would consider is a self-hosted open source solution to keep communication private (just having an on-prem closed solution would not be enough, I want to OWN the data, otherwise, I might as well go with the market leader).
Otherwise, why use Stride instead of Slack? Most people I know have already used Slack and require no training. They probably even have the mobile app installed already.
Stride just seems to be a me-too offering with no compelling reason to exist
This is different in my mind than the market for VCS interfaces...in the end I still own my git repo
it's safe to say this won't be killing slack in any meaningful way. wow, that's a terribly atlassian UI they plopped on there. no offense to the dev team(s), i'm sure they had no say in making it so cluttered. slack wins because they make focus on communication not mandatory UI components that have no place in a chat app.
I've not ever used Stride however I've now just tried it as a curiosity to see this UI that you find fault with. It feels figuratively just like Slack. I'm actually surprised just how similar it is in so many respects. So I'd love to hear your elaboration on the poorness of the Stride UI.
Long time hipchat user here (both DC and Cloud), the rollout of Stride rubbed me all kinds of wrong ways. They 'replaced' HipChat w/ Strie but didn't keep many of the same features/integrations and then FORCED you to switch by a deadline. I get upgrades and progress, but how about rolling upgrade, swap out the client, move everyone over automatically and not pain your users? For my team, we said screw it and 'migrated' to Slack. Give us a chance to switch, we switched.
Same. Stride is just a worse implementation of Slack with less features. They even got rid of the “good parts” of HipChat, mainly that the macOS client doesn’t idle at 5% CPU, and replaced it with a full blow Electron client that had the same problems as Slack.
Honestly I’m a bit dumbfound how they are handling the transition. I bet they end up losing a lot of customers to Slack.
Ditto. Too little, too late.
Inaccurate.
Data center has not been sunset. https://www.stride.com/help-center/frequently-asked-question...
I also don't think anyone was forced to switch but I could be wrong. An email requesting or encouraging some action is different from being forced to do something.
I was just saying I have used DC in addition to Cloud. We migrated to cloud from DC about a year ago, and was forced to switch last week.
What happened to HipChat? It was already the same thing as Slack for less money.
It seems it stagnated. There wasn’t a real competitor to it until Slack turned up and developed a fantastic integration ecosystem (I don’t think there would be such a focus on conversational UI were it not for Slack, whether or not they intended that). By that time it was already too late, HipChat is old school, Slack is the new hotness.
Anecdotally, anyone working in a startup with an opinion on design will know how shallow a judgment has to be to switch to a competitor. App is functional but has 2008 design? The less functional equivalent with 2017 design is better because it looks up to date
There were also performance issues with HipChat, that Slack didn't have: messages went undelivered, load times unbearable etc. (at least in Sydney where we only just got speeds faster than broadband)
FWIW, I observed that 'conversational UI' and chatbots came from the western tech industry trying to 'learn' from the successes of Asian platforms like WeChat.
I observed chatbots in IRC probably before you were born.
I'm sure you did.
That's completely irrelevant though.
There's nothing new here but the packaging.
Yeah, no kidding. My last company was up in arms to replace HipChat with Slack even though they were 99% identical. There hasn't been a significant innovation in chat technology in like 30 years yet the business sector is more frothy than ever.
The core tech hasn't changed a ton, but slack is a good chat program for how people use computers in the modern age. If it encourages communication among your organization it's probably worth adopting, even at the higher price. I don't have numbers, but I was in an organization the switched and mobile use of slack was higher than hipchat.
Having extensively used both, Slack really is much better. Hipchat has a ton of reliability/usability issues and it’s clear _consumer-like_ product design is not Atlassian’s forte.
Also, HipChat circa 2016 was forced on my acquired company that had previously used slack. What a piece of shit that app is. HipChat just nuked the battery life on my stock nexus phone.
I had never before gotten in an argument about a chat app, but HipChat made me passionate about using anything else.
I use it at my work and it works reliably ok on the desktop, but yes I agree the mobile app (at least the iPhone one) is absolutely garbage.
That said from everyday desktop use it’s not bad. It’s nowhere near as unreliable for me as other posters are commenting about.
To be fair, Hipchat is missing a lot of features that Slack has.
That’s exactly the point, right? Slack turned up and offered more and HipChat didn’t respond in a meaningful way except to rewrite all their clients in JS. At that point they had a buggy client and fewer features, while Slack had an inefficient client with lots of features.
I was referring to the (weirdly opposed) example they mentioned with the better-looking-fewer-features.
Like what? 99% of usage is just chat rooms. I could hook in build notifications and post gifs. HipChat had voice and video years before Slack.
Before I list everything: posting gifs is garbage. Things like giphy integration degrade the signal-to-noise ratio, and I rage against it in every chat app I use. Even in off-topic rooms it'll random make following a conversation annoying at best.
Anyway, hipchat's faults:
Search is garbage.
Editing a message is garbage.
Joining a room/messaging a specific person on mobile is annoying.
I'm not sure about how Slack handles it, but when a person leaves our company, our Hipchat chat history completely disappears. All those decisions we made with our old Product Manager via private message? Into the ether.
Want to delete a file you uploaded? Too bad. Maybe you can do it via the web interface?
Want to delete a message? Same deal.
Hipchat is not very good at notifications and chat though.
3 years in, and still randomly missing messages for a while until it’s somewhat synched.
Whole ongoing conversations don’t appear on other devices if I don’t manually open them.
Getting notified on my phone while I’m on my laptop.
Lack of integrations is the most sailant thing to point st, but I think at its core Hipchap is also a very meh service.
We switched to Slack the day Hipchat went down for several hours.
I was really disappointed when noticed they didn't have a way to report bugs. They had some kind of "Suggestions box", so I used that to report mine: Images wouldn't upload correctly when the chat room name started wih a slash (/dev/null in my case). They deleted the ticket and a few days later it was magically fixed.
You will find pretty annoyed people if you search for "report hipchat bug".
Slack’s /feedback is stupendous. You get a human response in minutes. And they have live chat too.
Google for example makes it 1000x harder to give feedback and report bugs, which greatly limits the amount of quality feedback they get.
Anecdote: hangouts didn’t let us accept external users into a hangout today. Google will never know that because I have no easy way to tel them that.
> "I'm annoyed they didn't use my wording. They did fix my bug but I'm still annoyed."
In what world would one imagine that a suggestions box was in any way different from reporting a bug? "Suggestions box" is a bug report but renamed to be understood by Joan from accounting.
The thing about the HipChat suggestions box is that you had to collect "votes" for your "suggestion" to be considered.
So you could try to get their attention to the bug of "when you paste XML into a code block, it replaces it with subtly different, broken XML, my suggestion is to stop doing that", but it's going to be sitting several pages beyond "please add a left shark emoji!!!"
You can try to get your whole office to stack the vote, but why? I only have to be one person to report a bug to Slack.
Anecdata: The SaaS service I run has integrations with both -- Slack has literally 10x the number of integrated channels.
https://sameroom.io/status
You integrated slack 10x more in your SaaS?
My understanding was 10x more of his users integrate with slack than hipchat.
I believe they are in the process of sunsetting HipChat. It was not successful.
They gave us a deadline to move (~2000 users). So we're just getting the Slack business case ready.
If we have to move AND pay more money anyway, then why not just go to Slack?
A quick look at the prices, Stride is under half the price of Slack. No idea if quality correlates with price here since I've never touched Stride.
I don't know about Stride, but the quality of Slack has really been declining lately. Especially the quality of the desktop client.
If I was in charge of the decision for what communication tool to use at my company, I would take a long hard look at every single alternative to Slack.
I believe it's cheaper, isn't it?
You might also look at mattermost, if you are OK with hosting yourself (it's not hard, and upgrades are easy).
have you considered rocket chat? It's a slack you can either have hosted for you, or host in house.
I thought Stride was the same price as Hipchat?
They say they are working to improve hipchat, but only for datacenter, no more hosted.
Stride is just re-branded HipChat.
Stride was designed and built from ground up (not just a rebrand). I work at Atlassian, and have been using to since alpha.
I know it sounds silly but I believe the main reason for HipChat failing is mostly because the name was so uncool.
More likely it's just that HipChat isn't a great product experience.
As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style "s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever
One time I was trying to correct and "its" that should've been an "it's", but I didn't realized there was a preceding, correct "its" in the post. I ended up changing that "its" to an incorrect "it's", while also leaving the following incorrect "its". It was inconsequential, but very frustrating.
As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use it.
Um, you should have sed’d the whole sentence! J/K: totally absurd.
Uptime wasn't the greatest at a critical moment when Slack was gaining market share as well.
Yeah. HipChat's stability was absolutely abysmal for quite some time. They seem to have finally gotten it under control. That or a majority of their user base went elsewhere.
Barry Warsaw's law of names: "All names are stupid until you become rich and famous with it."
HipChat is a terrible name for a work-related collaboration tool, but "Slack" isn't great either....
But slack is?
We were on HipChat but went to Slack because Stride was lacking compared to HipChat.
They're trying to say it's not while also saying it's an "upgrade".
I guess it is a new major release of HipChat (with re-architecting) and re-branding. Same lead (Steve Goldsmith).
Unless an insider tells, we won't know I guess :)
An insider did tell, trust Hacker News :) - Steve Goldsmith himself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424942
Not at all--unless you consider building an entirely new product from the ground up a re-brand.
Joke's on them, we're still using Stash at my employer!
I rather like Stash. It has nice integration with Jira, and works fine.
Stash works fine in precisely the same sense that lynx is a perfectly capable web browser. It's not wrong, but you have to admit that it's missing a number of 'modern' features that many users have grown accustomed to.
The more recent offering (Bitbucket Server) falls behind the curve as well, even when compared to their own Bitbucket Cloud service.
Stride is a complete rewrite.
We are considering this for the solely because it is has screen sharing built in at the free level. In Slack, we would have to bump up to the paid level, and for our small team, the price jumps from free to $600+. The "decisions" and "tasks" features look like they might be nice (in theory). The largest thing holding us back is that many of us use Slack for other groups, which means Stride would be one more thing to run. A killer feature would be the ability to participate in Slack workspaces.
Any sources on that? I'm pretty sure it's a heavy re-architecting at the very least, but if it's the same team and lead, have they gone entirely from scratch or repurposed some of Hipchat's code? (just questioning)
Not curious enough to do the kind of blackbox exploration folks at https://webrtchacks.com or other sites do :)
I believe I am a pretty good source. :)
Stride is a brand new product (not a rebrand of Hipchat), we did not repurpose Hipchat's code. It's built from ground up on Atlassian platform - new protocol, clients, platform, etc. One exception is the video bridge technology which remains powered by the Jitsi.org open source product (which we acquired in 2015). I do look after both products (Hipchat Cloud and Stride) for Atlassian, happy to answer questions.
Thank you, indeed you are :) . Good luck ! Maybe you can convince the higher ups at my office that Microsoft Teams is an inferior product :) (we're already invested with Jira and Confluence so it's not a stretch...)
Would have been a shame not to use the Jitsi technology for sure, I deeply respect Emil Ivov and team.
Stride looks first-rate. Hopefully opening up APIs will bring integration on-par with Slack. What's the plan for bringing Stride to self-hosted options?
So I was told at your last conference that your going to be going to a RHEL instead of the current Ubuntu. I can’t seem to get an answer on what the timeline is for that. My director is signaling to look at other options and I really don’t want to do that. I mean will it be in next 6 months? We are looking at a huge commitment.
I love the decisions and actions features. I was wishing for those today in our project chat setup!
hi steve
We're still running Hipchat at work, and haven't gotten any "switch now, peasants" emails.
The industry needs a meme/graphic for this frequently broadcast communication.
Haven't used Stride yet but as someone who hates always-on chat I could see myself really appreciating its deep work oriented features: mute notifications, allow others in the channel to mark things as "task", "decision", "outcome" so you can go back and find important things you missed while deep working.
https://www.stride.com
Something about this comment feels very much like an ad.
Probably the strange link at the bottom of the comment, linking to the site we are talking about.
Especially because you can always mute Slack or use do not disturb as well.
But can Slack help you rethink team communication, or redefine the way teams move work forward, together? I know I want a messaging tool that delivers results.
https://www.stride.com/
I have no connection of any sort to Stride (or any chat app for that matter, other than a few I use, which doesn't include Stride yet). This aspect of chat has just been a point for me for years. Looks like Stride and Twistapp are both attempting to solve it, among others. Wouldn't surprise me if there were some Slack plugins to do similar things as well.
You might appreciate https://twistapp.com then.
Or https://www.discourse.org/
That looks like a big improvement too, thanks!
No problem! I've used the company's TODO app (Todoist) for 2 years now, and I like the company as a whole. They're 100% remote too, IIRC.
Oooh, this looks really nice. Threads in Slack still feel like an afterthought, and this appears to do them right.
It makes me miss forums/BBs! With proper subforums, etc.
When I looked over Strides features I thought the same thing. Do not understand the backlash at all.
Just don't fuck up Trello guys, for the love of god.
Trello seems to have lost it's use after it got made into a separate company. It seems to have gotten worse after it got bought out by Atlassian. No real intriguing features.
Also, Atlassian used to be loved by developers, after it ipoed it just seems not loved
This is not my experience. Trello has continued to work just fine after its acquisition by Atlassian.
from Atlassian last earnings release in Oct 2017: "Trello continues to grow its user base at an impressive pace with more than 25 million registered users in over 100 countries, up from approximately 19 million at the start of the calendar year"
https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/Q12018/T...
Gotten worse? I haven’t noticed anything worse, hasn’t seemed very different at all. I don’t have a business account though - do you have anything specific in mind?
"Lost its use"? What kind of bizarro tech bubble is this where something solid which works and has stayed true to its essence is considered bad, and instead we demand an unrelenting churn that results in limply overcooked products inevitably jumping the shark (JIRA redesign I'm looking at you).
Sad thing is there isn’t even baseline feature parity. Not sure what’s going to happen when they give my org a date to move by. Without some of the more enterprisey features, we can’t move to Stride.
Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.
They should have released it as a UI improvement for HipChat, not a whole new ecosystem.
> Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.
I certainly didn't appreciate it. As someone who invests significant portions of time building integrations between various systems in our development team, I quickly hit the brakes the second I heard the Stride announcement.
Since our organization is being forced to move from HipChat, we're reviewing alternatives rather than blindly continuing onward toward Stride.
I strongly doubt that this will have any impact on Atlassian's bottom-line, however.
biggest gripe with Atlassian is all their products are slow as hell. Hipchat was sluggish and buggy but at least they were steadily improving. Now everyone has to start over on a new platform (?) Confluence, how freakin long does it take to return a static info page, Seconds? As if visiting the HR subdomain wasn't painful enough already. Heaven forbid you click on something makes a POST request in JIRA, RIP developer.
Agreed. If anyone from Atlassian is reading this, the changes to Jira and Confluence make me think something is wrong there. I have been a faithful Jira user for over a decade and it has gotten markedly worse as a product in the past year. Maybe it's more profitable with app/marketplace, but the experience with multiple integrated apps is dog slow. Navigability has gotten worse. HipChat had uptime issues to the point my company moved to Slack. I am worried for you guys.
I agree with this. In 2006 I was a huge fan of JIRA and it just felt like such a well designed app.
Now it has some kind of Designer disease, where it looks beautiful (truly, I love the style and fonts and colors), but I simply can't find my way around it. And I get very frustrated trying to do basic things because the app is also really slow (clearly 500ms+ per request). It's clear that it's still a server-side app and not a SPA which is the kind responsiveness everyone expects nowadays.
So our two person team went back to using Excel. Jira just takes too long to get things done with.
Stride's WYSIWG editor is really unpleasant (and had several showstopping bugs which they're only just ironing out).
I have an open ticket to have a profile option to disable it, but ...crickets.
Michael Tiemann used to say that he wasn't interested in trying to pitch to a company unless he thought his product (Red Hat Linux) was four times better than what they currently had: the costs and risks of a switch can easily negate the value of changing to a product that is only somewhat better than the incumbent. Unless Stride does something massively better than Slack, I don't see how Stride can compete.
Slack's challenge is that it's just Slack. It's an extra monthly cost, extra thing to the manage.
Atlassian can sell you the integrated package. One price, one invoice, tight integration between products.
I don't have any data on this, but I think one reason for Slack's success was that people could just start using it without going thorough the IT. I'd assume there's still a huge number of companies who haven't made an official choice on this space. Those might be tempted to go with offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft.
Slack could be interesting acquisition for Dropbox (haven't thought out if it could work financially).
It’ll be bundled with other atlassian products. Less hassle to integrate with those, one less service to log into, one less monthly payment, etc. Slack is possibly better for someone who doesn’t use atlassian products.
Also, many people use skype for business, and so slack faces the exact same problem.
I didn't find any reference to encryption or security matters on Stride, anyone?
I want to believe that keybase will be soon mature enough to compete against Slack and other similar services...
I don't know what it is about Atlassian's branding but it always feels uncomfortably corporate to use any of their software. I'm worried that if I start using Atlassian software I'm going to have to buy inexpensive business-casual clothes, commute an hour and 15 minutes both ways, make small talk with Janet from accounting by the coffee machine while my mocha latte brews, and get Greg my middle-manager my self-assessment by EOD.
The primary function of Atlassian software is to say "Access denied." You tell Greg he needs to give you permission to do whatever. Greg says he'll do that after he gets your self-assessment. He later writes on your self-assessment receipt that you're a whiner lacking self-motivation.
I've used Confluence for two years. It's slow and the editor is buggy. The primary function is to prevent me from making a document public. I've used JIRA for 8 years. JIRA's primary function is to send email.
I'd say your assessment is accurate.
>The primary function of Atlassian software is to say "Access denied."
Not only is that funny, it's pretty accurate. If it weren't for that requirement it could all be replaced with git, ftp, and email.
Wait, people actually read jira emails? I just filter it to my 'ham' folder.
80% of my coworkers do not read them. I read the ~5% of them that contain more than "Status: -Open- Assigned." Of my remaining coworkers, there are a dozen that reply from their mail client, which just makes everything worse.
Honestly, in a way it's kind of refreshing. They're not trying to be all cutesy and hip like so many startups, which usually just seems unnecessary and almost gets in the way.
I don't need any more bright, pastel colours, cute little characters, etc.
And here I am, sitting during my 1.5 hour commute, thinking about how I should buy some more work-appropriate casual clothes because no one else wears suits at this site, and what free or inexpensive software we could use to make a project team collaborate more effectively...
What other "enterprise ready" solutions are there for this purpose? My other options based on the team's familiarity with them are are O365 (SharePoint/Outlook/Teams + MS Project), ServiceNow (I guess?), or HP PPM. I'd rather use something hosted because getting internal infrastructure is hard.
https://topicbox.com – as Slack is to IRC, Topicbox is to mailing lists.
Sounds like they nailed it.
The Atlassian blues.
Hipchat 2017 works perfectly fine for a chat app (which @tootie said have been basically the same for 30 years).
We have not been forced to migrate to Stride yet, but I am bummed about this can I keep kicking down the road.
I don't care how much better Stride is, Hipchat is good enough for us.
I don't understand the point of all these stupid chat apps... Discord, Slack ect...
If you need real time there is IRC. Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.
You're like that person who laughed about Hotmail when it came out, because why would you want someone else to host your e-mail, and why would you want to access it in a browser instead of via a full-featured client?
There's a difference between being "wrong" (which you're not), and realizing that 99,9% of people in the world aren't you.
IRC will never be used for corporate communication. IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003[1]. It's over.
Facebook solved a problem that many people had, despite the fact that Myspace, group e-mails, real-time chat and online photo sharing already existed. That's why they today have a market cap of over 500 billion US dollars.
Slack made the concept of IRC usable for "normal people". You're not normal people (that's meant as a compliment), so your capabilities aren't really relevant when looking at why things succeed or fail on a larger scale.
[1]: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-ir...
> You're like that person who laughed about Hotmail when it came out, because why would you want someone else to host your e-mail, and why would you want to access it in a browser instead of via a full-featured client?
And, to this day, Hotmail is still significantly slower and harder to use compared to Thunderbird. The only advantage is that it still has emails that I received almost 20 years ago.
> IRC will never be used for corporate communication.
As recently as last year, we were using IRC for corporate communication where I work. Fortunately, I'm still able to use the IRC gateway with Slack, but I really don't see any real advantage to using Slack over IRC on a work computer that's always connected. My client's logging easily beats what Slack provides.
> That's why they today have a market cap of over 500 billion US dollars.
I don't think it's because it solved a problem about keeping in touch. It's just an advertising platform and the reason why it has a market cap of that value.
> Slack made the concept of IRC usable for "normal people".
A decade or so ago, I communicated with many normal people over IRC and Usenet. More normal people were able to use chat clients like ICQ, and the various messenger clients (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google).
I simply don't see why people keep saying that Slack and hosted chat providers like it are some new innovation that people can finally use when they've been able to do so for the last several decades.
Slack is a quick sign up, and pay if you want history over 10,000 messages, all on day one less than five minutes. IRC, possibly available by hacks/add-ons and not by default or available via quick button, is missing chat history, loses messages when offline, doesn't support uploads, I'm not sure if there's any good mobile apps, but without some of the above, they'd be broken anyways. IRC's only real advantage over slack is that it's not Electron/Cordova based.
> Slack is a quick sign up
You don't even have to sign up to connect to IRC (though you can register with a nickserv if you want).
> and pay if you want history over 10,000 messages
IRC is only limited by disk space on your local machine.
> IRC, possibly available by hacks/add-ons and not by default or available via quick button, is missing chat history
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every client can keep a log of messages sent and received separated by channel/dcc session.
> doesn't support uploads
You can send files to others via DCC.
In any case, the other messenger services I mentioned did not have a long sign up process either. Creating new accounts for AOL instant messenger didn't require much effort at all, for example. Their clients also handled logging much like an IRC client would.
> If you need real time there is IRC.
The problem with IRC is that you cannot get chat history of a channel unless you configure a bouncer to do it for you. On that note, what's your opinion on XMPP? We used to use a XMPP server for internal company communication and the server was configured to replay the chat history to a client when it connected.
> Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.
That has a similar problem to IRC which is that new members cannot easily access messages sent before they joined. A better option would be an internally hosted NNTP server.
You could do that as well with IRC.
I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw telnet session live.
That simplicity also means it's not to hard to add additional things to it. If you want.
> You could do that as well with IRC.
You mean replaying channel chat history on the server side without having to use a bouncer?
> I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw telnet session live.
That is true and it makes writing bots relatively easy. From what I've read about XMPP, it appears that most languages have libraries to abstract the XMPP protocol to make writing a bot easier.
Chat is ephemeral for quick back and forth discussion. If you need history, maybe you should be using email anyway.
Perhaps, but a lot of times, certain discussions take place over chat, and it's beneficial if someone who happens to join a little later in the conversation can simply read through the chat history to get up to speed rather than interrupting everyone to get some context to the conversation and proceed to ask questions about things that had already been discussed (rather than simply reading and getting the answers that way).
Open protocols can certainly do this.
If you want both, there is Slack ;)
Why separate your communication into two tools instead of one?
Because one is a free and open standard where you actually own your data.
I think Riot/Matrix is a happy compromise. I've been hosting a couple of servers (one for fun, one for work) for about half a year now, and it's working well.
Luckily Attlasian has jitsi too so you can separate it into two again :^)
I agree, I hate all the constant spam of messages but my company uses Slack so I have to as well. Slack does have a colorblind theme, so I guess I got that going for me, which is nice.
I use Discord heavily. I'd love to hear why you think IRC is better for voice and text chat than Discord.
sometimes, you need to use a chat app to talk to other people. in those cases, an app that the person at the other end of the conversation can have a fighting chance at figuring out how to use it can be a good thing.
Sad to see no one's mentioning Mattermost.
Did anyone else notice the Easter egg in Hipchat's web client when using js debugging tools?
everybody here seems to be griping about it, but from the overview on their website it seems like a reasonable alternative to slack, and the free tier includes group video chat and screen sharing. that sounds pretty sweet to me.
did they ditch hipchat?
"The modern workplace, after all, seems to have a need for an ever-increasing number of tools that provide constant interruptions." Nice one
If I am going to consider using something other than Slack, probably the only thing I would consider is a self-hosted open source solution to keep communication private (just having an on-prem closed solution would not be enough, I want to OWN the data, otherwise, I might as well go with the market leader).
Otherwise, why use Stride instead of Slack? Most people I know have already used Slack and require no training. They probably even have the mobile app installed already.
Stride just seems to be a me-too offering with no compelling reason to exist
This is different in my mind than the market for VCS interfaces...in the end I still own my git repo
it's safe to say this won't be killing slack in any meaningful way. wow, that's a terribly atlassian UI they plopped on there. no offense to the dev team(s), i'm sure they had no say in making it so cluttered. slack wins because they make focus on communication not mandatory UI components that have no place in a chat app.
I've not ever used Stride however I've now just tried it as a curiosity to see this UI that you find fault with. It feels figuratively just like Slack. I'm actually surprised just how similar it is in so many respects. So I'd love to hear your elaboration on the poorness of the Stride UI.
What exactly is cluttered about Stride's UI, and how do you define "cluttered"?