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This is interesting to me. I've used it at the last three companies ranging from 15 people to 1700 people. No issues really. Considering how often HipChat went

This is interesting to me. I've used it at the last three companies ranging from 15 people to 1700 people. No issues really. Considering how often HipChat went down prior to Slack, Slack is a welcomed replacement. As for alternatives, I don't really know if many do exist. Slack offers their free version, which allows teams to use it pretty much without any strings to see if they like it. It provides great functionality in a simple UI (you may disagree, that's totally fine), and solves a problem - Office Communication. It has been a productivity increase for the teams I've been on as it is much, much better than email chains, easier to add code snippets, images, and the fairly rich ecosystem of plugins/bots is icing on the cake for me. The other day it took me an hour to wire up a couple endpoints in Node, add them as slack slash commands and boom, I was able to add three commands for QA department that resolved some heartburn for them. I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.

grandalf 9y ago
> I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way. I agree with this, but haven't found it to be preferable to hipchat. I definitely think it's a well designed product in many ways, I'm just surprised the valuation for such a thing is that high. I look forward to seeing what new innovations and improvements are in the future.
- brogrammernot 9y ago
  One of the companies I used HipChat at before they switched to Slack and the only reason they ended up switching was there was a 4 week period where HipChat kept going down so one of the engineers setup a free slack room. It got used often in lieu of HipChat as it never went down. I'd agree that they're both good, but if it's the main communication tool for your company the #1 priority is that it stays online.
deker_ 9y ago
I've used Mattermost in the past and found it worked quite well. I don't know if it has the same number of integrations Slack does, but as a chat-room/text-communication tool it works well enough. It's also open-source and self-hosted. Perhaps I don't understand enough about how Slack works, but it seems like a huge security risk to me to couple (potentially) sensitive content (chat, e-mails, etc) with a hosted service. https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/
- it33 9y ago
  Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention! Yes, we see many enterprises moving to open source, private cloud solutions. One recent example: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ditches-hipchat-slack-to-create-its-own-work-chat-app-uchat-2017-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ditches-hipchat-slack-to...

grandalf 9y ago

> I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way. I agree with this, but haven't found it to be preferable to hipchat. I definitely think it's a well designed product in many ways, I'm just surprised the valuation for such a thing is that high. I look forward to seeing what new innovations and improvements are in the future.

brogrammernot 9y ago
One of the companies I used HipChat at before they switched to Slack and the only reason they ended up switching was there was a 4 week period where HipChat kept going down so one of the engineers setup a free slack room. It got used often in lieu of HipChat as it never went down. I'd agree that they're both good, but if it's the main communication tool for your company the #1 priority is that it stays online.

deker_ 9y ago

I've used Mattermost in the past and found it worked quite well. I don't know if it has the same number of integrations Slack does, but as a chat-room/text-communication tool it works well enough. It's also open-source and self-hosted. Perhaps I don't understand enough about how Slack works, but it seems like a huge security risk to me to couple (potentially) sensitive content (chat, e-mails, etc) with a hosted service. https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/

it33 9y ago
Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention! Yes, we see many enterprises moving to open source, private cloud solutions. One recent example: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ditches-hipchat-slack-to-create-its-own-work-chat-app-uchat-2017-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ditches-hipchat-slack-to...