Hipchat may soon have the features all my other tools have had for years. In the meantime, it does some other things poorly.
June 30, 2016

Hipchat may soon have the features all my other tools have had for years. In the meantime, it does some other things poorly.

Daniel Berlin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HipChat

Hipchat is used by our department. Company-wide we have other chat solutions.

Pros

  • The best thing about HipChat is that when I send feedback, someone seems to be reading it. The three biggest complaints I had when I started using it a few months ago have been patched out of existence. The software seems very immature to me, but it's making big strides.
  • The conversation pane is well organized, such that I can easily see who wrote which messages and when
  • Popup notifications have good customization controls.

Cons

  • The interface is designed such that it is work to do anything other than talk to the person I am already talking to. It seems like my use case is not considered (number of contacts/rooms, number of people in my org not already in my list, etc)
  • I cannot organize my list of contacts other than adhoc (no alphabet? no groups?). Finding a new contact involves moving my hand to the mouse, scrolling to the top of the left-hand pane, clicking on a header that doesn't seem to indicate anything but is the key to revealing the search bar I want... It's clunky and unintuitive.
  • The embedded youtube feature fails more often than it works and I'd really just like to turn it off. I used to click links and open them in browsers, where I expect websites to open, but now even if I remember to right-click instead of clicking, I still have to do more clicks to open a link than I used to.
  • I am disappointed by the half-functional nature of this feature, but more disappointed when I think software is losing its direction. Is this a chat program or a series of weak solutions to a bunch of problems I don't have?
  • Notifications other than the popup don't contain much information. For example, I am in a chat room and someone sends an @here message. I have a blue number 23 which shows that 23 messages have been sent since I last looked, and at least one of them had my name or @here tagged. Now, I want to make sure I didn't miss something someone sent to me in particular. Only way to find out which message triggered which alerts is to scroll a bunch and look. If you are logged in to one chat room, hanging out with 5 people casually, it's probably not an issue, but when I come back from a meeting and there are 7 rooms with large blue numbers in them... I have to do a lot of silly work to find out if I missed anything important.
I like Hipchat better than Google Hangouts, but its faults are similar.

I like everything else I have used better than Hipchat though. It is less stable (crashes constantly while no other chat software ever has) than any other chat software I have used too. Of course this could be my environment.
While Hipchat will very likely one day become the chat software I need, there are many that have been out there for years that already are. I am constantly frustrated at having to use Hipchat.

HipChat (discontinued) Feature Ratings

Mobile Access
5
Search
2
Chat
3
Notifications
6
Discussions
4
Surveys
Not Rated
Internal knowledgebase
Not Rated
Integrates with GoToMeeting
Not Rated
Video files
1
Audio files
Not Rated
Access control
Not Rated
Advanced security features
Not Rated
Integrates with Google Drive
Not Rated
Device sync
6

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