Last week, software giant Atlassian announced that it has sold the IP of Stride and HipChat, their popular work-chat tools, to their partner and competitor Slack. This partnering of Atlassian and Slack is a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em approach” to the messaging market that has been starting to undergo significant competitive pressure from companies like Microsoft. This tech giant introduced its own work-chat application “Teams” in 2016, and the platform has proven to be a competitive product. HipChat will be discontinued as of mid-February, 2019, which leaves customers a decent amount of time to gather their bearing, and follow the data migration plan laid out by Atlassian. Through this partnership, Slack will begin to add new functionality to the integrations that currently exist between its product and Atlassian’s JIRA, Trello and Bitbucket, as well as introduce new integrations with more Atlassian products, such as their Confluence platform. However, you may be wondering if Slack is right for your team, or if it can fulfill all of the purposes you found in HipChat. To get you prepared and well informed for the transition, we have done some brief comparisons allowing you to quickly make the smartest choice for your business needs.

Slack

Slack, like HipChat, offers robust integration with dozens of tools. Most notably, Slack can be integrated with numerous Atlassian products like JIRA Service Desk, JIRA PM and Confluence. In JIRA project management tool specifically, Slack’s comprehensive integration includes the ability to create new Slack Channels linked to issues in Jira, without having to toggle between the two platforms. You can also view said Slack Channel conversations inside the issue in JIRA. Monitoring projects is made easy with this integration because you can filter notifications by a number of aspects, including status, priority, reporter, labels, and more. The user interface for Slack is also generally found to be more convenient and user-friendly. Team members are able to hide unused features and place multiple options behind different buttons, making the interface highly functional and less distracting

Flock

To be candid, Flock is a tempting work-chat tool simply because of its affordability, and Flock is offering HipChat and Stride users the opportunity to migrate to Flock Pro at no cost for a year. The deepest integration that Flock offers is with Google Drive, but the message platform also integrates with JIRA, Trello, and Bitbucket, so you can easily track bugs and manage projects. However, since Slack is an older and more mainstream program, there are many more Slack app integrations than Flock, meaning your options for integration will be limited. A main difference between Flock and Slack is that Flock is organized by user, and allows each user to be a member of multiple teams. Unlimited users can be added to message streams in Flock, while in Slack is capped at eight members, however the customization of notifications in Slack are significantly more in-depth.

Teams

Microsoft’s Teams is a major player in the work-chat space, and not just because it came from the tech behemoth. Depending on how your team uses collaborative messaging platforms, one downside to Teams is that it integrates almost exclusively with Microsoft Office products. That means that to utilize it effectively, you need an Office 365 suite subscription. Team’s messaging platform hosts a more complex user interface, and at times has inconsistent functionality. Unfortunately meaning that your IT support team will be spending a larger portion of their time assisting users. If you are used to using Office 365, then this is a suitable alternative to HipChat. However if your team relied on HipChat’s hyper integration capabilities, then another collaboration software may be a better fit.

Jabber

Cisco’s jabber moves away from messaging and focuses more on direct calls made from your computer or mobile phone. It also integrates with far fewer applications than other collaborative messaging platforms, and is most useful for uniformed development teams that rely on secure lines of communication for simple instant messaging, and cloud business telephony. This is often thrown in with other Cisco software packages as an add on and has not been a major focus for the telecom giant.

Asana

Asana is slightly different from HipChat or Slack as it is a collaborative project management software with a sophisticated commenting feature. This is why Asana differs from Slack’s messaging service with its layers of integrated apps. If you already use a project management tool or other products from Atlassian and are looking to migrate to a new messaging service, it may be more beneficial to migrate your HipChat data over to another service than to transition to Asana.

Overall, there is no one perfect collaborative messaging platform for every business. Your development teams and business teams should look at which features you rely on most, and move forward from there. There is plenty of time until February to review your options and decide which service is best for your business. Atlassian is laying out a plan to ease the data migration process over from HipChat, to whichever service you choose. If you have any questions or are looking to implement any Atlassian products or integrate any third party messaging apps reach out today! Clovity is an Atlassian Solution Partner.