The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot.
The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
Because the expected loss from a malicious actor with access to those logs cloning your product (without any access to the actual people who thought up your product!) is often more than balanced by the expected benefit from getting everyone on a knowledge base with a brilliant UX.
Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-stakes as that.
Unless your cats are taking selfies on Mars. In which case, yeah, maybe developing an in-house chat service is worth the investment.
But Slack isn't just used for discussions. It's used for sharing. People send files through slack -- files that probably contain sensitive data, code, financials, etc. People pass secret sharing URLs (think Google Docs' "anyone with the link can access") through it. If we're being honest, probably some people exchange passwords over it. People directly grant OAuth access to other services for "integrations". Some people do "ChatOps" -- literally controlling production servers through chat -- over Slack.
Q: Were my messages taken/read/accessed?
If you have not been explicitly informed by us in a separate
communication that we detected suspicious activity involving
your Slack account, we are very confident that there was no
unauthorized access to any of your team data (such as messages
or files).
So. Slack has been hacked, and at least some people's logs were evidently stolen.
Yeah, what you just said is probably the case for the majority of Slack's users, and I get that.
My perspective is framed by working with an EMS provider (PCB design & assembly) who does business in some highly regulated fields. We've started using Slack in the last couple months for some of our teams, and love it, but the idea of using it as a catch all strikes me as questionable.
If we used Slack for actually talking about the design/assembly portion of the business, and not just coordinating sales and marketing efforts, our customers would flip shit. And rightfully so.
I own a contract manufacturing company in China, had similar concerns. We implemented an open source Slack alternative that runs on our own server. Project is called Zulip --> https://github.com/zulip/zulip
I feel like I came across that as I was weighing the various options for us to try haha. Zulip is the kind of thing I'd love to give a shot, but I have to take into account people who won't be tech savvy enough to use something like that. Therein lies Slack's value to us.
At the end of the day, Slack is really useful, but I just don't see its use getting expanded much. At least for us. There's lots of stuff that just shouldn't get communicated across there. Coordination across the sides of the business that don't use Slack wasn't an issue in the first place, it was never really even considered afaik.
> Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-stakes as that.
I find this to be a pretty interesting comparison. To the best of my knowledge, the entire stakes of the space race were "we might lose face".
Slack is classic "shadow IT". It isn't introduced or managed by IT. It is introduced by users. If IT departments were in charge of Slack, you'd have to have seven layers of managerial interference before you could open a new channel and it'd have the usability of Lotus Notes.
You are right, a lot of companies would walk away from that pretty quickly as long as it's a third party thing. Github launching it's self hosted enterprise is what really enabled it to reach the larger companies, as they tend not to trust their valuable data to exist outside of their control.
Slack has said before that they're going to release a self hosted version at some point, so they have to know this is true. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the larger market (personal use and the SMB sector) for now though, even though the enterprise market will really make them money, because it's a much lower pressure space where they can afford to experiment.
First, because the (perceived) risk is relatively small, both of damage and the chances of damage.
Second (this is the point I think hn-like forums grossly underestimate) is because the alternatives are not really alternatives. In practice the likelihood of using Irc or some open source chat within a company with the same wide buy in as slack (or Skype etc) is 0.
I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack.
There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...
If the choice was between $0 and $7, you might have a point. It isn’t.
As a company we are not short of options: Slack (the dev team liked it, but no one else used it and even a large part of the dev team didn’t use it), Google Hangouts (what everyone else used), Skype (no one here uses it), and now HipChat—which everyone in the company uses. This means that we weren’t choosing between $0 and $7, but:
• $0 (Slack) which provided something most people in the company didn’t use, and whose limitations we in the dev team hit fairly quickly (both 10k message chat history and the limited number of integrations).
• $0 (HipChat) which provides something most people in the company do use, and whose limitations we have only recently hit (the last six weeks) and are not currently bothering us (the limitation is just the 25k message chat history).
• $0 (Google Hangouts). Not really $0, but we already pay for it as part of GApps so it’s an incremental $0. The group chat functions suck, and there’s no integrations to speak of, but it is available.
• $2/mau (HipChat). Adds video/voice calls and screen sharing and unlimited chat history. We only need the chat history, and that isn’t bothering us.
• $7/mau (Slack). Just removes the 10 service integration limitation (which IIRC was 5 a few months ago) and the chat history and a few other features we don’t really care about but nothing to write home about. There’s also the $12/mau level and they are working on an Enterprise level.
There is absolutely nothing that Slack provides—except a bigger bill—that HipChat doesn’t provide as well for less. (And, even if Slack were better than HipChat, it isn’t 3x better. Sorry.)
This isn’t to say that Slack is a bad thing, just that it’s stupidly expensive and/or limited compared to other hosted options.
Your strawman implies that his team would save time in Slack versus HipChat, but you ignored the justification he already gave about the integrations that are more useful to them edit and that the whole company was happy to go to HipChat. It's possible those integrations help them save the time that makes the difference, but having every user there would surely help.
I cost justified a tesla that way. How much I spent on gas gong to mountain view, plus time in the carpool lane, but time I rent it in getaround. Blah Blah Blah. Doesn't mean it is right or worth it.
Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.
The issue that I’ve had with Slack is more related to text like this from the New Relic integration:
This integration will allow you to receive updates in a Slack channel when an alert is triggered in New Relic. If you would like web, transaction, server, and mobile alerts to be posted in separate channels, you will need to set up separate integrations.
You can quickly hit the limit of ten integrations on the free service by having to set up a separate integration for each channel you want things to appear in. So…between GitHub, Bitbucket, Semaphore, a custom API integration, and a couple of others we ended up hitting the limit of 5 integrations (which is what the limit was as of May or June when we made the switch to HipChat; it’s double that now, but we’re starting to use even more tools, so it’s the same problem).
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire.
Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used.
[0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now.
[1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.
We've been on hipchat for about two years. Never had a problem with offline notifications. I get both an e-mail instantly and an IM when I log back onto the chat client. I don't recall this ever being a problem or ever not being there.
I dunno what notification settings hipchat is missing, but I'm not sure I need whatever it is missing. If I get tagged in a message, I get notified. Not sure that I want more than that. We have our deploys and a few other things hooked up to hipchat - at first when we started using it we went crazy with the third party integrations, than realized we didn't actually need all the noise the integration notifications gave us and turned a lot of it off.
Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen.
Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?
A portion of the difficulty is owing to them using a web app in a SSB (single site browser) instead of a properly native desktop app.
I would love to be able to tile different channel/message windows, like we all did with IRC clients. Unfortunately this is fundamentally intractable in an SSB-architected app (including Electron, node-webkit, et al.).
Agreed. I wrote a blog post outlining a way to get around this. (https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/slack-is-too-...) The gist: turn off all notifications then flip them back on by channel. Still doesn't address de-coupling of pop-ups and sound, though.
Yeah after we started hooking it up now I get all these notifications for builds, etc. I don't need any of this notifying me but I need notifications for other types of messages.
Right now I'm not seeing a difference between this and HipChat but everyone seems to love it so I'll use it I'm just kinda indifferent and unimpressed with it thus far.
Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.
Everything you said about notifications in HipChat is false.
I first used HipChat more than 2 years ago, and the notifications worked perfectly and were as configurable as I wanted them to be. Offline notifications worked well.
We tried Slack when it came out and couldn't figure out why anyone would use it over HipChat, since it had no native client at the time.
We have been using HipChat for the last two years for one of our two major products at work and have very recently moved to Slack for the other. While notifications on HipChat work most of the time, they are still very patchy. I personally use the Mac client, while others in my company use the web, Windows, and Linux clients and we've all been bitten by missed notifications on applications one too many times to actually become a nuisance for us. Until the very last update to the Mac client, I became used to frequently finding the client freezing up on me. The windows clients, on the other hand, is even more infamous for this. Plus, the iOS app isn't something I really look forward to using (judging by the fact that I've had it installed on my iPhone for far longer than the Slack app, yet I leave it signed out almost completely, while I enjoy using the Slack app).
I used HipChat on Windows, Mac, and Android for 1.5 years and never experienced any of that. My team didn't, either. Those issues must have started happening after I stopped using it. Maybe Atlassian hasn't prioritized HipChat after buying it.
My current theory is that HipChat was purchased (and marketed) to be part of the Atlassian suite. They may have believed there wasn't enough upside in a chat client to market it as a standalone product.
For me, one of the reasons why I don't like Slack is that in moving to Slack from Hipchat, I lost configurability in notifications. Slack chat window notifications are terrible. They consume immense amounts of space, and yet aren't clearly colour-coded for relevance. Hipchat notifications were tight and concise, and could be clearly colour-coded.
A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications.
Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?
At least on Windows slack has pretty terrible performance. I wish i could go back to hipchat. I regularly experience perceptible lag when typing, which doesn't happen anywhere else.
EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
Not recent. May have gotten worse, but last I tried it was heavier than hangouts; yeah, text chat chewing up more cpu than streaming video. Pretty rough.
Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.
Once you add history to Slack, it's performance is just awful. One of the worst performing apps I use. It can take over a second to switch rooms.
If I have to cycle through 4 rooms to get to the conversation I want, it can take seconds just to Option+UpArrow there.
Plus I can't manually reorder rooms as I like. I don't get why everyone talks about the Slack UX. Slack has snippets. Which I find mostly useless. Especially since they kill performance. But HipChat lets you reorder rooms as you see fit. Which is something I actually used and miss desperately.
At least Slack has finally gotten rid of the useless Channel vs Group distinction?
Honestly, also not being in SV, I think it could be the biggest thing for companies since email. Nobody in our 400 person shop wants to use anything but Slack. Its completely changed the company culture, brought together different teams, opened up a real time log of what ops is doing (employee worth), consolidated communications, searchable file server. The list goes on and on. Nobody wants to use email and most people despise JIRA (in our small company). Everybody from every department is trying really hard to integrate everything they do into Slack and Slack keeps making it easier.
I think comparing feature for feature isn't the right way to understand why Slack is a disruptive innovation.
Often it's an innovation along some other dimension - process, business model, etc. In this case it's Slack's business model and "platform" strategy. Other tools like HipChat were just that, a tool. Slack is a platform in the sense that it enables businesses and developers to leverage and extend the platform, thereby adding additional value to the platform. This leads to so-called "Network Effects" where as more apps are built on the platform, the more valuable the platform and the more likely others will want to build on that platform, etc. in a virtuous cycle.
