Absolutely. My company uses it (among other things) for handling production issues.

We'd rather not manage that ourselves. It's just one more thing we can screw up.

This is different than the FOSS subject of the article, but it true that convenience is compelling.

If it's just infra management you want, then use Hipchat. It does the same things Slack does, at $2/user/mo instead of $8. Slack is ridiculously expensive.

It's only expensive compared to HipChat which is a subsidised gateway service that leads to Jira. Our company used HipChat for about a year before moving to Slack. Honestly, the differences are not many and any reasonable team could choose either.

I think we migrated to Slack for connectivity reasons, fonts and general user interface, and the bigger list of integrations. Are these worth $6 per user per month? If you've got the money then maybe. But it's by no means a given.

And that's what I meant by "among other things".

Originally, we were using Campfire.

As needs grew beyond just putting out fires, we looked at Hipchat, Flowdock, and Slack. We probably would have gone with Hipchat (because of the price), if they had SSO, or better JIRA integration. Slack had both.

I highly doubt that slack has more features than IRC, which has thirty years of history in dozens of code bases. I agree that taking a canned solution is easier, and easier is often best. But I think this is the main reason slack is popular; its less to think about. There are many dimensions in which it will be worse.

So use grove.io