"Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..."

Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.

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.

And then what if Slack gets hacked?

http://slackhq.com/post/114696167740/march-2015-security-inc...

    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.

Yikes.

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.

(Zulip committer here) Definitely agree that user onboarding could use some work, feel free to send feedback.

hn-username @zulip.org , or https://groups.google.com/group/zulip-devel

Another self-hosted alternative you might like is MatterMost, which is quite similar to Slack in look-and-feel, but free software and self-hosted.

> 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".

That, and "Soviets are going to launch satellites loaded with nuclear weapons into space and end the cold war".

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.

The way to judge this is adoption.

HipChat is a real on premise alternative.

It may not be quite as "slick" looking, but it works very well.

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).

> the stupidly high price of Slack.

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).

> a giant log for everything in your company

The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.

big companies [in the US] already largely deal with retention/e-discovery requirements.

there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this.

https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en