I haven't used Slack, but I've used all sorts of xmpp/jabber servers such as Openfire, generic jabberd, etc. Hipchat blows those away. I can quickly see what links and files I've posted or have been posted to me. I can open unlimited rooms, invite members to them and if I have a new employee start all I need to do is make them an account and they have everyones contact information. We previously used g-chat which was an absolute pain. Half of the employees I have on gchat I have their personal emails.

And it was about $3/mo per user. Not bad at all.

We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.

I'm sorry, I don't speak marketing. Care to translate what you just said for us non-initiated?

Which words are you having trouble with? That's pretty straight forward, but I'm assuming you're wanting to know more about the across devices thing... This is actually one of my favorite features. Their system keeps track of where you're logged in from and whether you're active or idle on that platform, then if you are sent 1-1 messages or mentioned in a room it will find you, delivering to a computer client first, then push notifications, then email--which is really valuable for us.

>it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own

Is this sentence really that hard to understand?

Team communication: Teams need to interact in a variety of different ways: public groups/private groups, fixed groups/ad-hoc groups, groups/1-2-1. HipChat supports a variety of different ways of interacting, and does so in a way that's easy to use. People nowadays use a variety of different devices (and classes of device). HipChat has a range of native clients, plus a web based one, and so can be used on most of the devices that people want to use it on. (We use Slack, but I've tried and liked HipChat too)

Not everyone needs open-source tweakable tools, and siloing private conversations into an OTR capable client isn't that weird. Hipchat worked great when I convinced TC to switch to it back in the day - I've had less luck with NBC, which still uses Campfire. Not everything needs to cross every t and dot every i — if it works for the people who use it and people are comfortable with it, what's the problem?

Yeah bro, chill out. Not every product needs to 'work' or be 'good'.

Yes, you clearly don't get the point.

A functioning business doesn't want to arse around setting up a Jabber server, building integration with Jira, creating clients optimised for group IM, or that sort of thing. It's not impossible to do, but it takes time and other resources.

On the other hand, we can use Hipchat - it works pretty well, integrates with anything we want, and somebody else is doing the development work. It's an obvious win.

What exactly do you mean by 'spy'?

Edit: Looks like OP was referring to this: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te...

Probably because it integrates with Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket and because it "Just Works". Sure we could do all that stuff with irc or whatever open source tools but that costs development hours which costs money, or we could just use something that it extremely cheap(or free if you don't want video chat) and works great with no effort on our part.

I agree with you, but current open source alternatives (XMPP and it's clients) are lacking really good clients for the osx/ios/android/linux/windows/web which share some common functionality (embedding images, videos, keeping a tab of sent files, search, ...).

I would give money for somebody to work on this problem and open source it.

Still do. Point me at the Jabber server that gives us cross platform/device group and individual IM, easy integration, it's hosted elsewhere so if our work network is ever hosed we can still communicate and doesn't require any mucking around to set up. No?