Why Use Slack or HipChat?

• John Vandivier

Business often have email and in-office communicators. Do Slack and HipChat offer any advantage over such tools? Yes.

I think <a href="https://slack.com/pricing">Slack is a bit better but I have used <a href="https://hipchat.com/">HipChat more. HipChat is part of the Atlassian stack in case you are familiar. The benefits in this article apply both places.

  1. Always on like a communicator or chat tool, but persistent record keeping like email.
  2. Opt-in listening. With email and chat tools the speaker needs to know the recipients. With opt-in listening the speaker needs to know the topic of discussion and they can broadcast it to a room of people who want to hear about it, in addition to targeting individuals directly.
  3. Discussions are even more persistent than email. Email has chains but Slack and HipChat have rooms. With rooms, you can leave the conversation and come back later, but still see everything that happened while you were gone.
  4. Sweet emoji support.