Extremely unreliable

I use HipChat for work. I, and pretty much everyone else at the company, hate it.

Its unreliable in a variety of ways.

The service is entirely inaccessible for a few hours every few months. This isnt scheduled, as far as I can tell.

It often has to re-establish its connection to the server.

About once every two months, it will just stop delivering messages for a while. Often its intermittent, or just for some people, so its hard to know if we need to switch to IRC and Slack (which is too expensive for us to use company wide) for a while.

Sometimes I dont receive push notifications for new messages, but if I do, it doesnt show me what room the message came in.

The push notifications were so unreliable that I had to enable text message notifications as well (which I could t do through this app).

The text messages are truncated at a little more than the length limit on an SMS, so I often get two messages. Since SMS cannot guarantee order, the second one often comes first. That will just be the last few characters and some ellipses, e.g. "hb..."

It sends the text messages from five different phone numbers, so I get five different message threads in my Messages app. At least it sends messages from the same person from the same phone number.

When I open the app, theres no way to tell which rooms have received new messages, and no way to find new messages to me. It certainly doesnt have something like an inbox.

Once in a while I go to send a private message and discover that theres a weeks-old message I didnt see because HipChat didnt notify me at all.

Theres no way to clear message history.

On top of all that, the company pays for this service. Its cheaper than Slack, but I guess you get what you pay for.

danielparks about HipChat – Group chat for teams