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Email Killers 2017: A Look at 14 Cloud-Based Team Collaboration Apps: Page 6 of 17

HipChat

Having initially carved out a niche among software developers, Atlassian has now positioned HipChat as a collaboration tool for more general corporate use, particularly among teams of HR, legal, finance, IT, operations, and marketing professionals. This is in part because Atlassian, which purchased HipChat in 2012, sells its Jira Core project management software to HR, legal, finance, IT, operations, and marketing departments, and HipChat is the sister application that provides collaboration functionality to Jira users. And it's in part because of Altlassian's 2015 acquisition of Hall, a HipChat competitor whose app had a broader target market. Notable customers outside the dev space include Expedia and Fitbit. (Atlassian also recently bought Trello, though that's more about project management apps than team collaboration proper.)

In the past year, the plans and features available in each have remained the same, as has the comparatively low $2/user/month price point. Noticeable is the increase in third-party app integrations, with HipChat now integrating with more than 130, up from about 90 when I last updated this slideshow.

The most important enhancements, IMHO, are around video conferencing and deployment options. Previously supporting one-to-one video chat, HipChat now has native video conferencing, based on technology from Atlassian's acquisition of Blue Jimp, for up to 20 participants. It rolled this out first for the online app, and then for the server-based version of the software.

And while HipChat has been available for a while as software that enterprises can run on servers, a new deployment option lets enterprises host the HipChat software in their own data centers. This lets businesses not only own and operate their own team collaboration application, but also deploy it in a way that maintains high availability and makes it highly scalable.

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