Top Messaging Platforms for Enterprise — Best Picks for Your Business

Last week, software giant Atlassian announced that it has sold the IP of Stride and HipChat, their popular work-chat tools, to their partner and competitor Slack. This partnering of Atlassian and Slack is a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em approach” to the messaging market that has been starting to undergo significant competitive pressure from companies like Microsoft. This tech giant introduced its own work-chat application “Teams” in 2016, and the platform has proven to be a competitive product. HipChat will be discontinued as of mid-February, 2019, which leaves customers a decent amount of time to gather their bearing, and follow the data migration plan laid out by Atlassian. Through this partnership, Slack will begin to add new functionality to the integrations that currently exist between its product and Atlassian’s JIRA, Trello and Bitbucket, as well as introduce new integrations with more Atlassian products, such as their Confluence platform. However, you may be wondering if Slack is right for your team, or if it can fulfill all of the purposes you found in HipChat. To get you prepared and well informed for the transition, we have done some brief comparisons allowing you to quickly make the smartest choice for your business needs.

Slack

Slack, like HipChat, offers robust integration with dozens of tools. Most notably, Slack can be integrated with numerous Atlassian products like JIRA Service Desk, JIRA PM, and Confluence. In JIRA specifically, Slack’s integration includes the ability to create new Slack Channels linked to Jira issues without toggling between platforms. Conversations in Slack channels can also be viewed inside the Jira issue. Monitoring projects is easy since notifications can be filtered by status, priority, reporter, labels, and more. Slack’s interface is generally user-friendly, allowing team members to hide unused features and organize options efficiently.

Flock

Flock is an affordable work-chat tool and is offering HipChat and Stride users the opportunity to migrate to Flock Pro at no cost for a year. Its deepest integration is with Google Drive, but it also integrates with JIRA, Trello, and Bitbucket. However, Flock has fewer app integrations than Slack. Flock is organized by user, allowing membership in multiple teams. Unlimited users can be added to message streams in Flock, while Slack is capped at eight members. Slack offers more in-depth notification customization.

Teams

Microsoft Teams integrates mainly with Microsoft Office products, requiring an Office 365 subscription for full functionality. Teams has a more complex interface and can sometimes be inconsistent, increasing IT support needs. If your team already uses Office 365, Teams is a suitable HipChat alternative. Otherwise, Slack or another messaging platform may be a better fit.

Jabber

Cisco Jabber focuses on direct calls from computers or mobile phones. It integrates with fewer applications and is most useful for secure, simple messaging and cloud business telephony. It is often included as an add-on with other Cisco packages and has not been a major focus for the company.

Asana

Asana differs from HipChat or Slack as it is a collaborative project management software with sophisticated commenting features. If your goal is messaging integration with Atlassian tools, it may be more beneficial to migrate HipChat data to a messaging platform rather than switching to Asana.

Overall, there is no single perfect collaborative messaging platform for every business. Teams should prioritize features they rely on most and choose accordingly. Atlassian provides a data migration plan from HipChat to ease the transition. If you have questions or need help implementing Atlassian products or third-party messaging integrations, Clovity is here to help as an Atlassian Solution Partner.

📧 Contact us at sales@clovity.com or visit 🌐 atlassian.clovity.com to get started today.