With time, more and more companies are depending on employees that are usually or never in the office. Every business has their reason for having these kinds of employees, and that is why they need a group chat service they can trust and one that best fulfills their needs. But, with chat services such as HipChat, Slack, and Quip. Which one to choose?
Each service offers similar services, but to stand out from the competition, a service needs to provide, at least, one feature that the competition doesn’t offer. Let’s take a look at what each service has to offer and what one offers that the rest don’t.
Slack
Slack
Slack is one of various group chat services out there that makes communicating between teams a lot better. It offers a large variety of features such as:
- Channels or rooms that can be for a certain project. Private channels are also available.
- Direct Messages
- Drag and Drop Images, PDFs, Spreadsheets
- Messages, File Sharing, Notifications, Etc Indexed
- Narrow your word search by file type and messages
- Personal feed
- Preview text before and after the result
- Paste link to services such as Google Drive, DropBox or Box and File is synced
- All content such as PDFs, Word Documents, Google Docs and more, is searchable from search box
- Share and test code snippets
- Available for Mac, Windows 7+, Linux, iOS, Android and Windows Phone
- Connect Tools you already use such as Twitter and get notifications within Slack
- Free for teams of all sizes, but a paid account offers more features and controls
- Video calls and screen sharing
Quip
Quip
Quip is another great option for teams to communicate and work together on all kinds of projects. It offers its users features such as:
- Smart Inbox to manage your documents
- 1 on 1 personal chat
- Comment directly on any content the team is working on
- Direct messages with @mention
- Include Emojis and Memes to make work fun
- Enjoy notifications to know what is going on
- Document editing
- Task lists
- share spreadsheets
- Import/export from Office, Evernote, Google Drive and more!
- Themes
- Encrypt data
- Set permissions for folders
- Single Sign on for third party apps
- Integrated spreadsheets and documents
- Plays nice with tools such as Zendesk, Github, JIRA, Jenkins, Pager Duty, Twitter, Salesforce, and Stripe.
- Split screen sharing
- Customizable notifications
There’s no doubt that Quip offers its users a lot, but the design was not very appealing and pleasant to look at. It also doesn’t have rooms or channels like HipChat and Slack, but instead offer a smart inbox that lets you manage your documents. Quip also falls back in not providing a free service for teams of all sizes like Slack and HipChat site’s clearly state.
HipChat
HipChat
Last, but not least, we have HipChat. A service that wants to help you organize your team’s project by providing features such as:
- Video Conference
- App for iOS, Android, Windows and Linux
- Offers notifications
- Up to date with notifications such as Asana, Google Hangouts, Jira, Bitbucket and 150+
- Custom Emoticons
- Hipbots
- Animated Gifs
- RSS Feeds
- Twitter Notifications
- Secure and encrypted conversations
- Invitations only rooms
- Split screen sharing, share your screen with others
- Drag and Drop file from desktop, Dropbox and elsewhere
- Create unlimited rooms
- Get notified within the app, by Email, SMS or push
- Search for saved content by keyword, text, links files and more!
HipChat also allows you to create notifications by Email, SMS or Push. It will notify you when you have missed a message, and you can choose how to be notified, a feature the other two services need to catch up on.
Which one to choose?
Slack Free Account
- Search and browse 10k most recent messages
- 10 service Integrations
- Free apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows Desktop
- Multi-team support
- 1 on 1 calls (beta)
Quip Free Account
- Unlimited number of personal documents
- Personalized domain team.quip.cpm
- Archive with 1000 messages
- Unlimited group sharing
- History of document editing made in the past 30 days
HipChat Free Account
- Free group messaging
- Instant messages
- Shared documents
- Unlimited users and integrations
As you can see that the three services offer very similar features, but the one that stands out for me is Slack. I think it has a great design compared to HipChat and Quip, and it also offers users more useful features in its free account. All three are excellent services, and it’s all about seeing which one fits your team’s needs since every team is different.
Conclusion
As you can see that the services are very similar but have their slight differences, and it’s up to you if those differences are enough to make you choose the competition. Which group messaging services do you use? Let us know in the comments.
