HipChat is fantastic, however:
4/25/2014: HipChat Changed Their TOS To Allow Admins Access to 1-1 Chat History
Reviews from HipChat TOS Change Hacker News Thread:
We use Slack at my company (switched to it from Kato) and we're very happy with it.
-- coolsunglasses on Hacker News
Same [referring to above quote]. Though, it seems a tad overpriced. It is a very nice platform though -- fidlefodl on Hacker News
Somewhat tangential to this story, but we recently moved our team over from HipChat to Slack [1]. I initially thought that we'd miss the sheer number of integrations HipChat offers, but Slack seems to cover almost all of the ones we use regularly and some HipChat doesn't yet offer, like Asana. -- shravan on Hacker News
Our team tried out Slack, but the Mac app isn't native, just a rather weak wrapper around the normal web page. And the web experience just isn't as good as HipChat. Also, no in-app voice/video integration that I could find. HipChat's one-on-one video is great, although waht I really wish for is conferencing built in. Google Hangouts is just too annoying to set up (first it pesters me about signing up for Google Plus, which I don't want, then it shows a blank screen with a "start a hangout" button, then it opens a GH video in a separate window, which is just stupid), and doesn't have a desktop app. -- lobster_johnson on Hacker News
An Open Source Alternative to HipChat and so much more.
Gitter is chat, for Github.
Currently the service is in beta, but will soon be moving across to a paid model where all open-source/public rooms are always free.
Features:
- Gitter supports IRC, web and mobile web chat interfaces.
- Markdown in your chat.
- Gitter understands Github - it uses your Github organisations for security, understands commit hashes and issues and much more.
- Embedded content from external services.
- A fully-featured API
- Open-source service integration model.
- Support for Hubot.
- Much, much, more.
Hosted IRC and so much more.
Features:
- web UI for your less techie team members
- SSL for all communications
- Searchable chat archive
- Integrations with GitHub, Heroku, Bitbucket, Pivotal Tracker, and more
- Desktop and email notifications when you're not online