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As a hipchat using company, we got a slack account to give it a test drive, and I was ... surprised how much of a wash it is vs hipchat.

I had a "this is what all the fuss is about?" reaction.

I actually seem to prefer the hipchat UI personally, and apparently so do many of my colleagues. The fact that hipchat is cheaper only made it clearer to us.

note: only using and comparing the osx desktop app for both services.

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Actually, it sounds small, but the biggest advantage of HipChat over Slack is that HipChat allows you to change the background color of bot messages (like incoming exceptions, deploys, etc.). It is incredibly frustrating that Slack can't allocate an engineer to just do this. Slack's custom message styling options are virtually nonexistent. Yeah, yeah, I know we programmers shouldn't say "it will only take a few minutes," but come on!

Although you can't change the bg color, you can certainly change the coloured left-border.

I've used both and currently use slack. I prefer the simple ui of hipchat to slack for sure. In my area slack seems to be becoming the more popular chat tool but maybe I just have too small of a pool to be accurate.

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