HipChat Alternatives

Why?

HipChat is fantastic, however:

4/25/2014: HipChat Changed Their TOS To Allow Admins Access to 1-1 Chat History

4/27/2014: Response from HipChat regarding 1-1 chat access by admins - Who can view chat history and files

Edit: 10/19/2014: Slack is awesome (and is taking over the world).

Slack

Slack Homepage

Working at Slack

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

ChatGrape

"The world's fastest business chat."

ChatGrape Homepage

ChatGrape allows you to manage your cloud services right from the chat, allowing your business to move twice as fast.

Core features are:

The world's only Grape Browser that allows you to access your company's issues, appointments and files right as you type
External Services like Giphy and Youtube browsable without leaving the service
Markdown and code inside the chat
Customer oriented Privacy Policy especially regarding governmental data access
The indexAPI, allowing you to add your company data to the ChatGrape index
Special pricing for startups
iOS, Mac OS X and Android Apps
Open Source: Encrypted OTR P2P Messaging in the making
a lot more to come

Let's Chat

Let's Chat Homepage

A BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) chat app for small teams.

Features:

Persistent messages
Multiple rooms
New message alerts / notifications
Mentions (hey @you)
Image embeds
Code pasting
File uploads
Transcripts / chat history
XMPP Multi-user chat (MUC)
Local / Kerberos / LDAP authentication
Hubot Adapter
REST-like API
MIT Licensed

Kandan

Kandan Homepage

An Open Source Alternative to HipChat and so much more.

Gitter

Gitter Homepage

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.