What about HipChat don't you like? I know it can be buggy at times, but from a strictly functional perspective, I feel like it's ok, or at least sufficient for me.
"Barely sufficient to stop people from switching to Slack" seems to be Atlassian's target.
Atlassian abandoned HipChat's bug tracker, and put up a fresh JIRA that they discourage you from using at several steps. That's one way to get the bug count down without fixing any bugs.
I've logged a number of tickets against their product, their solution seems most frequently to be "we're merging this with another ticket that's about 50% related, fixing some other issue, then closing this ticket and opening another one for other issues since merged into this ticket, elsewhere." If you follow the ticket trail around long enough, you may see your issue fixed, but I haven't been that dedicated yet. Their support process is certainly pretty crappy.
As an enterprise user: Just about everything to do with LDAP/AD integration. Disabling an AD user from the app and re-enabling them later converts their account into a local account, for one. If you have it connected to a Crowd server, and the Crowd server loses connection with its directory, it returns an empty user list to Hipchat, resulting in EVERY USER ACCOUNT BEING DISABLED. And as we just established, when it comes back, Hipchat sets up the users as new.
I still remember, and have nightmares about, the day ~300 users lost all private chats, private room membership, and chat history, all because of braindead design.
Hipchat is not my favorite atlassian product. The only reason they have any traction whatsoever is because Slack doesn't offer a behind the firewall product.
I'll mention one point: editing your sent messages sucks. Afaik, using s/foo/bar is the only way in the Linux client. If I mess up the /code command (very easy to do) the. Fixing it is such a pita that I might as well not bother.
Why can't HipChat message editing be as easy as Skype's? If HipChat is at all targeted for devs, why is pasting/sharing code a pita? Where is bold/italics on linux? Your own hyperlinks (instead of pasting raw urls?
I only use HipChat because the alternatives at my company are worse. Even IRC seems better at this point.
We switched to Discord and are pretty happy. Path we took was: HipChat (buggy, server outages) -> Slack (resource hog) -> Discord (gamer focused, but works well).
No doubt they'll sell someday though so w/e. Temporary / replaceable is the new norm for productivity tools. Beware lock-in! Might end up back on IRC next.
It is okay on my Mac (except ugly and slow as molasses), but my Windows coworkers have been complaining about crashes, HiDPI problems and missed notifications for ages.
The editing function is embarrassingly bad. I get it, I've been on IRC when Perl was cool, but I can't believe they're shipping that. I don't think I've seen a non-programmer use it, ever.
I've also never felt so unwelcome in a bug reporter as in HipChat's. It really reminded me that Atlassian sells to suits, not to users.
