HipChat

The team chat that was there before Slack, bought by Atlassian, renamed Stride, and then sold to Slack to be switched off

Shut down
19902026

HipChat was a hosted group chat service for companies, built by Pete Curley, Chris Rivers and Garret Heaton, in beta from December 2009 and public from 25 January 2010. It offered persistent rooms, searchable history, file sharing, integrations and desktop, web and mobile clients. Atlassian bought it in March 2012 and bundled it with Jira and Confluence. After Slack overtook it, Atlassian replaced it with Stride in 2017, then sold both to Slack in July 2018; the services closed on 15 February 2019.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2009
  2. 13 December 2009 Launch
    HipChat beta
  3. 2010
  4. 25 January 2010 Launch
    HipChat opens to the public

    Rooms, history, files, desktop clients.

  5. 12 May 2010 Feature
    HipChat API
  6. 2012
  7. 7 March 2012 Acquisition
    Atlassian buys HipChat
  8. 2014
  9. February 2014 Feature
    Free tier
  10. 2017
  11. 7 September 2017 Rebrand
    HipChat Cloud replaced by Stride
  12. 2018
  13. 26 July 2018 Shutdown announced
    Sold to Slack, closure date set
  14. 2019
  15. 15 February 2019 Shutdown
    HipChat and Stride switched off

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: hipchat.com, 30 April 2011 →

Browse hipchat.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2019 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

HipChat, Inc. 2009–2012 Founded Pete Curley, Chris Rivers and Garret Heaton
Atlassian 2012–2019 Acquisition Bundled with Jira and Confluence; replaced by Stride in 2017
Slack 2018–2019 Acquisition Bought the IP and the customers, then closed the services

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Slack launched in 2013 and took the market HipChat had built. Atlassian replaced HipChat Cloud with Stride in September 2017, and on 26 July 2018 gave up: it sold the HipChat and Stride intellectual property to Slack, took a stake in Slack, and closed both products on 15 February 2019.

Our analysis: HipChat had the right product four years early and then watched someone else do it better. It had rooms, history, search, file sharing and integrations in 2010, and under Atlassian it became the default chat for companies already on Jira and Confluence. But Atlassian ran it as one product among many, the clients grew slow, and Slack arrived in 2013 with a free tier, a faster app and an obsession with polish that HipChat never matched. Stride, the 2017 rebuild, was late and split the user base. Selling the customers to the winner and taking shares in return was the rational end.

History [edit]

Chat rooms for companies

Curley, Rivers and Heaton had met at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and had already built HipCal, a web calendar sold to Plaxo. HipChat went into beta on 13 December 2009 and opened to the public on 25 January 2010: private chat rooms for a company, one-to-one messages, history you could search, image previews, 5 GB of file storage, and native clients for Windows, Mac and Linux with a web client added in March. An API followed in May 2010, and the integrations with GitHub, Heroku and the rest gave developers a reason to leave IRC and Campfire.

Atlassian years

Atlassian bought HipChat on 7 March 2012 and made it the chat for teams using Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket. It grew: a free tier arrived in 2014, video calling and screen sharing came in the paid plan, and HipChat Server let companies run it inside their own firewall. It was, for a couple of years, the obvious choice.

Slack launched publicly in February 2014 and was faster, friendlier and fiercely marketed. By 2016 HipChat was being compared to it in every review and losing. Atlassian's response, announced on 7 September 2017, was Stride: a new cloud product with built-in voice and video that replaced HipChat Cloud, while HipChat Data Center stayed for self-hosted customers. Stride did not turn the numbers around.

Sold to the winner

On 26 July 2018 Atlassian and Slack announced a deal: Slack would buy the HipChat and Stride intellectual property, Atlassian would take a minority stake in Slack, and both products would be discontinued on 15 February 2019 with migration tools to move customers over. HipChat Data Center got a shorter reprieve and was also retired. The Slack and Atlassian integrations that came out of the deal are the only thing left of it.

The domain today

hipchat.com redirects to Atlassian. Slack, which absorbed the users, was itself bought by Salesforce in 2021.

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Sources [edit]

  1. A new partnership with Slack Atlassian blog 26 July 2018 [archived]
  2. Atlassian acquires chat service provider HipChat The Next Web 7 March 2012
  3. HipChat Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  4. hipchat.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 June 2011

Last verified: 22 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).