Is HipChat Server really more expensive than JIRA and Confluence?

[Peter Callies]

After seeing the announcement that HipChat server has become GA, I checked pricing.  For the 500-user tier that we would need, it apparently costs $16,000 annually.  It's not a perpetual license and there is no maintenance discount.  

That's actually $4,000 more than 500 users on HipChat Cloud.  So I would need to take on the cost of hardware and administration and pay at least $4,000 more?  Actually, I would guess that most customers like me don't actually have the maximum number of active users in a license tier, but it seems like we'd be forced to pay for the maximum because of tiering. 

This is stunning given that the same licensing level of JIRA and Confluence each cost $12,000 and then 50% less for maintenance in following years.

So the initial license for HipChat Server would cost my company $4,000 more than JIRA or Confluence and then $10,000 more every year thereafter?  

Atlassian, can you please explain the pricing model and plan for all your products given that this one seems so out of character?  I'm somewhat dumbfounded.

[David Schweikert]

At our organization (120 employees), we are also evaluating Hipchat and the cloud-solution is out of question because of privacy issues. The server solution seems however also too expensive to us, especially when compared to JIRA and Confluence (which we already license). We also feel like we don't get any advantage in being "loyal" customers using many products of Atlassian.

[Chris Burgess]

I am actually in a similar situation. We are actually a small development team and LOVE HipChat. It's perfect for our needs, integrates well with all of the other Atlassian tools we are using (none of which are hosted btw). We have corporate policies to keep all forms of communication private within our own infrastructure.

It makes little sense to us that the solution that we host on our infrastructure should be more costly than the solution hosted on yours. I'd gladly pay the $2 per user per month but at our level we are being asked to pay 3 times that.

I'm trying to make the case to be able to stick with HipChat but I'm likely going to be overruled if we are forced to go to a cloud solution or pay $6.00 per user per month. That's way more than the competition.

[jnolen]

Thanks so much for sharing your feedback We always watch pricing feedback carefully.

HipChat Server is a product targeted at larger teams, and its pricing applies discounts based on user volume. At the 500-user tier, the cost is $2.66/per user/per month, far less than competitive products. And at 1,000 users, HipChat Server matches the Cloud version at $2/user/month. And the price goes down further at higher tiers.

HipChat Cloud pricing has been optimised for small to medium size teams and we highly recommend this as the most convenient option. If your team fits this description but are hesitant to use our Cloud service I'd love to learn more.

Thanks again for your feedback, and feel free to reach out to me directly.

[Phil Businger]

Curious what competing products are being compared here? At our user tier - 5000 users - Hipchat Server is more than JIRA, JIRA Agile, Confluence and Fisheye/Crucible COMBINED! We use the free cloud version today, and are happy with it. We would consider additional licensing costs for LDAP integration and history retention - we don't see a need for voice/video chatting as we are satisfied with our Google offering here (which is bundled with the rest of our Google Apps service) But this pricing is a complete non-starter for us.

[Błażej O_]

@Jonathan Nolen You people watch pricing carefully, but obviously you are not even looking at your customer needs.

Consider a medium 500-tier company with ~300 active users and jira+confluence instances safely hidden inside the VPN. You CANNOT properly integrate HipChat cloud with it. You would have to go for server. But then WHOOP, 16000$. Additional costs of server, IT staff, easily goes up to over 20000$ annualy.

Now remember, that every company tool is bought as an investment to save time/money, and is expected to return the costs (directly or indirectly) with some additional profit. How on earth do you think a 20000$ chat tool will pay for itself?

I don't get you, Atlassian people. You have a wonderful, precious tool, built in sweat and tears by many talented developers. JIRA is unique with it's possibility to adapt to various, very different, business environments. With JIRA ecosystem you have found your sweet spot in the market, niche, providing access to many companies that can use your tool and be better and more effective thanks to it.

Yet instead of caring about mutual benefit (you sell tool to companies, companies save more money) and growing alongside with your clients, you started acting like a locust swarm.

Business people in Atlassian drifted away to some monopoly fantasy land.