Asana vs Stride (previously HipChat)

Asana has fantastic mechanisms for dealing with team collaboration. Not only can tasks be assigned to team members, but Asana lets users follow tasks and use hyperlinks to refer to team members within a task.

The Asana task workflow within a project is broken down into "Today," "Upcoming," and "Later." The tasks themselves have the status of either done or not done. There is also a subtask feature to group tasks together. Tasks can be assigned to other team members and are stored in the "Inbox" view for processing. This replaces email for some team communication.

Teams can have private (only visible to project members) and public (visible to anyone in the team) projects. Each member can also have their own personal projects.

Tasks can be viewed in list and calendar views. It's possible to display only the tasks assigned to the user or tasks organized by project or team. Single tasks can exist in multiple projects. Lists of tasks can be divided into sections and organized in many different ways – tasks that still have to be done, tasks that have been completed, by due date, by assignee, by popularity, etc.

Expanding a task will allow adding things like subtasks, tags, and attachments, as well as comments. Users can also subscribe to a task via RSS from this view. There's a separate view specifically for attachments.

Search lets you find what you’re looking for quickly.

The tagging system enables project managers to easily filter tasks.

There are many videos, tutorials, and reference documents to help you get up and running.

Asana provides a list view and a Kanban view which can be selected if a new project is created.

Keyboard shortcuts all involve the Tab key, so it is unlikely that they will interfere with shortcuts that have already been established.

It's possible to have tasks appear in a Slack channel.

You can access HipChat from pretty much every common platform. HipChat even allows chatting via SMS.

You can ping people to get their attention even if they are not online by @mentioning them. Depending on how the person has set their account up it can be by notifications via in-app sounds, visual alerts, and even email, SMS, or mobile app push notifications.

Including Asana, Github, Zendesk, WordPress, MongoDB, TeamCity, JIRA, Confluence, PowerShell and more that 40 others.

Free with unlimited users, $2/user/month for voice + video calls, screencasts, full history retention and management. (Even enterprise feature like SAML)

An intuitive, easy to overview interface listing both online and offline users.

Things like photos get automatically embedded in the chat thread once you upload them.

You can invite people to join conversations even if they don't have a HipChat account. HipChat will generate a link to share and the guest will only need to enter their name to join the conversation.

HipChat has an optional desktop client powered by Adobe AIR.

HipChat audio and video works on mobile platforms and web browsers.

Participate and keep tabs on ongoing discussions on particular topics or amongst certain groups of people.

If you are worried about third-parties getting access to your data you should consider self-hosting. With self-hosting you are in control over where your data is stored, who has access to it. You will also not be vulnerable to exploits of a third-party provider.

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A big company with experience will bring in more options like Google Apps One Time Login.

E.g. part, away, all, here etc.