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We migrated from IRC to hipchat a few years ago and I might be able to offer a little insight on that.

As someone who writes a lot, I used the built-in IRC client in emacs which works very well on any OS. But we had several non-developers who needed an IRC client and obviously had no desire to learn emacs. In short; we could not find an IRC client for windows that didn't suck. This alone was the primary driver to drop IRC and move to hipchat.

In hipchat, everyone gets the same client and it does what it does. Coming from an IRC client in a real text editor, the hipchat client is appalling - it has only the absolutely most basic text editing functionality (adding and removing single characters basically - forget about cursor movement, word skipping, in-line searching, transposition etc.). But to users who are not used to typing much, hipchat does everything they need to - it completely matches the editing capabilities of "notepad" and for a great many users this is good enough.

What hipchat then added was images. This actually comes in handy for exchanging screenshots - and yes you can do file transfers with IRC but in hipchat it's one of the primary features. It's image exchange support far exceeds its text exchange support in my opinion :)

As for searching, hipchat does claim to have it but the matching is so unbelievably weak that I gave up using it completely. With regards to search, I was way better off with IRC and emacs - but that's not because of IRC that's because of the editor.

Hipchat stores conversations and lets you retrieve them when you come back after having been off line. With IRC, you need to be on-line to see what's going on. Personally, I actually felt that IRC had an advantage here - because if I want persistent messages I'll use e-mail (it's just as instant as chat but does not require the counterpart to be on-line). So when we used IRC, I'd still use mail for internal communication at times. Different tools for different types of communication. Now, with hipchat, I have almost completely stopped using e-mail internally in our organisation. I probably send one or two e-mails a week, down from maybe 20-50 a day. In that sense, hipchat has been just as much an e-mail replacement as an IRC replacement. I'm not convinced that this is a good thing, but this is what happened.

We did consider writing/finding a bot for IRC which would store conversations in all rooms and make them searchable so that you could both see past discussions where you had been offline, and also offer better search. IRC is of course completely open to that, but we didn't find a bot we could just use off the shelf.

As for the pre-built integrations... Well, we used one of the integrations (the jira one) for a while and then it stopped working. The hipchat product is a very very complex piece of machinery implementation wise - I suspect it started life as a proof of concept and then never really got to the "ok let's write it from scatch, properly" stage. Troubleshooting anything, in my limited experience with hipchat, is hopeless. If a reboot doesn't fix your problem, a re-install may - and that's basically what you have to work with.

So, in conclusion: Moving to hipchat from IRC definitely changed things - not sure it was for the better. Where do we go from here? I'm really not sure, but I think we know more about our needs now than we did when we moved to hipchat :)