If your organization has turned on Chat Preferred or Chat only, your users see Google Chat in Gmail instead of classic Hangouts.
Features in Google Chat
- Rooms where teams can collaborate and hold multiple threaded conversations
- Share documents and files from your Drive, computer, or mobile device
- Search for people and rooms, with filtering
- Rich previews for web links
- Bots, including the ability for third parties to develop bots
- Improved accessibility and compliance
- Expand rooms and direct messages to use full Gmail window
Differences between classic Hangouts and Chat
- Group messaging in Chat can be in group chats or rooms. New group chats and unthreaded rooms in Chat appear in classic Hangouts, but legacy group chats and threaded rooms in Chat do not. Learn more about Chat and classic Hangouts interoperability.
- Phone calls and text messages using Google Voice aren't available in Chat. Users can make calls and send text messages using Google Voice at voice.google.com or through the Google Voice mobile apps.
- Some classic Hangouts features aren’t currently available in Chat, such as custom status messages.
- The default Chat notification is New threads, threads I'm following, and direct messages, which is different than classic Hangouts. To change their notifications, users can go to chat.google.com/settings.
To learn more, review the full list of known limitations.
