Zulip

Key Features of Zulip

Zulip offers a range of capabilities that make it stand out from traditional team chat tools:

• Topic-Based Threading: Every message lives within a named topic inside a stream, making it easy to follow and return to specific conversations—even long after they’ve started.
• Designed for Asynchronous Work: Ideal for distributed teams, Zulip helps team members stay in sync without requiring everyone to be online at the same time.
• Scalable for Complex Organizations: Whether you're managing a handful of discussions or hundreds of active workstreams, Zulip’s interface keeps it all organized and accessible.
• Powerful Search and Filtering: Quickly find past messages, topics, or files, no matter how large your history grows.
• Open Source and Self-Hostable: Zulip is 100% open-source, with full support for on-premise hosting—offering data control, compliance, and flexibility.
• Active Developer Community: With over 1,000 contributors and rapid development, Zulip benefits from constant improvement and innovation.
• Easy Migration Tools: Bring over users, messages, and integrations from Slack and other platforms with minimal friction.
• Rich API and Integrations: Automate workflows and connect with your existing tools using Zulip’s extensive API and integration ecosystem.
• Inbox View for Unread Messages: Get a high-level overview of all your unread conversations, so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Focused Conversations: By separating discussions into topics, Zulip enables deep work without constant distraction from unrelated messages.

Zulip: A Better Way for Teams to Chat, Collaborate, and Thrive

In a world where remote and flexible work are quickly becoming the norm, the way we communicate has never mattered more. Zulip stands out as a powerful, open-source team chat application designed from the ground up to help teams stay focused, productive, and aligned—no matter where their members are.

Unlike traditional messaging apps, Zulip introduces a unique topic-based threading model that feels like the best of both worlds: email and chat. Whether your team works across time zones or just needs to organize hundreds of conversations happening simultaneously, Zulip offers clarity and structure where others offer noise.

Zulip isn't just a product—it's a vibrant open-source project powered by a global community. With over 1,000 contributors and more than 500 commits merged each month, it's the largest and fastest-growing open-source team chat project today. More than 74 contributors have crossed the 100-commit mark, showing the sustained energy behind Zulip’s evolution.

What sets Zulip apart is how it’s built to support asynchronous work from the ground up. Instead of a chaotic firehose of messages, Zulip keeps discussions neatly organized into topics within streams. This makes it effortless to catch up after being away, focus on one conversation without missing others, and return to ongoing threads days—or even weeks—later without losing context.

From startups to Fortune 500 companies and open-source communities, organizations choose Zulip because it makes remote collaboration feel less like a struggle and more like a superpower. David Lanstein, co-founder of Atolio, put it best: “The first-class threads in Zulip are absolutely critical to how we work.”

The impact goes beyond better messaging. Gaute Lund, co-founder of iDrift AS, shared that using Zulip expanded the number of team members a manager could meaningfully keep up with. For Rust language team co-lead Josh Triplett, it accelerated decision-making, turning months-long GitHub stalemates into swift resolutions.

Zulip doesn’t just help you talk—it becomes a living knowledge base, naturally organizing your team’s institutional memory as you go. Max McCrea of Monadical pointed out that this happens without extra effort, simply by using Zulip as intended. For larger organizations, the app’s UI makes managing hundreds of workstreams possible in a way that Slack and similar tools struggle to match, as Jon Jensen from End Point Dev attests.

And if you're wondering whether it's worth the switch, just ask James van Lommel, Director of Engineering at Semsee: “I don’t like going back to Slack now. It’s just not as efficient a way to organize communication.”

Zulip offers both a hassle-free cloud option and a fully open-source self-hosted solution—perfect for teams that need total control over their data and infrastructure. Migration tools make it easy to bring in messages and integrations from other platforms like Slack.

If your team craves a better way to communicate—one that respects both your time and your attention—Zulip is worth a look.