If you’re looking for a group chat productivity solution that’s affordable & won’t constantly disrupt you with automated messages, random links & lunch plans, you might want to try Zulip out. Zulip is different from Slack & its clones in that each conversation has its own thread. It’s free & open source for the most basic version & has a free cloud version as well.
You can get the Zulip app for a variety of platforms, including Android, the iPhone & the desktop. An API is available & it has 60+ native integrations: Jira, Stripe, GitHub, Zendesk, Travis CI, Heroku, Sentry, Google Calendar, IFTTT, Nagios, even Slack (yes!)… It’s been around since 2012 & is used by many leading-edge companies & organizations, like Veelo, Solano Labs, Layershift, Akamai, Recurse Center & Level Up.
It’s easy to tweak Zulip, as its codebase is available on GitHub under an MIT license. An open source developer & support community. It’s feature packed & superior to other available Slack alternatives & clones like Mattermost or Hipchat.
These are some of the most salient features of Zulip:
- Full-text full-history search – Search text, people, & threads of conversations, with advanced search operators for fine-grained control.
- History – Join a stream & see its history, so new team members are never out of the loop.
- Starred messages – Keep a ‘Todo’ list of messages to come back to, or keep track of interesting conversations.
- Statistics – Powerful set of analytics available to help you see how your organization communicates.
- One-on-one & group private conversations – Lightweight private conversations with one or as many people as needed.
- Team presence – See who is currently online at a glance.
- Invite-only streams – Enjoy the benefits of threaded conversations while controlling your audience & privacy.
- Persistence – Zulip always receives messages for you, even when you’re logged out or away from your computer.
- Message Editing – Messages can always be edited, either in the body of the message or its topic.
- Typing notifications – Know when other users are composing messages to you.
- Saved drafts – Zulip’s drafts make it easy to write longer messages without worrying about losing your work.
- Accessibility – Zulip follows best practices for accessibility, & has been validated using popular accessibility auditing tools.
- Conversations threaded by topic – Participate in several conversations with the same group at once, without getting lost or overwhelmed.
- Catch up quickly – With topics, hotkeys & snappy performance, usefully reviewing hundreds of messages takes just minutes.
- Fully internationalized – The Zulip UI is fully internationalized & has been translated into over a dozen languages.
- Customizable login & registration – Customize the available authentication methods & the login & registration pages for your organization using Markdown.
- Video calls – Create & join video calls with a single click. Powered by Jitsi.
Zulip is an open source project, with commercial support & funding provided by US-based Kendra Labs, which was founded in 2016 by Tim Abbott. You can get the code for free on GitHub here & build it & host it on your own. Alternatively, you can use the Zulip Cloud version (see pricing here).
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Zulip
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