Zulip

Hi Product Hunters, I’m super excited to share Zulip 4.0 with you! This is actually the second time Zulip has been posted to Product Hunt, but the first time that anyone from the Zulip team is involved. (Zulip made it to #3 in late 2017 when an enthusiastic user hunted it without telling us!) People love Zulip because topic-based threading fixes the core problems with traditional team chat like Slack or Discord. See our users explain Zulip in an amazing cartoon on Twitter, this release’s Hacker News comment thread, and blog posts. I first saw the magic of remote work back in 2011, when we built a highly effective distributed team for Ksplice, while my friends’ companies struggled to hire remote. Our secret was Zephyr, MIT’s ancient terminal-based chat system, which had an incredibly useful threading model. Unfortunately, a terminal-only chat system like Zephyr is only viable for a team of Linux kernel programmers 🙂. We created Zulip to bring topic-based threading to the world, with modern chat features like emoji reactions, and mobile and desktop apps for every platform. (And yes, we do have a terminal app.) With Zulip, catching up on conversations you care about is an efficient use of your time, no matter if you were away for a few hours or a few weeks. Zulip makes it possible to weigh in if you only have a bit of time to spare, whether as a busy manager or a part-time participant in a community. It breaks from the pitfalls of channels in Slack, where conversations constantly disrupt one’s focus with the need to respond before the conversation moves on. I personally experienced the power of Zulip’s asynchronous model after taking 3 months off for paternity leave this February. I received over 20,000 messages in the Zulip developer community while I was out, and I really enjoyed skimming everything and replying to the hundreds of topics where I had something to contribute or someone to thank. This would have been crazy to even attempt with any other chat tool! This Zulip 4.0 release adds improved moderation and permissions features, a native GIPHY integration, a new default view, and hundreds more features and bug fixes detailed in our blog post! This is our largest release ever, with over 4300 new commits from 137 people since Zulip 3.0. With translations for 17 languages and 68 people who’ve contributed 100+ commits to the project, Zulip has by far the most active open-source development community of any team chat software. Unlike many modern “open source” applications, Zulip is uncompromisingly open source software; we publish everything under the Apache 2.0 license. For those who don’t want to self-host their mission-critical communications tools, we have a SaaS offering, which we provide for free to over 600 open source projects and similar worthy organizations. For those who prefer to control their data, we work hard to make it easy to set up and run a self-hosted Zulip installation without paying us a dime, which is why thousands of organizations do so today. Thanks for reading! The sun never sets on the Zulip community, so various folks will be replying to comments all day.

Our company switched to using zulip this year and we are happier than ever. Previously we were using Glip which had very poor support for searching in Chinese. We were on the hunt for an opensource option and found zulip to be a perfect fit. The opensource model allowed us to host our own instance given the wonderfully detailed documentation while allowing us to report any issues to the maintainers easily. The threading model is the best part, enabling efficient catch-up of conversations you missed without being overwhelming. Zulip integrated PGroonga which helped greatly with search in Chinese. If your organization often discusses multiple issues simultaneously or have people in different time zones, zulip is definitely worth a try.

Thanks @tabbott3 I enjoy the ease of use and everything about this program! It makes my life so much easier at work.