Zulip Reviews & Product Details

We have been using Zulip for two years now at Ultimate Bègles (an Ultimate Frisbee association in Bègles (France) of about 100 members). Zulip has been a great choice for many reasons.

We were searching for a way to get away from emails and dozens of independent whatsapp groups to share information to our members. What we found with Zulip is a great way to develop our members' sense of belonging to our association. One of the statistics which surprised me the most is that 47% of the 35 231 messages exchanged on Zulip over a two years period are direct messages.

As the president of the association, I like many aspects of Zulip:

- we can forward emails (received from the federation, from the city, other clubs, other associations, updated schedule of the next tournament, etc.) directly to Zulip channels so that this information is available

- there is a phone app (representing 65% of our messages sent)

- there is a web app (representing 35% of our messages sent) which is very practical for writing longer posts or more technical content or for a few of our members who do not have a phone

- members are free to join public channels and have access to the information posted before they joined

- you can do poll using the "/poll" syntax to decide for the date of the next meeting

- a discussion can be marked as "solved"

- we have a few global channels (Announces, Results) to share global announces or recent results of our teams at tournaments to everyone

- we can create private channels to discuss the Administration, the Money, the Coaching decisions privately.

As an admin, I like:

- message sent to the wrong discussion can me moved to the good one

- the title of a subject can be changed (for instance to merge two discussions on the same topic)

- we can download a tarball of everything allowing us to download our data and continue with an independent server.

- the zulipchat.com server works 100% of the time. It was never down for the last 2 years of usage.

As a coach, I like:

- players can announce their presence/absence to a training with just a thumbs up/down

- we create a new channel for discussing travel/lodging for each tournament, not to spam the other members not going

As a user, I like:

- members are free to join/quit the public channels of their choice depending on what information they want or don't want to receive

- direct messages can be sent to a group of members

- while using the web-app, you can copy-paste an image from the pastebin directly in the text

- files already uploaded in zulip have a link which you can easily copy to share the same file in another channel/discussion Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is not a mainstream software. Therefore, Zulip is new for the vast majority of our new members. We need to teach and accompaign them at the beginning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Channels and conversation threads are very useful for compartmentalizing various conversations. The web/desktop interface is pleasant and intuitive. The support and documentation are very effective. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface of the mobile application is a bit confusing and not very intuitive. But these problems seem to be fixed in the new version of the app, currently in beta version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This product makes team cooperation much easier. Conversations can be categorized and threaded, with good formatting options. It's easy to set up, available on multiple platforms and (for us) works seamlessly across them. Vastly superior to the main competitor, which we used for years but have now dropped in favor of Zulip. We use this more than email to communicate.

A big plus for our team, which deserves a shout-out for the Zulip team, is that we work on a project (an Android RPG game) that has no monetary income whatsoever, so Zulip allows us to use the full product for free. Such generosity is rare. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not a lot of bad things to say. No spell checker is a downside. I guess it's on the to-do list, but not there yet. Any other complaints would just be nit-picking. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've been using Zulip for a couple of months now with our ≈40 people organization gathered around sharing knowledge, training and support for CS-related skills (especially programming) in our research lab (Ecology/Biodiversity/Evolution). We can't wait to use it more and to welcome like 100 more persons. And more: we're not afraid: Zulip *will* scale :) We find it fresh, powerful, flexible, extensible and convivial. Especially when it comes to tracking multiple diverging asynchronous conversations : being able to move messages accross topics to keep things focused and tidy is a killer feature. I also like how old resolved topics naturally sink away from the focus as new conversations start spinning on top of them. Finally we've got an excellent FOSS for just that <3 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's hard to have people opt into *yet another* chatroom. People get fed up with the multiplicity of chat groups they're already involved in: Mattermost, Slack, Discord, Teams, Whatsapp, Matrix/Element.. because they figure it's *yet another app to install and to regularly check*. But it's wrong: all these run smoothly in simple browser tabs within a single window, or you can use Ferdium to have them all in the same app. Transitioning from big techs to FOSS becomes a breeze :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Zulip has unlimited history (=no loss of project history), a clean and clear interface, super-intuitive classification of topics, possibilities for one-to-one interactions, and it is not in the hands of big players who hold all the cards & can change the rules of the game at any moment. It was introduced to our organization by a very professional & very picky programmer and is up to all our hopes. I recommend it without hesitation at all. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With the best efforts I am not able to find back sides to Zulip. It does the job neatly & efficiently and I was never frustrated with it at any point (although I'm by self-report a fussy user). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I run a research group in theoretical physics, and Zulip is a perfect fit to organize our discussions. We organize the projects into streams, assiging users accordingly to the collaborations. Withing each stream we organize the discussion in topics that help us track info later, like references and developments. Zulip natively supports Latex/Markdown for math equations and proper Markdown for codes, which makes the conversations that require equations and codes rich and clear. All conversations, either on streams or single/group direct messages are quite easy to navigate and organize. All those features are superior to Zulip's alternatives like Mattermost and Slack. Particularly, Mattermost is quite similar to Zulip, but the way it splits conversations into subtopics are confusing, while Zulip's topics are clear. Regarding Slack, their support for Latex/Markdown/Codes is insuficiente, while Zulip's is perfect! For all those reasons, Zulip is the perfect group chat tool for physicists. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

(i) The Android app could be better. There are missing features.

(ii) I would like a group calendar a boards integrated to Zulip nativelly.

(iii) I would like an option to hide some streams from the default view on the sidebar. In this case it would be interesting to have an "archive" option that freezes the stream and removes it from the sidebar list, but keeps it acessible for reading following some different route on the interface. Also, it would be nice to remove some active streams from the sidebar, since we often have some streams that need to stay active, but we only access it every now and then. For instance, I keep a stream with a discussion on how to access our servers that needs to be updated sometimes, but not often, and new members need to read it, but old members will probably never open it, unless some updates are posted there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Zulip allows me to manage multiple conversations on multiple contexts and organizations with incredibly clarity and efficiency thanks to how it manages threads. It has complete keyboard control and marking threads as done is a pleasure and helps to keep the focus. Polls and international timezone translation are a great bonus, as the automagical formatting and (if you like it) the expandable super comfortable editor (not only a tiny tidy little window). :)

I also absolutely love that we can self-host the server, how stable it is and how easy it is to upgrade it. Also, hyper zealous organizations will adore that you can export all your information to keep it safe in some other place.

It is a great example of what can Free/Libre Open Source Software can create.

Did I mentioned that it also has great accessibility?

What else can we ask for? :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

2 things that I don't dislike but would like to see:

- I would like to be able to quickly record audio and have it translated to text (I remember some talks about that a time ago), and

- I'd love to have a faster mobile app (also, I believe this in on course already). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Zulip has enabled modern work-related communication within our small research group, making it easy to collect/keep information grouped according to research project.

In addition to connecting our team, it's convenient to add outside contributors / research partners.

Being able to use mathematical notation is a huge plus in my line of research.

The free access to the professional version which does not "forget" information after 3 months (Slack ..) is essential for us. And it's great that we do not have to self-host.

On the rare instances that we needed support or encountered a bug, the problem was solved quickly.

My group uses the product daily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It may not look as shiny as its competitors. But all one needs is in the right place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Zulip is a useful tool for communicating in groups with the least noise possible. The threaded model is really good, and much more useful than I thought it would be. The whole thing was easy to set up and the web client means that I don't have to install software just to chat to colleagues. It integrates reasonably well with the outside world (in our case, GitHub) which is legitimately useful to catch up with project progress. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm not entirely convinced that workplace instant messaging is a Good Thing and would prefer something 'slower' like e-mail or something with more friction like a telephone call when it's really urgent. But this is not really Zulip's fault, and it does its best to minimise noise. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Zulip provides a spam-free environment for communication with a mid-size group, further divided into smaller subgroups.

Our application for a free Cloud Standard hosting plan has been approved very quickly (we are a research lab within a public University).

I really appreciate that the entire history is searchable and that threads are very well supported.

We use zulip every day (and multiple times a day), both on the desktop and on a phone/tablet.

We add new users regularly (e.g. all students that are doing some project with us) and they have been able to use it immediately and without complaints.

The fact that it is open source guarantees that our messages are not stored in a silo, giving us a much larger leverage than other competing platforms.

The world clock feature has helped us several times when collaborating with people far away. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The mobile applications are not as good as the web version, even though they are improving.

I would like to have (many) more integrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.