Zulip for open source projects
Grow your community with thoughtful and inclusive discussion.
Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open-source
projects!
Make Zulip the communication hub for your open-source community.
Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Discuss issues, pull requests and feature ideas, engage with users, answer questions, and onboard new contributors.
Use topics to organize the discussion
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Like email threads, Zulip topics create a separate space for each discussion, so different conversations will never get in each other’s way.
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Find active conversations, or see what happened while you were away, with the Recent Topics view. Read the topics you care about, and skip the rest.
We just moved the Lichess team (~100 persons) to @zulip, and I'm loving it. The topics in particular make it vastly superior to slack & discord, when it comes to dealing with many conversations.
— Thibault D (@ornicar) July 7, 2021
Zulip is also open-source! https://t.co/lxHjf3YPMe
Lasting knowledge repository
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Permanently link to a Zulip conversation or a message in context from your issue tracker, forum, or anywhere else.
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With web-public streams, anyone can view, browse, and search your organization's public content — no account required.
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Conversations are organized by topic, so you can review old discussions to understand past work, explanations, and decisions.
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Topics make it easy to find the right conversation with Zulip's powerful full-text search. New participants can learn from past discussions as they onboard, with unlimited message history.
Choosing Zulip over Slack as our group chat is one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Zulip makes it easy for our community of 1000 Recursers around the world to stay involved, even years after their batches finish. No other tool has a user experience that scales to a community of our size.
Build inclusive communities
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Conversations in Zulip can continue for hours or days, enabling effective discussions between community members around the world.
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Core contributors can answer a question when they have a few minutes, without digging through dozens of messages.
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Part-time participants quickly zero in on the conversations they care about. This is not possible with other chat tools like Slack or Discord.
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Topics provide a safe space to ask a question without interrupting other conversations.
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Zulip offers dozens of features for moderating discussions. Members can also mute anyone they'd rather not interact with.
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Check out Zulip for communities to learn more about how Zulip facilitates contributor engagement and inclusion.
When we made the switch to @zulip a few months ago for chat, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it was going to become the beating heart of the community, and so quickly. It's a game changer. 🧑💻🗨️👩💻
— Dan Allen (@mojavelinux) June 29, 2021
Open ecosystem
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Zulip is 100% open-source software, with no "open core" catch. We work hard to make it easy to set up, backup, and maintain a self-hosted Zulip installation, where you have full control of your data.
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Our high quality export and import tools ensure that you can always move from Zulip Cloud hosting to your own servers. There is no lock-in.
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Zulip's open API is shared by the official web/desktop, mobile, and terminal clients, with a complete API changelog and backwards-compatibility policy designed to support developers of third-party clients.
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Zulip supports mirroring channels with IRC, Slack, and Matrix, and you can connect to other modern chat protocols using Matterbridge.
I highly recommend Zulip to other communities. We’re coming from Freenode as our only real-time communication so the difference is night and day. Slack is a no-go for many due to not being FLOSS, and I’m concerned about vendor lock-in if they were to stop being so generous. Slack’s threading model is much worse than Zulip’s IMO. The streams/topics flow is an incredibly intuitive way to keep track of everything that is going on.
Powerful formatting
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Zulip code blocks come with syntax highlighting for over 250 languages, ability to set a default language, and integrated code playgrounds.
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Type LaTeX directly into your Zulip message, and see it beautifully rendered.
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Enjoy inline image, video and Tweet previews.
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If you made a mistake, no worries! You can edit your message, or move it to a different topic or stream.
At rust-lang, at Ferrous Systems, and now at Near, Zulip is absolutely invaluable for making technical discussion work!
Interactive messaging
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Start a video call with the click of a button, or plan events without worrying about time zones using global times.
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Use emoji reactions for lightweight interactions. Have fun with custom emoji and gather feedback with polls.
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Share files or images with drag-and-drop uploads.
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Enjoy animated GIFs with Zulip's native GIPHY integration.
Wikimedia uses Zulip for its participation in open source mentoring programs. Zulip’s threaded discussions help busy organization administrators and mentors stay in close communication with students during all phases of the programs.
Effective workflows with integrations
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Use topics to manage support workflows, answer questions, and collaborate to investigate issues. Mark the topic ✓ resolved when done!
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Customize Zulip’s markup with linkifiers, so that “TRAC-1234” and “#1234” automatically link to issues or tickets in the tools you use.
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Native integrations for GitHub, Jira, Twitter, Sentry and hundreds of other tools can initiate new topics, creating lightweight discussion spaces for each issue.
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Bots can also use a dedicated topic to avoid crowding out conversations.
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Connect to thousands of tools using Zapier. Integrations written for Slack can post into Zulip via the Slack compatible webhook.
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Build your own integrations with Zulip’s easy-to-use RESTful API, client bindings, incoming webhooks, outgoing webhooks and interactive bot framework.
Flexible administration and moderation
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Invite new members with multi-use invite links, or make your community open for anyone to join without an invitation.
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Allow (or require) users to authenticate with single sign-on options like GitHub or GitLab, instead of with a username and password.
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Automatically subscribe members to streams when they join.
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Manage your community with fine-grained permission settings for administrators and moderators.
When and how you want it
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With apps for every platform, you can check Zulip at your computer or on your phone. Zulip works great in a browser, so no download is required.
- Zulip alerts you about timely messages with fully customizable mobile, email and desktop notifications.
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Use Zulip in your language of choice, with translations into 23 languages.
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Zulip is built for scale and works reliably for open organizations with 10,000s of users, with modest hardware.
The Lean community switched from Gitter to Zulip in early 2018, and never looked back. Zulip’s stream/topic model has been essential for organising research work and simultaneously onboarding newcomers as our community scaled. My experience with both the app and the website is extremely positive!How the Lean prover community uses Zulip ↗
Make the move today
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The Zulip core developers have decades of combined experience leading and growing open source communities, and we love helping other communities reach their potential.
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Getting started or moving from another platform is easy! Import your existing organization from Slack, Mattermost, Gitter, or Rocket.Chat.
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If you have any questions, please contact us at sales@zulip.com. You can also drop by our friendly development community at chat.zulip.org to ask for help or suggest improvements!
The Lean community switched from Gitter to Zulip in early 2018, and never looked back. Zulip’s stream/topic model has been essential for organising research work and simultaneously onboarding newcomers as our community scaled. My experience with both the app and the website is extremely positive!How the Lean prover community uses Zulip ↗