Zulip


Zulip is an open source chat and collaborative software created by Jessica McKellar and Tim Abbott in 2012.

History

Zulip was originally developed as proprietary software by a startup called Zulip, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, while in private beta, the company was acquired by Dropbox. In September 2015, Dropbox open-sourced it under the Apache License. Today, it is a leading open source alternative to Slack, with over 34,000 commits contributed by 550 people.

Overview

In Zulip, communication occurs in streams. Each stream can have several topics - Zulip features a unique threading model, in which each message also has a topic, along with the content. Zulip claims that this improves productivity by "making easy to catch up after a day of meetings". Apart from this, Zulip offers standard features found in collaboration apps like message reactions, message search history, polls, private messaging, group messaging etc. Zulip streams can be private or public - only people invited to a private stream can view messages in it, while anyone within an organization can join a public stream. Messages in Zulip can be sent in plain-text or formatted using markdown, along with images, links, and file attachments. Zulip also offers support for native integrations with hundreds of services, which can extend its functionality.

Official client apps

Apart from the web interface, Zulip officially supports three other clients, all of which are open sourced: