The organized, open-source
Slack alternative
Organized team chat that makes your team more productive.
The organized, open-source
Will my team actually work better?
- No missed messages: topics keep conversations separate, so nothing important scrolls past unnoticed.
- Skip what you don't need: every conversation is labeled, so catching up doesn't mean reading everything.
- Async first: a reply lands in its conversation, not mixed into unrelated messages or buried in a side thread.
- Find the full conversation, years later: search takes you to the whole discussion, not one message mixed in with other conversations.
Is it easy to adopt and here to stay?
- Import your existing Slack workspace, and keep your Slack integrations running.
- Zulip Cloud works just like Slack does: sign up and go. Self-hosting is available if you need it.
- 100% open-source software, stewarded by the nonprofit Zulip Foundation.
- Your data is yours, with full export anytime.
Wikimedia, the Rust programming language, the Technical University of Munich, and thousands of other organizations run on Zulip.
Organized conversations, not tangled channels
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In Slack, discussions are jumbled together in the channel, or tucked away in threads that are easy to miss.
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In Zulip, topics create a separate space for each conversation, so discussions never get in each other's way, and a busy channel stays easy to follow.
In fact now it seems strange to me to just fire off messages in Slack with no subject – that's chaos, madness. The genius of subject lines is that you can quickly and easily catch up on the messages you missed in your off-hours... This feature alone saves me hours a week.
Built for asynchronous work
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Slack rewards being online all the time. After a day away, catching up means reading every conversation in a channel, message by message, to find the ones that matter.
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In Zulip, topics tell you what each conversation is about before you read a word, so catching up means choosing which conversations to read, not reading all of them.
Zulip's unique threading saves me well over an hour a day in working with our distributed team of engineers and PMs across 7+ time zones. We tried Slack, Mattermost, and other team chat products that claim to support threading, and nothing handles synchronous and asynchronous communication so intuitively.
Find the full conversation, years later
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In Slack, finding an old discussion means searching for a keyword, landing on one message, and scrolling to piece the rest together.
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In Zulip, search takes you to the whole conversation, kept together under its topic, so there's nothing to piece together.
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Slack's free plan hides messages after 90 days and deletes them after a year. Zulip Cloud Free shows your 10,000 most recent messages, and older ones are kept and reappear when you upgrade.
Coupled with a culture of using Zulip in an organized way, it's difficult to overstate the impact it has on knowledge management... It is the essence of good UX design.
Open source, and your data is yours
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Zulip is 100% open-source software (Apache 2.0), with no "open core" catch, stewarded by the nonprofit Zulip Foundation. A paid team provides leadership, expertise, and support for the open-source community.
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Zulip Cloud works just like Slack does: sign up and go. Organizations with special requirements can also self-host the same software.
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Move your data with our high quality export and import tools; you are never locked into a proprietary tool.
Moving from Slack is easy
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Import your existing organization from Slack, including message history, users, channels, and custom emoji. There's a step-by-step guide for the whole process.
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Slack integrations can post to Zulip via the Slack-compatible webhook, and Zulip provides 130+ integrations including for GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, Sentry, and Zapier.
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If you have any questions, please contact us at sales@zulip.com, or drop by our friendly development community at chat.zulip.org to ask for help or suggest improvements!
We switched to Zulip after trying pretty much every chat app out there. And it's been amazing. The threading-by-topic system is genius. It keeps every conversation in its lane and makes catching up effortless.
Slack
Slack is a feed you keep up with.
Zulip is a set of conversations you come back to.
Here's how that plays out, feature by feature.
| Slack | Zulip | |
|---|---|---|
| Organizing conversations | Messages pile up in the channel. Threads hang off a single message and stay hidden from the channel, so anyone not already in them misses what's said. | Each channel is split into topics, and every message belongs to one. New conversations are visible to everyone in the channel, not tucked away. |
| Catching up after time away | Scroll through each channel, then mark it as read. | See a list of conversations with unread messages, and read only the ones you need. |
| Message history | The free plan hides messages after 90 days and deletes them after a year. | Zulip never deletes your messages, on any plan. Zulip Cloud Free shows your 10,000 most recent messages. Older ones reappear when you upgrade. |
| Search results | Take you to a message in the channel, among whatever else was being discussed at the time. | Take you to a message in its topic, with the whole conversation already around it. |
| Pricing | Free plan with the 90-day limit; paid plans priced per user | Free and sponsored plans; $6.67/user/month (billed annually) for unlimited history — see plans. |
| Hosting | Cloud only | Cloud or self-hosted |
| Source code | Proprietary | 100% open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Data export | Admins can export data, but what's included depends on your plan. | Export everything at any time. |
| Nonprofits, education, open source | Discount program | Free Cloud Standard for eligible organizations. |
| Apps and integrations | A large app directory. | 130+ integrations. The Slack-compatible webhook, Zapier, and the API connect the rest. |
| Calls | Built-in huddles for audio and video calls. | Start a video or voice call in one click with Jitsi Meet or Zoom. Self-hosted servers can also use BigBlueButton, Webex, Nextcloud Talk, and more. |
Teams that switched from Slack
Slack's interface was too slow and clunky, and the more channels you're in, the harder it is to use. Zulip's UI makes it easy to access all the information you need.
Jon Jensen, CTO of End Point Dev
I don't like going back to Slack now. It's just not as efficient a way to organize communication.
James van Lommel, Director of Engineering at Semsee
I love the application, and couldn't dream of going back to anything else. Slack and Discord just pale in comparison.
Nathan Kaplan, Head of Global Launch Operations at WindBorne