26 ms·

Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

501 points by tabbott 9y ago

pm 9y ago
How is threading done right exactly as compared to Slack (I don't use threading)?
- donaldguy 8y ago
  Very differently. Slack does threading on the basis of replies to a message and hides/collapses those under a thread, showing them only to people who expand and notifying only those who are already involved in the thread (by replying to it or being OP) Zulip's threading is based, more like email, on a Subject which all messages (can) have. Though Zulip subjects are more likely to be one or two words. In this way threading is tacked on to Slack whereas it is as at the heart of Zulip
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    Threading in email works via message-ids and references to preceding messages, nothing to do with subjects. That is, except as a workaround for garbage email clients and services too incompetent to use email correctly.
    - donaldguy 8y ago
      I mean, depends on your MUA in practice. I think by standard for server side threading— https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256 — "base subject" is definitely a valid consideration. I only skimmed though. :-) feel free to extract a spec, I'm curious (but not enough to read 19 pages right now)
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
        If I may quote: ORDEREDSUBJECT The ORDEREDSUBJECT threading algorithm is also referred to as "poor man's threading". The searched messages are sorted by In other words: as a workaround for garbage email clients and services too incompetent to use email correctly. Yes, the REFERENCES algorithm also uses the base subject--but never to override message-id based threading, only for merging together threads that couldn't be joined using message-ids ... or in other words: as a workaround for garbage email clients and services too incompetent to use email correctly. Well, and for merging together chunks of a thread where you have major gaps in your mailbox, so that reference headers don't overlap enough to make the connection, but the point remains that it's not really a threading mechanism, just a last-ditch attempt to recover a thread where proper threading information is missing, which is fine for corner cases like large gaps in which messages you have in your mailbox, and doesn't change that a sender that doesn't supply reference headers in the first place is incompetent.
- usr1106 8y ago
  In Slack threads are an annoyance. They lead to missed answers and discussions, because they are rarely used in average user groups. When they are they default to private only for the writer and appear out of the natural flow for the reader. In zulip every message belongs to a topic. (Well there is the "no topic" topic, but it shouldn't be used and even if it is it appears exactly like every other topic). So no surprises. I have used slack (and irc and xmpp) for a long time, and Zulip for 2 months. Zulip is certainly much better for the geek. Slack user experience is somewhat more straight forward for the naive user not caring about things done "right". For hacker news readers zulip is likely to be the preferred choice. Expect resistence from your non hacker news colleagues / managers / team members.
  - pm 8y ago
    Appreciate the explanation. Is threading such a big deal that people can't live without it? I honestly never found it useful.
    - geofft 8y ago
      In busy channels in medium-sized companies, lack of threading is a huge pain: person A says "Hi, I'm trying to do X, how do I do this," person B says "Hi, I'm getting error message Y" 2 minutes later, someone shows up 5 minutes later and says "Have you tried installing this thing" and they were talking to B about solving Y but A tries to install it and use it for X and then everyone is confused and wastes time. Slack is positioning itself as an email replacement, and to some extent all of these tools are replacing at least some email. Imagine taking 20% of your email and not having subject lines, just authors. What's the "LGTM" for? (Or worse, the sender anticipates that and says "Re @pm at 00:10, agreed" and then you get to track that down.) Or imagine taking your in-person conversations, the ones that you'd eventually want to move to IM to support distributed or remote teammates, and having a rule that you couldn't go up to someone's desk, instead every in-person conversation had to take place at this one water cooler. If multiple people wanted to talk, well, either they can have multiple conversations in front of each other, or they can wait until one conversation is done. (Slack's implementation of threading, meanwhile, doesn't actually solve the problem that well because of the way it pushes threaded conversations to a side. Imagine email without a reply-all button - it solves some problems and creates so many others. You can and should live without Slack threading.) ... also, another argument that threading matters: you're using a threaded forum right now. Remember phpBB? Would HN be improved by switching to a phpBB-style UI? If you unindented all the comments on this page and sorted them by time, would it be a workable experience?
dade_ 9y ago
Does it federate? Unified communications and collaboration have been going exactly backward the last 5 years.
- Phrodo_00 8y ago
  5 years? XMPP was almost 20 years ago.
kevml 9y ago
Threading done right or wrong in in slack doesn’t really matter. What matters is if your point gets across. Sometimes that’s fine via threads. Sometimes threads get in the way.
est 9y ago
need more screenshots. I want to see exactly where it have done right instead of downloading few megabytes of an electron app.
- donaldguy 8y ago
  You could alternatively OAuth sign up for the chat.zulip.org server used for project development and see the feature in action there (https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zulip-org.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zul... ) so long as you kept testing traffic to the `#test here` stream :-)
  - icc97 8y ago
    Minor niggle - but I don't understand you and the github readme point to readthedocs rather than just 'show me the money' of https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/ Perhaps you want to give more context, but I did nothing on the readthedocs page other than look for the link.
    - tabbott 8y ago
      We used to do that, but it turns out that having the Internet visit your chat community without any briefing isn't the best plan. Linking to the ReadTheDocs page has helped a lot in making sure people joining the community have some sense as to what to expect (e.g. that it's at times running a super beta version of Zulip, or that people are doing actual work, that we have a code of conduct, and you should send your test messages to #test here).
      - icc97 8y ago
        Ok, that does make sense.
- usr1106 8y ago
  You don't need an app. Use it in the browser. But you need a functioning team/community using it to see how it works. Mobile is different. From what I hear the Slack client is better/easier to use than the Zulip client. Haven't used either of them myself.
voidmain 9y ago
We used Zulip (then a commercial product) at FoundationDB, and really liked it. We had teams in two cities. The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about. But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen streams in more or less chronological order. It makes it much easier to keep up with what you care about asynchronously without throwing everything into a single stream. And therefore it is easier to put down, and to use notifications very selectively, which mitigates some of the major downsides of company chat. I haven't used Slack recently either, but as I understand it its "all unreads" feature is much clunkier. I haven't used a recent version, but I would definitely consider using it again.
- halestock 9y ago
  Off topic, but man I wish FoundationDB hadn't disappeared.
  - itp 8y ago
    (worked at FoundationDB) Me too. Back on topic, I really enjoyed Zulip as well. It wasn't perfect, but it very much did feel like they were actually getting the marriage of email and chat closer to right. Slack just feels like a shitty chat client that uses all of my RAM.
    - voidmain 8y ago
      Hey, we should get lunch some time!
  - voidmain 8y ago
    Your wish is granted! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395
- jsiepkes 8y ago
  Same here. We're a company with about 50 people and deal with a lot of operational chatter. The threading model of Zulip works really great for us. Before Zulip we used XMPP for a long time, then Mattermost for a short time (the threading model in mattermost didnt work at all for us), then moved to Zulip and never looked back. I definitely recommend Zulip.
sandGorgon 9y ago
Interestingly they do have a hosted option - https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/ It's very expensive compared to slack though. I thought it would be priced closer to the cheaper alternatives (around $2).
- tabbott 8y ago
  Read more closely -- it's actually the same price for each of "billed annually" and "billed monthly".
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    not sure what you mean - it is 8$ per active user per month or 80$ billed annually. The same as slack pricing. Microsoft teams is around 2$ per month (for the most basic Office 360 plan... else free). Hipchat is 2$ per month
btrautsc 9y ago
I was really interested in this. The first intriguing thing I found was this product is owned by Dropbox. Slack eating into Dropbox's territory with (decent) file sharing / searching and Dropbox countering with a alternative chat/ threading app is a nice battle.
- geofft 8y ago
  Formerly owned by Dropbox, as I understand it—see https://zulipchat.com/team/ https://zulipchat.com/team/
- rryan 8y ago
  Eh probably not, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014, long before Slack was popular.
ttoinou 9y ago
Does anyone know a slack-like cloud app but with project management features ?
- donaldguy 8y ago
  Perhaps https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ ?
  - ttoinou 8y ago
    Thanks but doesn't look like it has a team chat
    - donaldguy 8y ago
      It has @mentions, notifications, and the ability to have some Google-Docs style inline comment threads, so depending on the use case I'm not sure you'd totally miss it Otherwise perhaps phacility-hosted (so cloud) Phabricator, wherein it is mostly (a less unified UI) project management system but has the realtime chat component available in https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/conpherence/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/conpherence/
- sorich87 8y ago
  I'm working on one https://www.frontseat.pro https://www.frontseat.pro. It's still in beta. It would be great to read your feedback.
jaynagpaul 8y ago
Another threaded slack alternative I've found enjoyable is Spectrum. (https://spectrum.chat https://spectrum.chat) They've recently open sourced as well, (https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum). Their design is appealing, and I can see a lot of work being done on the platform. Not affiliated or anything, just a fan. P.S: I'm trying to create a community for "Bored Hackers", and you can check it out here and say hi! (https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers)
- fiatjaf 8y ago
  I like Spectrum. It's just a forum.
donaldguy 8y ago
I feel like a little background would help this thread. I vaguely know/knew some of the founders, but am not really in touch anymore Zulip was started as, and basically still was last I used it, a modernization/web-ification of the BarnOwl[1] curses/terminal client for, mostly, MIT's (and CMU's, inter alia [2]) legacy Zephyr[3] IM protocol. (though BarnOwl also has support for XMPP, IRC, AIM, and Twitter). MIT students who were into the zephyr community also tended to like the interleaved-thread with option to narrow to specific filters view. The Subject part of threading comes as largely an accident of Zephyr's implementation[4] Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-s... and subsequently open sourced in 2015. Zulipchat.com is a second company formed around Zulip by (OP) one of the original founding members of the pre-acquisition company to (I'm speculating) keep the project healthy and active and give people a hosted option. It is not primarily aggressively pursuing market share, capitalization, etc. That is why it doesn't like price aggressively to compete with Slack, etc. as someone EIT was confused about I took the time to spin this out from memory, etc. but then I found it was mostly covered (or if you prefer corroborated) here: https://zulipchat.com/history/ https://zulipchat.com/history/ Anyway its a good model for organized communications once you get used to it and I'd recommend it if you are in a small enough company/team with enough latitude to experiment with such. It would also be cool to see a decent large public instance as an alternative to ~Mastadon [1] https://barnowl.mit.edu/ https://barnowl.mit.edu/ [2] https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-messaging-system-is-deployed https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-messa...) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol) [4] https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node20.html https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node...
rryan 8y ago
They offer free hosting for open source projects. It has been really great for Mixxx (floss DJ software), allowing our ~10 person distributed dev team to work together much more effectively.
- SXX 8y ago
  That one is interesting. Any major downsides / upsides compared to slack other than limits?
  - rryan 8y ago
    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 or run out money and shut down. Slack's threading model is much worse than Zephyr/Zulip's IMO. Especially on mobile. The streams/topics flow in the "all conversations" view is an incredibly intuitive way to keep track of everything that is going on.
fiatjaf 8y ago
> The project survived my becoming a parent in December and taking 2 months off to bond with my baby daughter Lily. For me, it was a great stress test of Zulip’s catch-up experience; I was able to catch up on over 20,000 messages of chat history when I returned, following up on more than 100 conversations that needed my attention. So is that what you've supposed to do when you become a parent? Stop doing everything else for two months, than never look at your child again? (Not saying the person did this.)
- snowwindwaves 8y ago
  I think people normally take some time off work when they have a child. Does that seem strange to you?
  - fiatjaf 8y ago
    I asked first.
    - dsr_ 8y ago
      Explaining my downvote here: this doesn't add anything valuable to the conversation. Either you have a defensible point or you don't; this sort of behavior suggests that you are more interested in having an argument than a discussion.
      - fiatjaf 8y ago
        Yes, but only because the previous commenter had that position also, by asking me the stuff he did. I hope you have downvoted him also.
- rkangel 8y ago
  > than never look at your child again On what basis do you even suggest that that's what happened? They say that they took 2 months off after the birth of their child (which seems reasonable) and then had to catch up on their messaging when they got back.
nqzero 8y ago
is there a public server we can join to try this out ? eg, my mattermost clone is https://mm.nqzero.com https://mm.nqzero.com just use a fake email (it's unused) and try it out. every time there's an announcement in this space i go to the landing page and am disappointed that trying out the product appears to be semi painful
- kawera 8y ago
  You can login using OAuth on this server: https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/
zestyping 8y ago
It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model." The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.
- suyash 8y ago
  I was trying to learn about it as well but gave up because how bad the homepage is, no relevant information or screenshots. I'm sticking with Slack.
  - rishig 8y ago
    Thanks for the feedback suyash. We're working on landing pages; weren't expecting a hacker news launch today :).
- tabbott 8y ago
  We're definitely planning to provide a slick explanation on zulipchat.com. Using chat.zulip.org is helpful, especially if you visit a day later and read the message history; since you really only experience Zulip's magic properly when catching up on a bunch of unread messages (the `n` hotkey in particular is super great). That said, https://zulipchat.com/features https://zulipchat.com/features has a screenshot; and https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 does a pretty good job of explaining the concept. And https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip explains some of how Zulip's model can make a big difference in how an organization communicates. (I'm the Zulip project leader and wrote the blog post)
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    That one single screenshot shows... a chat I presume? Which looks marginally worse than Slack. I couldn't care less for any other links, because they: are on some other sites that you assume are discoverable by magic. Now imagine a person who has used Slack, and has never seen your app in their life. They arrive at your landing page. What are the incentives for such a person to download the app? Generic marketing-speak?
SEJeff 8y ago
Really fantastic (and simple) overview of zulip from Julia Evans aka b0rk: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985
the_duke 8y ago
How does Zulip compare to Mattermost? Anyone got experience with both?
- ptman 8y ago
  Mattermost is open core. Seems zulip might be as well, but the open source version seems more featureful
  - tabbott 8y ago
    Zulip is 100% open source; we're not playing the "open core" game that Mattermost is.
  - rishig 8y ago
    Zulip is fully FOSS. The project makes money from hosting and enterprise support.
cygned 8y ago
Too bad the installation requires a dedicated Ubuntu machine. I was hoping that I could deploy it with little effort on my k8s cluster to try it out.
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  What is stopping you from running it in k8s? Don't you just need to create a docker file based on the Ubuntu docker image, plus whatever installation steps zulip requires? EDIT: There seem to be some folks who have done that already: https://github.com/galexrt/docker-zulip/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/galexrt/docker-zulip/blob/master/README.m...
tills13 8y ago
What an awful name
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hota_mazi 8y ago
Not a single screen shot of that threading feature?
merinowool 8y ago
Is it compliant with GDPR - for example can admin delete all user data at request?
- pknopf 8y ago
  Are companies required to delete employee records?
  - egeozcan 8y ago
    I can't answer your question but I'd like to note that users are not always employees.
    - pknopf 8y ago
      Yeah, well, even if it is an open source project, what about git? You can't remove an arbitrary commit in the tree. I'd argue discussions about code follow under the same umbrella. I really thing people are taking this GDPR thing WAY too seriously. They are really only going after the obvious abusers, IMO.
  - zerkten 8y ago
    They can be.
    - pknopf 8y ago
      I doubt it. I've read the 66 page standard and I remember something about "records required for business", ie transactions, tax info, etc. I'd argue employee conversations would fall under the same umbrella.
- rishig 8y ago
  yes, the server admin can.
cryptos 8y ago
Is there a business model behind Zulip? If so, what is the business model?
- rishig 8y ago
  Hosting and enterprise support: https://zulipchat.com/plans https://zulipchat.com/plans
haffla 8y ago
Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent users. I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything. Does anyone know about any hard limits with either Zulip or Rocket.Chat?
- eksmast 8y ago
  If you care to login, there is a thread on zulip here https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scaling/near/360250 https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scal... regarding scaling. Relevant info- Zulip is designed for ~15k users with real-world tests of 3k users. Not sure about concurrent users.
  - haffla 8y ago
    Interesting thread, thanks
  - johnx123-up 8y ago
    Just curious, is there any integration with Restyaboard?
- web007 8y ago
  We tried RocketChat for about a day before switching to Mattermost. It wasn't great, but worked okay for a team of 20-30. After a month or so of mumbling and grumbling on MM we went to Zulip, and brought on another dozen or so designers and PMs. Zulip lasted about 6 months before management implemented Slack company-wide and rolled out for the other 100 sales and support teams. Zulip was the best for engineering, by far, but it was doomed from the start because the UX wasn't as simplified and polished as Slack. It didn't Just Work, you had to think and use it properly to see the benefits. Back to your question: no limits I know of, and a t2.medium was 90% idle for an active team up to ~50 without a hitch. I think the docs (or launch announcement?) mentioned a large deployment around 1k, but I can't remember the details. You'll definitely want to test your expected configs and hardware to be confident.
SXX 8y ago
If someone tried to do it how easy is it to add to Zulip login with 3rd-party SSO server like Discourse? Want to find alternative to Slack for open source project since restricting they apply getting annoying and it's would be nice to have single point of registration after all.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Zulip uses python-social-auth for some other backends, so for the more general version of your question about doing some other third-party auth, the answer is not super hard. That said, it looks like python-social-auth doesn't have a backend for Discourse: https://python-social-auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/index.html https://python-social-auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends.... It's also probably not super hard to just add a direct authentication backend for Discourse.
  - SXX 8y ago
    Thanks for information. Seems like I should be able to do it. Though if we want to have little customization like that does it mean we'll absolutely need to host it on our servers or something like that possible on hosted plan? PS: Obviously I get that If I manage to push code upstream hosted option will support it, but I suppose it's might take a while.
    - tabbott 8y ago
      Once something is merged to master in zulip.git, it's usually on zulipchat.com production within a few days. So if you do it in a way that gets merged (which requires, e.g., automated tests appropriate for an authentication backend) and is configurable for just one organization in a multi-organization server, you would not need to host your own servers.
zingmars 8y ago
I love Zulip. I really wish other IM clients implemented functionality similar to Zulip's threading. It allows for easily filtering converstations and makes reading history that much easier. That said, what Zulip lacks right now is polish. Server installation for example is a mess. You basically need a dedicated Debian machine to install it. There is a docker image that I'm using, but it's rather unstable (if I will have to make changes to the configuration, I fear I will have to spend hours trying to fix it). You also NEED to have a SSL certificate which means that testing in a local network isn't as painless as simply installing the server. There's also problems with the search function (it barely works), lacks things like archiving topics (or hiding them), enabling app notifications using their Google Play App requires you to send them an email and a few other things. Their apps also feel sluggish. They have an old Cordova app that is slowly losing compatibility with the server and a new app that is fairly slow. The desktop app is an electron app and it also has some issues. Thankfully issue reporting is fairly painless.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I agree with some of these complaints (e.g. I very much wanted to fix the push notification registration process in this release), but I'd like to clarify a few things: * Needing an SSL certificate should not really be a barrier. We now have an installer option to use Certbot which works great if you're on the public Internet, and if you're not, we have simple instructions for creating a self-signed certificate. * Zulip has never had a Cordova app. I assume you're referring to the [legacy Android app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.andr...), which was written in Java (and is deprecated in favor of [an RN app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobile&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobil...) which lets us share most of the hard work of mobile development between Android and iOS). * I'm surprised by your comment about search; we often hear from users that they love Zulip's search. Can you open an issue with more details about what you're seeing? I'm wondering if e.g. search is broken in the Docker image. As a sidenote, for the Electron desktop app in particular, all the performance issues that we could reproduce went away with the latest update (not because we changed something in our code, but because we upgraded Electron which had upgraded Chromium to a newer version with fewer performance bugs). If you're still seeing issues with app version 1.9.0, I'd love to see a profile captured from the app's developer tools.
stevenicr 8y ago
moderators? admin panel? banning users via subnet, hostname, cidr? These are the things I need in a chat replacement. I've discussed possibly funding these things for riot / matrix not sure I can afford it, but I know I can't afford not to have these kinds of options in a public chat system. looking at the features, I'd need a way to have the server download any images / attachments, check for viruses, strip any exif data, before showing preview to the room. (evil actors host an image on their server, post it to the room, and bam they have everyone in the room's ip addy, at that point everyone's router had better be updated. Looks interesting, and I am looking to replace a java / flash chat system from a decade ago that is yet to be beat sadly.
- zerkten 8y ago
  This is designed to be run inside an organisation with some degree more trust than what you have in your situation. You should submit some feature requests (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues) for these things because they do come up in some business scenarios (e.g. a way to plug-in virus scanning.)
ciupicri 8y ago
The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what other software is required, e.g. for the database, how Zulip uses it, what libraries or other kind of dependencies it has, etc. [1]: http://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.html http://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.htm...
- fipple 8y ago
  This comment is a great illustration of why companies and investors prefer software as a service business models wherever possible.
  - andybak 8y ago
    When there are so many options for one-click repeatable deployments of complex stacks that strikes me as an overreaction. I recently had to test a complex Django-based Document Management System: https://www.mayan-edms.com/ https://www.mayan-edms.com/ The install was a breeze. Even with very little experience with Docker it took me a matter of minutes to fire up a Digital Ocean droplet, paste in a few commands and have a fully working install. Every open source web app should have some equivalent that is as simple as this.
    - ciupicri 8y ago
      The install was a breeze because you practically installed a self contained black box. What if you wanted to use Apache instead of nginx or a custom compiled Python interpreter or PyPy?
      - detaro 8y ago
        Then you go to documentation for a more manual installation and adjust it to your tastes.
hailk 8y ago
> Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software Claims like these are really off-putting. Is it done for SEO purposes?
jlebrech 8y ago
we use it. it's ok
Dowwie 8y ago
Zulip is yet another Python success story!
needle0 8y ago
When viewing the page on a Japanese Mac, the letter sequence "am" within "Open source team chat" is incorrectly displayed as a single-character "A.M." symbol. It appears the CSS is specifying "'dlig' 1" for the H tags - 'dlig' stands for Discretionary Ligatures, which triggers all sorts of weird inadvertent ligatures and should be used, as its name shows, with discretion. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0
skrowl 8y ago
I know it's marketed to gamers, but if you're looking for a free Slack alternative check out discordapp.com. It's pretty great. It supports bots, so you can easily integrate your git / trello / etc.
- SXX 8y ago
  Problem with Discord is that unlike project targeted to corporate customers it's might break APIs hard or change UI without notice or enforce whatever weird rule they desire. Also they burning VC money and don't yet have proven business model so investing time in adopting it for non-gaming seems like strange decision.
  - degenerate 8y ago
    Agree, they are throwing piles and piles of money into their cloud costs, and now they have implemented screen sharing too... a much requested feature to put them in a Skype-kill positon. The free money is going to dry up eventually, and how they lock it down and pivot to start making money is still unknown.
soneca 8y ago
It is not "Free", it is freemium. Zulip On Cloud is the exact same freemium model and pricing of Slack. Zulip On-Premise also is freemium (Enterprise plan do not show the price). https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/
- blocked_again 8y ago
  You can download Zulip and host for free on your own server. That's what the blog post is mostly about. Zulip cloud is also Free with no limits for open source projects.
- olalonde 8y ago
  It's open source (Apache License 2.0): https://github.com/zulip/zulip/ https://github.com/zulip/zulip/
- markc 8y ago
  >On-Premise Ugh, NO! It's Premises. Get it right, Zulip! (and the countless people who screw this up every day.)
zerkten 8y ago
How frequent and painful are Zulip upgrades? This is one of the reasons folks like SaaS for communications tools which always seem to be changing.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Having your team's core communication tool go down and be hard to bring back up can be quite painful. So as a project, we put a lot of effort into release management to minimize the risk of that happening. I personally postmortem every report of an error when upgrading. As a result, for most folks, installing a security/bugfix release Just Works with a few seconds of downtime. For a release like this one with 3000+ commits, dozens of database migrations, and tons of new features, our largest sites found it Just Worked with about a minute of downtime while the database migrations were running. If you really care about availability like we do with zulipchat.com, it's possible to have downtime be seconds even with the database migrations, but that requires a bit more expertise on how Zulip works than we think it's fair to expect server administrators to learn, so we don't recommend that to most folks. So the main downside in this space of self-hosting is that zulipchat.com runs very close to master, which in practice means you'll get new features on zulipchat.com first (though folks running their own server can always upgrade; you just end up on the hook for the work). On the flipside, self-hosting is better for i18n (since our volunteer translators generally make sure languages get to 100% around a release, but new strings may not get translated for weeks after the code gets into production on zulipchat.com).
Bromskloss 8y ago
How does it compare to Matrix, Rocket.chat, or Mattermost? Are there others I should know about?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

501 points by tabbott 9y ago

pm 9y ago

How is threading done right exactly as compared to Slack (I don't use threading)?

donaldguy 8y ago
Very differently. Slack does threading on the basis of replies to a message and hides/collapses those under a thread, showing them only to people who expand and notifying only those who are already involved in the thread (by replying to it or being OP) Zulip's threading is based, more like email, on a Subject which all messages (can) have. Though Zulip subjects are more likely to be one or two words. In this way threading is tacked on to Slack whereas it is as at the heart of Zulip
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  Threading in email works via message-ids and references to preceding messages, nothing to do with subjects. That is, except as a workaround for garbage email clients and services too incompetent to use email correctly.
  - donaldguy 8y ago
    I mean, depends on your MUA in practice. I think by standard for server side threading— https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256 — "base subject" is definitely a valid consideration. I only skimmed though. :-) feel free to extract a spec, I'm curious (but not enough to read 19 pages right now)
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      If I may quote: ORDEREDSUBJECT The ORDEREDSUBJECT threading algorithm is also referred to as "poor man's threading". The searched messages are sorted by In other words: as a workaround for garbage email clients and services too incompetent to use email correctly. Yes, the REFERENCES algorithm also uses the base subject--but never to override message-id based threading, only for merging together threads that couldn't be joined using message-ids ... or in other words: as a workaround for garbage email clients and services too incompetent to use email correctly. Well, and for merging together chunks of a thread where you have major gaps in your mailbox, so that reference headers don't overlap enough to make the connection, but the point remains that it's not really a threading mechanism, just a last-ditch attempt to recover a thread where proper threading information is missing, which is fine for corner cases like large gaps in which messages you have in your mailbox, and doesn't change that a sender that doesn't supply reference headers in the first place is incompetent.
usr1106 8y ago
In Slack threads are an annoyance. They lead to missed answers and discussions, because they are rarely used in average user groups. When they are they default to private only for the writer and appear out of the natural flow for the reader. In zulip every message belongs to a topic. (Well there is the "no topic" topic, but it shouldn't be used and even if it is it appears exactly like every other topic). So no surprises. I have used slack (and irc and xmpp) for a long time, and Zulip for 2 months. Zulip is certainly much better for the geek. Slack user experience is somewhat more straight forward for the naive user not caring about things done "right". For hacker news readers zulip is likely to be the preferred choice. Expect resistence from your non hacker news colleagues / managers / team members.
- pm 8y ago
  Appreciate the explanation. Is threading such a big deal that people can't live without it? I honestly never found it useful.
  - geofft 8y ago
    In busy channels in medium-sized companies, lack of threading is a huge pain: person A says "Hi, I'm trying to do X, how do I do this," person B says "Hi, I'm getting error message Y" 2 minutes later, someone shows up 5 minutes later and says "Have you tried installing this thing" and they were talking to B about solving Y but A tries to install it and use it for X and then everyone is confused and wastes time. Slack is positioning itself as an email replacement, and to some extent all of these tools are replacing at least some email. Imagine taking 20% of your email and not having subject lines, just authors. What's the "LGTM" for? (Or worse, the sender anticipates that and says "Re @pm at 00:10, agreed" and then you get to track that down.) Or imagine taking your in-person conversations, the ones that you'd eventually want to move to IM to support distributed or remote teammates, and having a rule that you couldn't go up to someone's desk, instead every in-person conversation had to take place at this one water cooler. If multiple people wanted to talk, well, either they can have multiple conversations in front of each other, or they can wait until one conversation is done. (Slack's implementation of threading, meanwhile, doesn't actually solve the problem that well because of the way it pushes threaded conversations to a side. Imagine email without a reply-all button - it solves some problems and creates so many others. You can and should live without Slack threading.) ... also, another argument that threading matters: you're using a threaded forum right now. Remember phpBB? Would HN be improved by switching to a phpBB-style UI? If you unindented all the comments on this page and sorted them by time, would it be a workable experience?

dade_ 9y ago

Does it federate? Unified communications and collaboration have been going exactly backward the last 5 years.

Phrodo_00 8y ago
5 years? XMPP was almost 20 years ago.

kevml 9y ago

Threading done right or wrong in in slack doesn’t really matter. What matters is if your point gets across. Sometimes that’s fine via threads. Sometimes threads get in the way.

est 9y ago

need more screenshots. I want to see exactly where it have done right instead of downloading few megabytes of an electron app.

donaldguy 8y ago
You could alternatively OAuth sign up for the chat.zulip.org server used for project development and see the feature in action there (https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zulip-org.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zul... ) so long as you kept testing traffic to the `#test here` stream :-)
- icc97 8y ago
  Minor niggle - but I don't understand you and the github readme point to readthedocs rather than just 'show me the money' of https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/ Perhaps you want to give more context, but I did nothing on the readthedocs page other than look for the link.
  - tabbott 8y ago
    We used to do that, but it turns out that having the Internet visit your chat community without any briefing isn't the best plan. Linking to the ReadTheDocs page has helped a lot in making sure people joining the community have some sense as to what to expect (e.g. that it's at times running a super beta version of Zulip, or that people are doing actual work, that we have a code of conduct, and you should send your test messages to #test here).
    - icc97 8y ago
      Ok, that does make sense.
usr1106 8y ago
You don't need an app. Use it in the browser. But you need a functioning team/community using it to see how it works. Mobile is different. From what I hear the Slack client is better/easier to use than the Zulip client. Haven't used either of them myself.

voidmain 9y ago

We used Zulip (then a commercial product) at FoundationDB, and really liked it. We had teams in two cities. The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about. But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen streams in more or less chronological order. It makes it much easier to keep up with what you care about asynchronously without throwing everything into a single stream. And therefore it is easier to put down, and to use notifications very selectively, which mitigates some of the major downsides of company chat. I haven't used Slack recently either, but as I understand it its "all unreads" feature is much clunkier. I haven't used a recent version, but I would definitely consider using it again.

halestock 9y ago
Off topic, but man I wish FoundationDB hadn't disappeared.
- itp 8y ago
  (worked at FoundationDB) Me too. Back on topic, I really enjoyed Zulip as well. It wasn't perfect, but it very much did feel like they were actually getting the marriage of email and chat closer to right. Slack just feels like a shitty chat client that uses all of my RAM.
  - voidmain 8y ago
    Hey, we should get lunch some time!
- voidmain 8y ago
  Your wish is granted! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395
jsiepkes 8y ago
Same here. We're a company with about 50 people and deal with a lot of operational chatter. The threading model of Zulip works really great for us. Before Zulip we used XMPP for a long time, then Mattermost for a short time (the threading model in mattermost didnt work at all for us), then moved to Zulip and never looked back. I definitely recommend Zulip.

sandGorgon 9y ago

Interestingly they do have a hosted option - https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/ It's very expensive compared to slack though. I thought it would be priced closer to the cheaper alternatives (around $2).

tabbott 8y ago
Read more closely -- it's actually the same price for each of "billed annually" and "billed monthly".
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  not sure what you mean - it is 8$ per active user per month or 80$ billed annually. The same as slack pricing. Microsoft teams is around 2$ per month (for the most basic Office 360 plan... else free). Hipchat is 2$ per month

btrautsc 9y ago

I was really interested in this. The first intriguing thing I found was this product is owned by Dropbox. Slack eating into Dropbox's territory with (decent) file sharing / searching and Dropbox countering with a alternative chat/ threading app is a nice battle.

geofft 8y ago
Formerly owned by Dropbox, as I understand it—see https://zulipchat.com/team/ https://zulipchat.com/team/
rryan 8y ago
Eh probably not, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014, long before Slack was popular.

ttoinou 9y ago

Does anyone know a slack-like cloud app but with project management features ?

donaldguy 8y ago
Perhaps https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ ?
- ttoinou 8y ago
  Thanks but doesn't look like it has a team chat
  - donaldguy 8y ago
    It has @mentions, notifications, and the ability to have some Google-Docs style inline comment threads, so depending on the use case I'm not sure you'd totally miss it Otherwise perhaps phacility-hosted (so cloud) Phabricator, wherein it is mostly (a less unified UI) project management system but has the realtime chat component available in https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/conpherence/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/conpherence/
sorich87 8y ago
I'm working on one https://www.frontseat.pro https://www.frontseat.pro. It's still in beta. It would be great to read your feedback.

jaynagpaul 8y ago

Another threaded slack alternative I've found enjoyable is Spectrum. (https://spectrum.chat https://spectrum.chat) They've recently open sourced as well, (https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum). Their design is appealing, and I can see a lot of work being done on the platform. Not affiliated or anything, just a fan. P.S: I'm trying to create a community for "Bored Hackers", and you can check it out here and say hi! (https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers)

fiatjaf 8y ago
I like Spectrum. It's just a forum.

donaldguy 8y ago

I feel like a little background would help this thread. I vaguely know/knew some of the founders, but am not really in touch anymore Zulip was started as, and basically still was last I used it, a modernization/web-ification of the BarnOwl[1] curses/terminal client for, mostly, MIT's (and CMU's, inter alia [2]) legacy Zephyr[3] IM protocol. (though BarnOwl also has support for XMPP, IRC, AIM, and Twitter). MIT students who were into the zephyr community also tended to like the interleaved-thread with option to narrow to specific filters view. The Subject part of threading comes as largely an accident of Zephyr's implementation[4] Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-s... and subsequently open sourced in 2015. Zulipchat.com is a second company formed around Zulip by (OP) one of the original founding members of the pre-acquisition company to (I'm speculating) keep the project healthy and active and give people a hosted option. It is not primarily aggressively pursuing market share, capitalization, etc. That is why it doesn't like price aggressively to compete with Slack, etc. as someone EIT was confused about I took the time to spin this out from memory, etc. but then I found it was mostly covered (or if you prefer corroborated) here: https://zulipchat.com/history/ https://zulipchat.com/history/ Anyway its a good model for organized communications once you get used to it and I'd recommend it if you are in a small enough company/team with enough latitude to experiment with such. It would also be cool to see a decent large public instance as an alternative to ~Mastadon [1] https://barnowl.mit.edu/ https://barnowl.mit.edu/ [2] https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-messaging-system-is-deployed https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-messa...) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol) [4] https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node20.html https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node...

rryan 8y ago

They offer free hosting for open source projects. It has been really great for Mixxx (floss DJ software), allowing our ~10 person distributed dev team to work together much more effectively.

SXX 8y ago
That one is interesting. Any major downsides / upsides compared to slack other than limits?
- rryan 8y ago
  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 or run out money and shut down. Slack's threading model is much worse than Zephyr/Zulip's IMO. Especially on mobile. The streams/topics flow in the "all conversations" view is an incredibly intuitive way to keep track of everything that is going on.

fiatjaf 8y ago

> The project survived my becoming a parent in December and taking 2 months off to bond with my baby daughter Lily. For me, it was a great stress test of Zulip’s catch-up experience; I was able to catch up on over 20,000 messages of chat history when I returned, following up on more than 100 conversations that needed my attention. So is that what you've supposed to do when you become a parent? Stop doing everything else for two months, than never look at your child again? (Not saying the person did this.)

snowwindwaves 8y ago
I think people normally take some time off work when they have a child. Does that seem strange to you?
- fiatjaf 8y ago
  I asked first.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    Explaining my downvote here: this doesn't add anything valuable to the conversation. Either you have a defensible point or you don't; this sort of behavior suggests that you are more interested in having an argument than a discussion.
    - fiatjaf 8y ago
      Yes, but only because the previous commenter had that position also, by asking me the stuff he did. I hope you have downvoted him also.
rkangel 8y ago
> than never look at your child again On what basis do you even suggest that that's what happened? They say that they took 2 months off after the birth of their child (which seems reasonable) and then had to catch up on their messaging when they got back.

nqzero 8y ago

is there a public server we can join to try this out ? eg, my mattermost clone is https://mm.nqzero.com https://mm.nqzero.com just use a fake email (it's unused) and try it out. every time there's an announcement in this space i go to the landing page and am disappointed that trying out the product appears to be semi painful

kawera 8y ago
You can login using OAuth on this server: https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/

zestyping 8y ago

It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model." The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.

suyash 8y ago
I was trying to learn about it as well but gave up because how bad the homepage is, no relevant information or screenshots. I'm sticking with Slack.
- rishig 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback suyash. We're working on landing pages; weren't expecting a hacker news launch today :).
tabbott 8y ago
We're definitely planning to provide a slick explanation on zulipchat.com. Using chat.zulip.org is helpful, especially if you visit a day later and read the message history; since you really only experience Zulip's magic properly when catching up on a bunch of unread messages (the `n` hotkey in particular is super great). That said, https://zulipchat.com/features https://zulipchat.com/features has a screenshot; and https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 does a pretty good job of explaining the concept. And https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip explains some of how Zulip's model can make a big difference in how an organization communicates. (I'm the Zulip project leader and wrote the blog post)
- dmitriid 8y ago
  That one single screenshot shows... a chat I presume? Which looks marginally worse than Slack. I couldn't care less for any other links, because they: are on some other sites that you assume are discoverable by magic. Now imagine a person who has used Slack, and has never seen your app in their life. They arrive at your landing page. What are the incentives for such a person to download the app? Generic marketing-speak?

SEJeff 8y ago

Really fantastic (and simple) overview of zulip from Julia Evans aka b0rk: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985

the_duke 8y ago

How does Zulip compare to Mattermost? Anyone got experience with both?

ptman 8y ago
Mattermost is open core. Seems zulip might be as well, but the open source version seems more featureful
- tabbott 8y ago
  Zulip is 100% open source; we're not playing the "open core" game that Mattermost is.
- rishig 8y ago
  Zulip is fully FOSS. The project makes money from hosting and enterprise support.

cygned 8y ago

Too bad the installation requires a dedicated Ubuntu machine. I was hoping that I could deploy it with little effort on my k8s cluster to try it out.

rahimnathwani 8y ago
What is stopping you from running it in k8s? Don't you just need to create a docker file based on the Ubuntu docker image, plus whatever installation steps zulip requires? EDIT: There seem to be some folks who have done that already: https://github.com/galexrt/docker-zulip/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/galexrt/docker-zulip/blob/master/README.m...

tills13 8y ago

What an awful name

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hota_mazi 8y ago

Not a single screen shot of that threading feature?

merinowool 8y ago

Is it compliant with GDPR - for example can admin delete all user data at request?

pknopf 8y ago
Are companies required to delete employee records?
- egeozcan 8y ago
  I can't answer your question but I'd like to note that users are not always employees.
  - pknopf 8y ago
    Yeah, well, even if it is an open source project, what about git? You can't remove an arbitrary commit in the tree. I'd argue discussions about code follow under the same umbrella. I really thing people are taking this GDPR thing WAY too seriously. They are really only going after the obvious abusers, IMO.
- zerkten 8y ago
  They can be.
  - pknopf 8y ago
    I doubt it. I've read the 66 page standard and I remember something about "records required for business", ie transactions, tax info, etc. I'd argue employee conversations would fall under the same umbrella.
rishig 8y ago
yes, the server admin can.

cryptos 8y ago

Is there a business model behind Zulip? If so, what is the business model?

rishig 8y ago
Hosting and enterprise support: https://zulipchat.com/plans https://zulipchat.com/plans

haffla 8y ago

Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent users. I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything. Does anyone know about any hard limits with either Zulip or Rocket.Chat?

eksmast 8y ago
If you care to login, there is a thread on zulip here https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scaling/near/360250 https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scal... regarding scaling. Relevant info- Zulip is designed for ~15k users with real-world tests of 3k users. Not sure about concurrent users.
- haffla 8y ago
  Interesting thread, thanks
- johnx123-up 8y ago
  Just curious, is there any integration with Restyaboard?
web007 8y ago
We tried RocketChat for about a day before switching to Mattermost. It wasn't great, but worked okay for a team of 20-30. After a month or so of mumbling and grumbling on MM we went to Zulip, and brought on another dozen or so designers and PMs. Zulip lasted about 6 months before management implemented Slack company-wide and rolled out for the other 100 sales and support teams. Zulip was the best for engineering, by far, but it was doomed from the start because the UX wasn't as simplified and polished as Slack. It didn't Just Work, you had to think and use it properly to see the benefits. Back to your question: no limits I know of, and a t2.medium was 90% idle for an active team up to ~50 without a hitch. I think the docs (or launch announcement?) mentioned a large deployment around 1k, but I can't remember the details. You'll definitely want to test your expected configs and hardware to be confident.

SXX 8y ago

If someone tried to do it how easy is it to add to Zulip login with 3rd-party SSO server like Discourse? Want to find alternative to Slack for open source project since restricting they apply getting annoying and it's would be nice to have single point of registration after all.

tabbott 8y ago
Zulip uses python-social-auth for some other backends, so for the more general version of your question about doing some other third-party auth, the answer is not super hard. That said, it looks like python-social-auth doesn't have a backend for Discourse: https://python-social-auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/index.html https://python-social-auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends.... It's also probably not super hard to just add a direct authentication backend for Discourse.
- SXX 8y ago
  Thanks for information. Seems like I should be able to do it. Though if we want to have little customization like that does it mean we'll absolutely need to host it on our servers or something like that possible on hosted plan? PS: Obviously I get that If I manage to push code upstream hosted option will support it, but I suppose it's might take a while.
  - tabbott 8y ago
    Once something is merged to master in zulip.git, it's usually on zulipchat.com production within a few days. So if you do it in a way that gets merged (which requires, e.g., automated tests appropriate for an authentication backend) and is configurable for just one organization in a multi-organization server, you would not need to host your own servers.

zingmars 8y ago

I love Zulip. I really wish other IM clients implemented functionality similar to Zulip's threading. It allows for easily filtering converstations and makes reading history that much easier. That said, what Zulip lacks right now is polish. Server installation for example is a mess. You basically need a dedicated Debian machine to install it. There is a docker image that I'm using, but it's rather unstable (if I will have to make changes to the configuration, I fear I will have to spend hours trying to fix it). You also NEED to have a SSL certificate which means that testing in a local network isn't as painless as simply installing the server. There's also problems with the search function (it barely works), lacks things like archiving topics (or hiding them), enabling app notifications using their Google Play App requires you to send them an email and a few other things. Their apps also feel sluggish. They have an old Cordova app that is slowly losing compatibility with the server and a new app that is fairly slow. The desktop app is an electron app and it also has some issues. Thankfully issue reporting is fairly painless.

tabbott 8y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I agree with some of these complaints (e.g. I very much wanted to fix the push notification registration process in this release), but I'd like to clarify a few things: * Needing an SSL certificate should not really be a barrier. We now have an installer option to use Certbot which works great if you're on the public Internet, and if you're not, we have simple instructions for creating a self-signed certificate. * Zulip has never had a Cordova app. I assume you're referring to the [legacy Android app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.andr...), which was written in Java (and is deprecated in favor of [an RN app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobile&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobil...) which lets us share most of the hard work of mobile development between Android and iOS). * I'm surprised by your comment about search; we often hear from users that they love Zulip's search. Can you open an issue with more details about what you're seeing? I'm wondering if e.g. search is broken in the Docker image. As a sidenote, for the Electron desktop app in particular, all the performance issues that we could reproduce went away with the latest update (not because we changed something in our code, but because we upgraded Electron which had upgraded Chromium to a newer version with fewer performance bugs). If you're still seeing issues with app version 1.9.0, I'd love to see a profile captured from the app's developer tools.

stevenicr 8y ago

moderators? admin panel? banning users via subnet, hostname, cidr? These are the things I need in a chat replacement. I've discussed possibly funding these things for riot / matrix not sure I can afford it, but I know I can't afford not to have these kinds of options in a public chat system. looking at the features, I'd need a way to have the server download any images / attachments, check for viruses, strip any exif data, before showing preview to the room. (evil actors host an image on their server, post it to the room, and bam they have everyone in the room's ip addy, at that point everyone's router had better be updated. Looks interesting, and I am looking to replace a java / flash chat system from a decade ago that is yet to be beat sadly.

zerkten 8y ago
This is designed to be run inside an organisation with some degree more trust than what you have in your situation. You should submit some feature requests (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues) for these things because they do come up in some business scenarios (e.g. a way to plug-in virus scanning.)

ciupicri 8y ago

The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what other software is required, e.g. for the database, how Zulip uses it, what libraries or other kind of dependencies it has, etc. [1]: http://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.html http://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.htm...

fipple 8y ago
This comment is a great illustration of why companies and investors prefer software as a service business models wherever possible.
- andybak 8y ago
  When there are so many options for one-click repeatable deployments of complex stacks that strikes me as an overreaction. I recently had to test a complex Django-based Document Management System: https://www.mayan-edms.com/ https://www.mayan-edms.com/ The install was a breeze. Even with very little experience with Docker it took me a matter of minutes to fire up a Digital Ocean droplet, paste in a few commands and have a fully working install. Every open source web app should have some equivalent that is as simple as this.
  - ciupicri 8y ago
    The install was a breeze because you practically installed a self contained black box. What if you wanted to use Apache instead of nginx or a custom compiled Python interpreter or PyPy?
    - detaro 8y ago
      Then you go to documentation for a more manual installation and adjust it to your tastes.

hailk 8y ago

> Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software Claims like these are really off-putting. Is it done for SEO purposes?

jlebrech 8y ago

we use it. it's ok

Dowwie 8y ago

Zulip is yet another Python success story!

needle0 8y ago

When viewing the page on a Japanese Mac, the letter sequence "am" within "Open source team chat" is incorrectly displayed as a single-character "A.M." symbol. It appears the CSS is specifying "'dlig' 1" for the H tags - 'dlig' stands for Discretionary Ligatures, which triggers all sorts of weird inadvertent ligatures and should be used, as its name shows, with discretion. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0

skrowl 8y ago

I know it's marketed to gamers, but if you're looking for a free Slack alternative check out discordapp.com. It's pretty great. It supports bots, so you can easily integrate your git / trello / etc.

SXX 8y ago
Problem with Discord is that unlike project targeted to corporate customers it's might break APIs hard or change UI without notice or enforce whatever weird rule they desire. Also they burning VC money and don't yet have proven business model so investing time in adopting it for non-gaming seems like strange decision.
- degenerate 8y ago
  Agree, they are throwing piles and piles of money into their cloud costs, and now they have implemented screen sharing too... a much requested feature to put them in a Skype-kill positon. The free money is going to dry up eventually, and how they lock it down and pivot to start making money is still unknown.

soneca 8y ago

It is not "Free", it is freemium. Zulip On Cloud is the exact same freemium model and pricing of Slack. Zulip On-Premise also is freemium (Enterprise plan do not show the price). https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/

blocked_again 8y ago
You can download Zulip and host for free on your own server. That's what the blog post is mostly about. Zulip cloud is also Free with no limits for open source projects.
olalonde 8y ago
It's open source (Apache License 2.0): https://github.com/zulip/zulip/ https://github.com/zulip/zulip/
markc 8y ago
>On-Premise Ugh, NO! It's Premises. Get it right, Zulip! (and the countless people who screw this up every day.)

zerkten 8y ago

How frequent and painful are Zulip upgrades? This is one of the reasons folks like SaaS for communications tools which always seem to be changing.

tabbott 8y ago
Having your team's core communication tool go down and be hard to bring back up can be quite painful. So as a project, we put a lot of effort into release management to minimize the risk of that happening. I personally postmortem every report of an error when upgrading. As a result, for most folks, installing a security/bugfix release Just Works with a few seconds of downtime. For a release like this one with 3000+ commits, dozens of database migrations, and tons of new features, our largest sites found it Just Worked with about a minute of downtime while the database migrations were running. If you really care about availability like we do with zulipchat.com, it's possible to have downtime be seconds even with the database migrations, but that requires a bit more expertise on how Zulip works than we think it's fair to expect server administrators to learn, so we don't recommend that to most folks. So the main downside in this space of self-hosting is that zulipchat.com runs very close to master, which in practice means you'll get new features on zulipchat.com first (though folks running their own server can always upgrade; you just end up on the hook for the work). On the flipside, self-hosting is better for i18n (since our volunteer translators generally make sure languages get to 100% around a release, but new strings may not get translated for weeks after the code gets into production on zulipchat.com).

Bromskloss 8y ago

How does it compare to Matrix, Rocket.chat, or Mattermost? Are there others I should know about?

deleted 8y ago

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