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At my last company we had an open rebellion against using Zulip for at least two years, before the product team budgeted for slack enterprise and the engineerin

At my last company we had an open rebellion against using Zulip for at least two years, before the product team budgeted for slack enterprise and the engineering team switched to that for DMs, although formal communication still happened through zulip to appease our VP. The mac client was never fast, search was neigh impossible to use across 7 years of messages and there were frequent issues with client stability and drop outs. More than once I've seen someone "mark all messages as read" and cause the service to crash. "Is zulip down?" was a sort of running joke among the engineers. I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision.

Zigurd 5y ago
I used it for chat and automated notifications related to a git workflow, both the repos and chat were self-hosted. It was far less polished than Slack (and Slack was not that polished back then). But fine for that purpose. In less tech centric environments the rough edges are more bothersome.
serial_dev 5y ago
> I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision. This resonated with me, at my current company hundreds (maybe thousands, I don't know) of employees' daily chat goes through a self hosted RocketChat instance. For all I know, based on the performance, that server is running on the cheapest Raspberry Pi. Everyone on the team just kind of accepted that sometimes, you can't connect for minutes (sometimes hours), the search is slow and not very powerful, the features and integrations are lacking. It's so frustrating when you want to contact someone, you can't, because it won't load, if you want to add an integration (that you are used to from your last company and would make things much easier for everyone), you can't, because there are no good integrations for RocketChat. In my opinion, terrible internal chat and penny pinching is a good sign of a dysfunctional organization. Ten dollars per employee per month sounds expensive, until you realize that your employees wait an hour a week for the self hosted tool to load and are now blocked because of that.
- Xylakant 5y ago
  You can pay for hosted Zulip, so if “paying for it” is a distinguishing factor that’s not a point against it. I’ve also seen orgs that used on-prem solutions for compliance reasons and had an actual working service - it’s just not significantly cheaper when done right.
aidenn0 5y ago
> I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision. I feel the same way about slack, so it's funny that we have different experiences. Granted I don't use Macs, so I can't have had a bad experience with the Zulip mac client.
zamalek 5y ago
I have barely used it but that's not for trying. I have no idea why (possibly my subtype of dyslexia?), but I have severe problems parsing the layout of the Zulip message history/chat. It's a pretty bizarre sensation that I've experienced nowhere else.
stavros 5y ago
> The mac client was never fast, search was neigh impossible to use across 7 years of messages and there were frequent issues with client stability and drop outs. I'm mentally comparing this with Slack, where no client is fast, search is nigh impossible to use across 7 days of messages and there are constant issues with usability. Seriously, why can I out-type my chat client? It's twenty fucking twenty-one, we had faster IM clients in the nineties.

Zigurd 5y ago

I used it for chat and automated notifications related to a git workflow, both the repos and chat were self-hosted. It was far less polished than Slack (and Slack was not that polished back then). But fine for that purpose. In less tech centric environments the rough edges are more bothersome.

serial_dev 5y ago

> I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision. This resonated with me, at my current company hundreds (maybe thousands, I don't know) of employees' daily chat goes through a self hosted RocketChat instance. For all I know, based on the performance, that server is running on the cheapest Raspberry Pi. Everyone on the team just kind of accepted that sometimes, you can't connect for minutes (sometimes hours), the search is slow and not very powerful, the features and integrations are lacking. It's so frustrating when you want to contact someone, you can't, because it won't load, if you want to add an integration (that you are used to from your last company and would make things much easier for everyone), you can't, because there are no good integrations for RocketChat. In my opinion, terrible internal chat and penny pinching is a good sign of a dysfunctional organization. Ten dollars per employee per month sounds expensive, until you realize that your employees wait an hour a week for the self hosted tool to load and are now blocked because of that.

Xylakant 5y ago
You can pay for hosted Zulip, so if “paying for it” is a distinguishing factor that’s not a point against it. I’ve also seen orgs that used on-prem solutions for compliance reasons and had an actual working service - it’s just not significantly cheaper when done right.

aidenn0 5y ago

> I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision. I feel the same way about slack, so it's funny that we have different experiences. Granted I don't use Macs, so I can't have had a bad experience with the Zulip mac client.

zamalek 5y ago

I have barely used it but that's not for trying. I have no idea why (possibly my subtype of dyslexia?), but I have severe problems parsing the layout of the Zulip message history/chat. It's a pretty bizarre sensation that I've experienced nowhere else.

stavros 5y ago

> The mac client was never fast, search was neigh impossible to use across 7 years of messages and there were frequent issues with client stability and drop outs. I'm mentally comparing this with Slack, where no client is fast, search is nigh impossible to use across 7 days of messages and there are constant issues with usability. Seriously, why can I out-type my chat client? It's twenty fucking twenty-one, we had faster IM clients in the nineties.