7 ms·

They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with

by temp 4y ago

They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to Zulip.

unixhero 4y ago
You self host their enterprise solution? I think you're missing the point, migrate to the community edition. We pay 0 (but contribute with donations).
- temp 4y ago
  I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have simply downgraded.
  - Blahah 4y ago
    you can also just host your own push proxy service using their open source code... https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-your-own-push-proxy-service https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-you...
    - solar-ice 4y ago
      Then you also need to build and distribute Android and iOS apps for your employees. Congrats, you now have a significantly larger project than "put Mattermost on a server and update it occasionally".
      - danielheath 4y ago
        I am using it on both cloud-hosted (work) and self-hosted (friends chat) servers. Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.
      - etc-hosts 4y ago
        Self hosting Mattermost community edition with the Mattermost apps in Google play and apple app store works fine.
  - savy91 4y ago
    We've been using the free (Team plan) self hosted edition with push notification for free. Am I missing something? https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html
hardwaresofton 4y ago
> self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack ??? How were you getting priced per user on a self-hosted instance? [EDIT] Ah, you had their enterprise edition on-prem.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Zulip is really underrated. It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine. It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or stealing attention from me. It should be the default. Zulip is just that: the vlc of team chat.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  My former company adopted Zulip because we were in the cybersecurity space and needed an on-prem solution. When I first saw it I thought "oh god this is going to be awful" - very ugly UI compared to Slack and others. But after getting used to it, I found that the UX is excellent. For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
- igortg 4y ago
  When everyone on the team learn to use Topics, it's life changer.
EGreg 4y ago
I thought Self-Hosted was free to you? What does self-hosted even mean otherwise
- danielheath 4y ago
  If you want SAML support you need to pay (or hack out the licence checks from the open source edition, but they're sprinkled everywhere)
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Self-hosted is entirely orthogonal to price. Microsoft Exchange and Oracle 21c are both self-hosted, for instance.
  - Shared404 4y ago
    For further elaboration, self-hosted just means that you get a license to install the code on a server you control - whether that license is FL/OSS, something proprietary, or some middle ground (open core etc).
darkteflon 4y ago
We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at Quill, which had a similar threading model but … was bought and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which is a total car crash. Can’t find anything. It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  What made the learning curve higher for non-technical members on Zulip than it was on Slack? It’s been a few years since I used Zulip, but I don’t feel like it had a particularly different level of complexity.
  - georgyo 4y ago
    I think the fact that you must give a thread topic to send a message. It's not particularly difficult concept, but different from every other chat app. And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.
    - ctxc 4y ago
      Zoho Cliq solves this by using ML to parse the message and give a suitable name. It's suitable 7/10 times, and the remaining 3 - it either doesn't matter that much or is trivial to rename. Zulip should try that if they haven't already.
      - darkteflon 4y ago
        I hadn’t heard of Cliq. Do you have lots of experience with it? What do you think of it?
ensignavenger 4y ago
And not only that, Zulip is 100% FOSS, wherea Mattermost is Open Core, so the Open Source portion is missing key features.
samatman 4y ago
We tried Zulip a couple times and ended up setting up a Matrix server when Slack became unbearable. The advantages of being able to federate with other channels is high, like almost everyone I have severe channel overload and I want an application which will be open all the time to reach as many people as possible. It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to move to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions. I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use Matrix for as much as possible.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I don't have a better link/reference, but the following shows that threading is a desired feature within the Matrix network and ecosystem: https://matrix.org/blog/posts#a-thread-for-next-time https://matrix.org/blog/posts#a-thread-for-next-time So, who knows, maybe you'll get the best of both worlds eventually. :-)
  - Arathorn 4y ago
    https://element.io/blog/introducing-threads-in-beta https://element.io/blog/introducing-threads-in-beta (not as good as zulip’s threads yet tho)
    - mxuribe 4y ago
      Ah-ha! I knew that i was not crazy! And, the link is from a pretty reliable source! ;-) Thanks @Arathorn!
- rkangel 4y ago
  > I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).
jillesvangurp 4y ago
We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for. Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation. You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
- BenLloydPearson 4y ago
  We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    A link would help for that ...
    - Justine_G 4y ago
      It's called the Starter plan and here's the feature comparison matrix: https://mattermost.com/pricing/#compare-features https://mattermost.com/pricing/#compare-features. :)
- mekster 4y ago
  > Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?) Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.
mdaniel 4y ago
and Zulip has a "public access" view, which I wish more open source projects would adopt (:eyes: kubernetes.slack.com) since it allows search engines to index into the threads: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option
- alya 4y ago
  To clarify here, from https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats: > Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 is the issue to track for the native search indexing feature.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    Ah, thank you for pointing that out and sorry that I didn't notice that caveat. I somehow thought Google's indexer was "hash url" aware but I can totally appreciate that the devil is in the details about that stuff
samtuke 4y ago
We've been using Zulip at our startup for 2.5 years now and still generally love it. We self host and haven't had any issues with that (pretty much zero maintenance so far). The Android app is awesome. Searching messages sucks, and I don't know if Slack bots and apps are compatible. Pretty much everything else is great, and we greatly prefer it to Slack and Mattermost (both of which we used before for years).

by temp 4y ago

unixhero 4y ago

You self host their enterprise solution? I think you're missing the point, migrate to the community edition. We pay 0 (but contribute with donations).

temp 4y ago
I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have simply downgraded.
- Blahah 4y ago
  you can also just host your own push proxy service using their open source code... https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-your-own-push-proxy-service https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-you...
  - solar-ice 4y ago
    Then you also need to build and distribute Android and iOS apps for your employees. Congrats, you now have a significantly larger project than "put Mattermost on a server and update it occasionally".
    - danielheath 4y ago
      I am using it on both cloud-hosted (work) and self-hosted (friends chat) servers. Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.
    - etc-hosts 4y ago
      Self hosting Mattermost community edition with the Mattermost apps in Google play and apple app store works fine.
- savy91 4y ago
  We've been using the free (Team plan) self hosted edition with push notification for free. Am I missing something? https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html

hardwaresofton 4y ago

> self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack ??? How were you getting priced per user on a self-hosted instance? [EDIT] Ah, you had their enterprise edition on-prem.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Zulip is really underrated. It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine. It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or stealing attention from me. It should be the default. Zulip is just that: the vlc of team chat.

danielvaughn 4y ago
My former company adopted Zulip because we were in the cybersecurity space and needed an on-prem solution. When I first saw it I thought "oh god this is going to be awful" - very ugly UI compared to Slack and others. But after getting used to it, I found that the UX is excellent. For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
igortg 4y ago
When everyone on the team learn to use Topics, it's life changer.

EGreg 4y ago

I thought Self-Hosted was free to you? What does self-hosted even mean otherwise

danielheath 4y ago
If you want SAML support you need to pay (or hack out the licence checks from the open source edition, but they're sprinkled everywhere)
Godel_unicode 4y ago
Self-hosted is entirely orthogonal to price. Microsoft Exchange and Oracle 21c are both self-hosted, for instance.
- Shared404 4y ago
  For further elaboration, self-hosted just means that you get a license to install the code on a server you control - whether that license is FL/OSS, something proprietary, or some middle ground (open core etc).

darkteflon 4y ago

We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at Quill, which had a similar threading model but … was bought and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which is a total car crash. Can’t find anything. It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.

NineStarPoint 4y ago
What made the learning curve higher for non-technical members on Zulip than it was on Slack? It’s been a few years since I used Zulip, but I don’t feel like it had a particularly different level of complexity.
- georgyo 4y ago
  I think the fact that you must give a thread topic to send a message. It's not particularly difficult concept, but different from every other chat app. And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.
  - ctxc 4y ago
    Zoho Cliq solves this by using ML to parse the message and give a suitable name. It's suitable 7/10 times, and the remaining 3 - it either doesn't matter that much or is trivial to rename. Zulip should try that if they haven't already.
    - darkteflon 4y ago
      I hadn’t heard of Cliq. Do you have lots of experience with it? What do you think of it?

ensignavenger 4y ago

And not only that, Zulip is 100% FOSS, wherea Mattermost is Open Core, so the Open Source portion is missing key features.

samatman 4y ago

We tried Zulip a couple times and ended up setting up a Matrix server when Slack became unbearable. The advantages of being able to federate with other channels is high, like almost everyone I have severe channel overload and I want an application which will be open all the time to reach as many people as possible. It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to move to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions. I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use Matrix for as much as possible.

mxuribe 4y ago
I don't have a better link/reference, but the following shows that threading is a desired feature within the Matrix network and ecosystem: https://matrix.org/blog/posts#a-thread-for-next-time https://matrix.org/blog/posts#a-thread-for-next-time So, who knows, maybe you'll get the best of both worlds eventually. :-)
- Arathorn 4y ago
  https://element.io/blog/introducing-threads-in-beta https://element.io/blog/introducing-threads-in-beta (not as good as zulip’s threads yet tho)
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    Ah-ha! I knew that i was not crazy! And, the link is from a pretty reliable source! ;-) Thanks @Arathorn!
rkangel 4y ago
> I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).

jillesvangurp 4y ago

We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for. Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation. You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.

BenLloydPearson 4y ago
We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  A link would help for that ...
  - Justine_G 4y ago
    It's called the Starter plan and here's the feature comparison matrix: https://mattermost.com/pricing/#compare-features https://mattermost.com/pricing/#compare-features. :)
mekster 4y ago
> Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?) Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.

mdaniel 4y ago

and Zulip has a "public access" view, which I wish more open source projects would adopt (:eyes: kubernetes.slack.com) since it allows search engines to index into the threads: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option

alya 4y ago
To clarify here, from https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats: > Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 is the issue to track for the native search indexing feature.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  Ah, thank you for pointing that out and sorry that I didn't notice that caveat. I somehow thought Google's indexer was "hash url" aware but I can totally appreciate that the devil is in the details about that stuff

samtuke 4y ago

We've been using Zulip at our startup for 2.5 years now and still generally love it. We self host and haven't had any issues with that (pretty much zero maintenance so far). The Android app is awesome. Searching messages sucks, and I don't know if Slack bots and apps are compatible. Pretty much everything else is great, and we greatly prefer it to Slack and Mattermost (both of which we used before for years).