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Love Zulip. It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch.

revskill 3y ago
By reading this blog post, it's easy to understand why. No screenshots for new readers to actually see what's the UI look like, what's the UX look like, what's other feature look like VISUALLY. Why taking too much words ? Remember one golden rule in marketing: One picture worths 1000 words.
- nxpnsv 3y ago
  true but look at their main page: https://zulip.com https://zulip.com it is pretty good at showing zulip
- madars 3y ago
  Looks like blog is about the diff between 6.0 and 7.0; see https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/ for screenshots. BTW, threaded conversations (called "instances" in Zephyr https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/ https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/, which Zulip's model is inspired by) are infinitely better than anything Discord/Slack/IRC have to offer and greatly contribute to discussion culture: it is considered a faux pas to not switch an instance when conversation topic changes, so you can easily narrow in on the entirety of a conversation even if a number different conversations are happening at the same time.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    Discord added threads recently which are nice but somewhat a completely different thing. It's like saying "let you and I discuss this after the meeting". But it's useful in a place where there is no structure. If the admin lets them have a long life they sometimes provide a nice archive view of solved things and such. I find zulip superior in every way except audio and video - which if we are being really honest Zulip does not actually have.
- dabber21 3y ago
  https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/
chimeracoder 3y ago
> It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch. Zulip was acquired by Dropbox before it was publicly available, and then after a few years Dropbox spun it out into an independent OSS project. It's kind of unfortunate that Dropbox never really gave Zulip a chance, because that was just before Slack became successful. Zulip as a product is way better than Slack and could have either "won" or influenced Slack and competitors to adopt a better conversation model. Of course, nothing is stopping that from happening today, but by the time Zulip was refounded and regained momentum, several critical years had passed in between and Slack was much further ahead in market share. Having used Zulip, Slack is now literally painful to use, especially at scale.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  I haven't used zulip, especially at a workplace, but the thing that Slack does so much better than everything else I've tried, is search. How is Zulip for search for large orgs with millions of messages? Discord doesn't hold a candle to Slack. For context, I'm not talking just about the ease and speed of searches, but also about the support for basic filters, exact phrase searching (Discord doesn't have this) or bypassing fuzzy search (Discord always fuzzy searches on the individual words of your search words)
  - nh2 3y ago
    I wondered this too. Just tried it on https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org: So far, it seems it doesn't support exact phrase search: Searching for "what" with our without quotes produces no results. Slack finds the results. Searching for `"option"` in quotes also finds `options`, so I'm not sure if exact, non-fuzzy search is possible. https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages suggests that there is no support for exact-search or case-sensitive search.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      Thanks for actually doing the research! Until some other team chat offers a good search, there's no way I'd consider anything besides Slack if it's up to me.

By reading this blog post, it's easy to understand why. No screenshots for new readers to actually see what's the UI look like, what's the UX look like, what's other feature look like VISUALLY. Why taking too much words ? Remember one golden rule in marketing: One picture worths 1000 words.

nxpnsv 3y ago
true but look at their main page: https://zulip.com https://zulip.com it is pretty good at showing zulip
madars 3y ago
Looks like blog is about the diff between 6.0 and 7.0; see https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/ for screenshots. BTW, threaded conversations (called "instances" in Zephyr https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/ https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/, which Zulip's model is inspired by) are infinitely better than anything Discord/Slack/IRC have to offer and greatly contribute to discussion culture: it is considered a faux pas to not switch an instance when conversation topic changes, so you can easily narrow in on the entirety of a conversation even if a number different conversations are happening at the same time.
- dizhn 3y ago
  Discord added threads recently which are nice but somewhat a completely different thing. It's like saying "let you and I discuss this after the meeting". But it's useful in a place where there is no structure. If the admin lets them have a long life they sometimes provide a nice archive view of solved things and such. I find zulip superior in every way except audio and video - which if we are being really honest Zulip does not actually have.
dabber21 3y ago
https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/

chimeracoder 3y ago

> It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch. Zulip was acquired by Dropbox before it was publicly available, and then after a few years Dropbox spun it out into an independent OSS project. It's kind of unfortunate that Dropbox never really gave Zulip a chance, because that was just before Slack became successful. Zulip as a product is way better than Slack and could have either "won" or influenced Slack and competitors to adopt a better conversation model. Of course, nothing is stopping that from happening today, but by the time Zulip was refounded and regained momentum, several critical years had passed in between and Slack was much further ahead in market share. Having used Zulip, Slack is now literally painful to use, especially at scale.

pcthrowaway 3y ago
I haven't used zulip, especially at a workplace, but the thing that Slack does so much better than everything else I've tried, is search. How is Zulip for search for large orgs with millions of messages? Discord doesn't hold a candle to Slack. For context, I'm not talking just about the ease and speed of searches, but also about the support for basic filters, exact phrase searching (Discord doesn't have this) or bypassing fuzzy search (Discord always fuzzy searches on the individual words of your search words)
- nh2 3y ago
  I wondered this too. Just tried it on https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org: So far, it seems it doesn't support exact phrase search: Searching for "what" with our without quotes produces no results. Slack finds the results. Searching for `"option"` in quotes also finds `options`, so I'm not sure if exact, non-fuzzy search is possible. https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages suggests that there is no support for exact-search or case-sensitive search.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Thanks for actually doing the research! Until some other team chat offers a good search, there's no way I'd consider anything besides Slack if it's up to me.