Slack was built for chatter. Zulip was built for getting work done.
Slack made team chat mainstream, and it works well for quick, real-time back-and-forth. But as teams grow, the same design that makes Slack feel lively — busy channels, constant notifications, threads tucked away in a side panel — makes it hard to follow what matters and easy to miss what's important. Zulip keeps the channels, the emoji, and the integrations, and adds one thing: every conversation is organized under a topic.
Zulip is everything Slack is, but it's smarter and more powerful.
In fact now it seems strange to me to just fire off messages in Slack with no subject – that's chaos, madness. The genius of subject lines is that you can quickly and easily catch up on the messages you missed in your off-hours... This feature alone saves me hours a week.
Slack's interface was too slow and clunky, and the more channels you're in, the harder it is to use. Zulip's UI makes it easy to access all the information you need.
Zulip's unique threading saves me well over an hour a day in working with our distributed team of engineers and PMs across 7+ time zones. We tried Slack, Mattermost, and other team chat products that claim to support threading, and nothing handles synchronous and asynchronous communication so intuitively.
Coupled with a culture of using Zulip in an organized way, it's difficult to overstate the impact it has on knowledge management... It is the essence of good UX design.
We switched to Zulip after trying pretty much every chat app out there. And it's been amazing. The threading-by-topic system is genius. It keeps every conversation in its lane and makes catching up effortless.
Zulip offers the same 100% open-source software in the cloud and self-hosted. See plans and pricing for details on what's included in each Zulip plan.
Getting started is easy! Import your existing Slack workspace, or create a new organization in minutes. Read how End Point Dev, Semsee, and GUT contact made the switch.
If you have any questions, please contact us at sales@zulip.com. You can also drop by our friendly development community at chat.zulip.org to ask for help or suggest improvements!
I don't like going back to Slack now. It's just not as efficient a way to organize communication.
Simple managed solution.
Always up to date.
/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly
/user/month billed annually
or $12 billed monthly
Retain full control over your data.
100% open-source software.
/user/month billed monthly
/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly