The organized, open-source
Slack alternative

Learn how organized team chat will make your team more productive.

Will my team actually work better?

What am I committing to?

Slack made workplace chat mainstream, but as a team grows, chat communication on Slack becomes disruptive, chaotic, and ephemeral. Zulip's unique topic-based threading combines the best of email and chat to make efficient communication possible.

Zulip is everything Slack is, but it's smarter and more powerful.

Organized conversations, not tangled channels

  • In Slack, discussions are jumbled together in the channel, or tucked away in threads that are easy to miss.
  • Like email threads, Zulip topics create a separate space for each conversation, so discussions never get in each other's way, and a busy channel stays easy to follow.
  • See each message in context, and if a conversation drifts, move messages to a topic of their own or mark the topic ✓ resolved when done.
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.

Built for asynchronous work

  • Slack is designed around being online: unread counts pile up while you're away, and the conversation moves on without you.
  • Zulip's inbox shows each conversation with unread messages. Read the ones you care about, skim or skip the rest, and reply in context even after hours or days away.
  • Busy leaders and experts can participate on their own time, without incessant @-mentions clamoring for their attention. Follow the topics where your timely input is needed.
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.
— Jacinda Shelly, CTO, Doctor on Demand

Your chat history becomes a knowledge base

  • In Slack, finding an old discussion means sifting through unrelated chatter, and on the free plan, messages older than 90 days are gone.
  • With conversations organized by topic, you can review old discussions to understand past work, explanations, and decisions.
  • Topics make it easy to find the right conversation with Zulip's powerful full-text search, and you can link to a Zulip conversation from emails, docs, issue trackers, or anywhere else.
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.
— Max McCrea, co-founder of Monadical (blog post)

Open source, without the lock-in

Moving from Slack is easy

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.
— Deepak Shukla, Founder and CEO of Pearl Lemon
Zulip

Zulip plans and pricing

You can move freely between Zulip Cloud hosting and your own servers with our high quality export and import tools.

Zulip Cloud

Simple managed solution.
Always up to date.

Free

Standard

$6.67

/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly

Upgrade to Standard

Plus 10 users minimum

$10

/user/month billed annually
or $12 billed monthly

Upgrade to Plus

Self-hosted

Retain full control over your data.
100% open-source software.

Free

Register now for unlimited notifications: grassroots communities · open-source projects · academic research · small non-profits · non-profit events · families & friends

Basic

85+% discount for non-workplace users!
$3.50

/user/month billed monthly

$20/month off for the first year!
Log in to upgrade

Business 25 users minimum

$6.67

/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly

$20/month off for the first year!
Log in to upgrade

Enterprise