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Zulip for open source projects
Grow your community with thoughtful and inclusive discussion.
Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open-source
projects!
Learn how the Rust language,
Lean theorem prover,
Asciidoctor, Rush Stack, and Mixxx communities are
using Zulip.
Make Zulip the communication hub for your open-source community.
Zulip is the organized team chat app that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Discuss issues, pull requests and feature ideas, engage with users, answer questions, and onboard new contributors.
Rust development would not be moving at the pace that it has been without Zulip.
Use topics to organize the discussion
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Like email threads, Zulip topics create a separate space for each discussion, so different conversations will never get in each other’s way.
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Find active conversations, or see what happened while you were away, with the Recent conversations view. Read the topics you care about, and skip the rest.
We just moved the Lichess team (~100 persons) to @zulip, and I'm loving it. The topics in particular make it vastly superior to slack & discord, when it comes to dealing with many conversations.
Zulip is also open-source!
Lasting knowledge repository
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Maintain access to your organization's entire message history with free Zulip Cloud Standard hosting. Information is at your fingertips with Zulip's powerful full-text search.
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Permanently link to a Zulip conversation or a message in context from your issue tracker, forum, or anywhere else.
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With the public access option, anyone can view, browse, and search your organization's public content — no account required.
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Conversations are organized by topic, so you can review old discussions to understand past work, explanations, and decisions.
The core of the Recurse Center is the community, and the core of our online community is Zulip… Switching to Zulip has turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve made, and it’s impossible to imagine RC today without it. No other tool has a user experience that scales to a community of our size.
Build inclusive communities
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Conversations in Zulip can continue for hours or days, enabling effective discussions between community members around the world.
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Core contributors can answer a question when they have a few minutes, without digging through dozens of messages.
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Part-time participants quickly zero in on the conversations they care about. This is not possible with other chat tools like Slack or Discord.
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Topics provide a safe space to ask a question without interrupting other conversations.
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Zulip offers dozens of features for moderating discussions. Members can also mute anyone they'd rather not interact with.
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Check out Zulip for communities to learn more about how Zulip facilitates contributor engagement and inclusion.
When we made the switch to @zulip a few months ago for chat, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it was going to become the beating heart of the community, and so quickly. It's a game changer. 🧑💻🗨️👩💻
Open ecosystem
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Zulip is 100% open-source software, with no "open core" catch. We work hard to make it easy to set up, backup, and maintain a self-hosted Zulip installation, where you have full control of your data.
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Our high quality export and import tools ensure that you can always move from Zulip Cloud hosting to your own servers. There is no lock-in.
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Zulip's open API is shared by the official web/desktop, mobile, and terminal clients, with a complete API changelog and backwards-compatibility policy designed to support developers of third-party clients.
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Zulip supports mirroring channels with IRC, Slack, and Matrix, and you can connect to other modern chat protocols using Matterbridge.
The Lean community switched from Gitter to Zulip in early 2018, and never looked back. Zulip’s model of conversations labeled with topics has been essential for organising research work and simultaneously onboarding newcomers as our community scaled. My experience with both the app and the website is extremely positive!
Powerful formatting
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Zulip code blocks come with syntax highlighting for over 250 languages, ability to set a default language, and integrated code playgrounds.
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Type LaTeX directly into your Zulip message, and see it beautifully rendered.
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Enjoy inline image, video and website previews.
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If you made a mistake, no worries! You can edit your message, or move it to a different topic or channel.
At rust-lang, at Ferrous Systems, and now at Near, Zulip is absolutely invaluable for making technical discussion work!
Interactive messaging
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Start a video call with the click of a button, or plan events without worrying about time zones using global times.
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Use emoji reactions for lightweight interactions. Have fun with custom emoji and gather feedback with polls.
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Share files or images with drag-and-drop uploads.
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Enjoy animated GIFs with Zulip's native GIPHY integration.
Wikimedia uses Zulip for its participation in open source mentoring programs. Zulip’s threaded discussions help busy organization administrators and mentors stay in close communication with students during all phases of the programs.
Effective workflows with integrations
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Use topics to manage support workflows, answer questions, and collaborate to investigate issues. Mark the topic ✓ resolved when done!
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Customize Zulip’s markup with linkifiers, so that “TRAC-1234” and “#1234” automatically link to issues or tickets in the tools you use.
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Native integrations for GitHub, Jira, Twitter, Sentry and hundreds of other tools can initiate new topics, creating lightweight discussion spaces for each issue.
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Bots can also use a dedicated topic to avoid crowding out conversations.
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Connect to thousands of tools using Zapier. Integrations written for Slack can post into Zulip via the Slack compatible webhook.
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Build your own integrations with Zulip’s easy-to-use RESTful API, client bindings, incoming webhooks, outgoing webhooks and interactive bot framework.
Flexible administration and moderation
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Invite new members with multi-use invite links, or make your community open for anyone to join without an invitation.
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Allow (or require) users to authenticate with single sign-on options like GitHub or GitLab, instead of with a username and password.
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Automatically subscribe members to channels when they join.
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Manage your community with fine-grained permission settings you can assign to user roles, user groups, and individual users.
When and how you want it
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With apps for every platform, you can check Zulip at your computer or on your phone. Zulip works great in a browser, so no download is required.
- Zulip alerts you about timely messages with fully customizable mobile, email and desktop notifications.
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Use Zulip in your language of choice, with translations into 23 languages.
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Zulip is built for scale and works reliably for open organizations with 10,000s of users, with modest hardware.
The Zulip threading model is fantastic and game-changing, and you are doing your community a disservice if you choose Slack or Discord over Zulip.
Make the move today
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The Zulip core developers have decades of combined experience leading and growing open source communities, and we love helping other communities reach their potential.
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Getting started or moving from another platform is easy! Import your existing organization from Slack, Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat.
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See how other open communities are using Zulip, and learn about best practices for moderating an open Zulip organization.
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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!
The Zulip threading model is fantastic and game-changing, and you are doing your community a disservice if you choose Slack or Discord over Zulip.
