Zulip is an open source
chat and
collaborative software
Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them".
As re ...
created by Jeff Arnold, Waseem Daher,
Jessica McKellar, and Tim Abbott in 2012.
Today, it is one of the free and open source alternatives to
Slack, with over 40,000 commits contributed by 660 people.
Overview
In Zulip, communication occurs in streams (which are like channels in
IRC
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...
). Each stream can have several topics – Zulip features a unique threading model, in which each message also has a topic, along with the content. Zulip claims that this improves productivity by "making it easy to catch up after a day of meetings". Apart from this, Zulip offers standard features found in collaboration apps like message reactions, message search history, polls, private messaging, group messaging etc. Zulip streams can be private or public – only people invited to a private stream can view messages in it, while anyone within an organization can join a public stream. Messages in Zulip can be sent in plain-text or formatted using
markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...
, along with images, links, and file attachments. Zulip also offers support for native integrations with hundreds of services, which can extend its functionality.
Official client apps
Apart from the web interface, Zulip officially supports other clients, all of which are open sourced:
Mobile appsfor iOS and Android.
A desktop clientfor Windows, OSX and Linux.
A terminal clientof Linux, OSX and Windows (WSL).
See also
*
List of collaborative software
This list is divided into proprietary or free software, and open source software, with several comparison tables of different product and vendor characteristics. It also includes a section of project collaboration software, which is a standard fea ...
References
Android (operating system) software
Collaborative software
Free software
IOS software
Linux software
MacOS software
Project management software
Task management software
Windows software
2012 software
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