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 apps
for iOS and Android.
A desktop client
for Windows, OSX and Linux.
A terminal client
of Linux, OSX and Windows (WSL).

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 {{cms-software-stub

Overview

Official client apps

See also

References