Tools & Resources

Zulip: Powerful Open Source Group Chat

Zulip is a powerfull open source group chat application optimized for software development teams. The world of open source chat has for...

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Zulip is a powerfull open source group chat application optimized for software development teams. The world of open source chat has for a long been dominated by IRC and XMPP, both of which are very old and haven’t advanced materially in the last decade. In comparison, Zulip starts with many useful features and integrations expected by software development teams today and has a well-engineered, maintainable codebase for those that are missing.

Every conversation in Zulip has a topic, so it’s easy to keep conversations straight. Are your coworkers discussing a software bug and the content of your website at the same time? No problem.

Sometimes, important things get discussed when you’re not around. Unfortunately, so do a lot of unimportant things. Zulip makes it easy to review the conversations you missed, so you can focus on that important project without having to catch up on how Jim’s guitar lessons are going.

An impressive amount of knowledge lives in your chat system. Zulip’s Gmail-style search will delight you with how quickly you can find exactly what you’re looking for.

Zulip has many integrations and a powerful API to match. But here’s where it gets interesting: thanks to how Zulip categorizes messages, automated messages never overwhelm you. As with any topic in Zulip, they’re easy to focus on, skim, defer to later, or ignore—as appropriate.

Zulip supports drag-and-drop file uploads, image pasting, group private messages, audible notifications, missed-message emails, desktop apps, and everything else you might want. Including emoji, naturally. And it’s all open source under the Apache license!