Zulip
zulip · Team chat
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What is Zulip?
Zulip treats team chat more like an inbox than a scrolling feed. Each message belongs to a topic, which makes it practical for teams that do not all work at the same time and for busy channels with several conversations at once.
Zulip is an open-source team chat app with topic-based threading that combines the best of email and chat. Every conversation has a topic, so people can catch up asynchronously without losing context. It can be self-hosted or used through Zulip Cloud.
Core capabilities
- Organise every conversation by topic, so threads stay readable days later.
- Work live or asynchronously without losing track of discussions.
- Built by 1,500+ contributors and used by open-source projects such as Rust.
Topics that keep conversations apart
Zulip's topic-based threading combines the immediacy of chat with the structure of email. Conversations stay separate inside a channel, so readers can follow, mute or catch up on exactly the discussions they need.
- Topics
- Async work
- Team chat
A large open-source community
Zulip is built by a distributed community, with over 1,500 contributors and more than 500 commits merged each month. Open-source projects such as Rust and thousands of other organisations use it every day, and it is licensed under Apache-2.0.
- Open source
- Apache-2.0
- Self-hosted
Where it fits
Use cases
- 01
Run a team across time zones
Give each discussion its own topic so colleagues in other time zones can read and reply to the threads that matter to them.
- 02
Separate client work from internal chat
Use channels per client or project and topics per question, keeping decisions easy to find later.
- 03
Host a community chat
Run a self-hosted Zulip for an open-source project or customer community where many conversations happen at once.