Zulip

It's a really well made alternative to Slack. The concept of ordering by Streams and Topics can make cluttered team-chats so much better organized. Often I was searching for a very specific post from half a year ago in Slack and only knew in which channel it might be. After hours of scrolling and trying to find by keywords I eventually gave up. In Slack this is indeed better, if people align in using the Topics for their post.

Threading model is a vast improvement over slack, and makes it usable for groups from very small to very large sizes (up to several thousand active users)

Zulip looks like a forum but feels like chat. Messages are organized into topics, which appear in channels. When conversation wanders, you can move message to another topic or even another channel.

When you return from vacation, it's relatively easy to catch up on the topics you care about.

Zulip has all the features you'd expect from modern chat such as emoji reactions, "people are typing" indicators, and knowing if people are online.

As as open source developer, I'd say Zulip is the best platform for open source projects, especially because it can be configured for "public access" so that anyone can read what's going on without signing up for an account. You can seamlessly link from Zulip to your issue tracker to your mailing list and back again.

Over time, the "corporate" options have become bloated, paywalled, and with dubious feature update choices. In that ecosystem, Zulip remains open source and close to its users.

• The streams and topics format takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, you wonder why no other platform does it like this.
• The UX looks overwhelming... until you realize how important mutes are. And then, it magically starts showing you what you want, very quickly!
• The best way to explain the Zulip experience is that it's somewhere between Slack and email -- the best of both.

Zulip is FOSS by default and the dev team is unapologetically loud and in-your-face with the choices they make. I think that's GREAT. They listen and interact with the community to create a great team communication tool. I appreciate them!

I’ve been really impressed with Zulip. It keeps team conversations super organized thanks to its unique threaded topics, which make it easy to follow discussions even when you join later. Messages don’t get lost like in other chat apps — everything stays clear and structured.

It’s also fast, reliable, and works great on desktop and mobile. I love that it’s open source, has tons of integrations, and can even be self-hosted if needed.

Overall, Zulip is one of the best tools I’ve used for focused, productive communication. Highly recommended!