Zulip
Open-source team chat with a unique topic-based threading model that makes it easy to follow multiple conversations.
Zulip is a powerful open-source group chat application used by thousands of teams for business, open source projects, and communities. What sets Zulip apart from Slack and other chat tools is its unique threading model: messages are organized into streams (channels) and topics, making it easy to catch up on conversations without being overwhelmed.
This topic-based threading means that even after a day away, you can scan topic names in each stream to decide what to read, rather than scrolling through endless chat history. Zulip also features keyboard-driven navigation, powerful search, message editing, file sharing, integrations with over 100 services, and a full REST API.
For self-hosting, Zulip is well-documented and runs on any Linux server. It scales from small teams to large organizations and is actively developed. Major organizations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, and Khan Academy use Zulip. It offers full export capabilities, making it easy to migrate your data.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Zulip?
Zulip is an open source team chat application with a unique topic-based threading model. Instead of a single continuous channel stream, every message has a topic, which makes it easy to follow multiple conversations at once and stay focused. It's designed for teams that want structured, organized discussion.
How is Zulip different from Discord?
Discord organizes communication into channels where messages flow as one long stream. Zulip organizes each channel into topics, so related messages stay grouped together. This makes catching up on a busy channel far faster — you can skim topics and only read the conversations relevant to you, a big advantage for large teams.
Can I self-host Zulip?
Yes. Zulip is fully open source and self-hostable. It ships with a built-in installation script for Linux and is also available as a Docker image. Thousands of organizations, including many open source communities, run Zulip on their own servers.
What are Zulip's key features?
Zulip offers topic-based threading, direct and group messages, file sharing, emoji reactions, inline image/video previews, full-text search, integrations with over 100 tools (GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and more), and a comprehensive API. It also supports email integration, so users can read and reply to messages by email.
Is Zulip free?
Zulip is free and open source (Apache 2.0 for the server, MIT for clients). You can self-host it at no cost with unlimited users and history. The company behind Zulip also offers paid hosting and enterprise support, but self-hosting is completely free.
Looking for contributors
This project is actively seeking help, join the community!
Repository details
Updated 8/10/2026, 11:00:35 AM
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