Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:26): Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:26):What differentiates Zulip from other similar products?
For more context, please see #zulip > softwarereviews.com
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:31):The most similar product, I suppose, is Slack.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:32):I like Slack fine for private team or department communication, but I don't think it's ideal for an open source project, where I believe in a lot of transparency.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:33):Zulip allows for "web-public" channels, which means that newcomers can read what we're talking about without signing up first.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:34):Back in the day, people would "lurk" around open source projects on mailing lists. These days, chat is also common. So let 'em lurk. Let 'em see what we're talking about. Hopefully, they'll join.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:35):Another differentiator that comes to mind for me is that as a keyboard junkie, Zulip has a keyboard shorcut for practically everything. I very rarely need to reach for a mouse.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 01:37):Zulip is open source, so I feel much more able to learn about where the product is going and even contribute a bit (see #zulip > first PR to Zulip). I chat with the Zulip core team at https://chat.zulip.org and I feel listened to. (I recommend the #feedback channel, by the way.)
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 10:27):Within channels, Zulip encourages you to talk within topics. This is a major differentiator. It keeps discussion much more organized than most chat apps such as Slack.
Yes, it's a little more work up front to type a few words about what you want to talk about (like typing the subject of an email), but it's worth it. You'll spend more time reading than writing anyway, so you can skip the topics that don't interest you.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Nov 01 2024 at 10:28):People who are new to Zulip sometimes simply reply to whatever the latest message is. That's fine. We can simply move the message to its own dedicated topic.
Last updated: Nov 01 2025 at 14:11 UTC