Zulip for open source projects

Grow your community with thoughtful and inclusive discussion.
Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open-source projects!

Learn how the Rust language, Lean theorem prover,
and Asciidoctor communities are using Zulip.

Make Zulip the communication hub for your open-source community.

Zulip is the organized team chat app that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Discuss issues, pull requests and feature ideas, engage with users, answer questions, and onboard new contributors.

Rust development would not be moving at the pace that it has been without Zulip.
How the Rust language community uses Zulip ↗

Use topics to organize the discussion

  • Like email threads, Zulip topics create a separate space for each discussion, so different conversations will never get in each other’s way.
  • Find active conversations, or see what happened while you were away, with the Recent conversations view. Read the topics you care about, and skip the rest.
  • Keep discussions orderly by moving or splitting topics when conversations digress.
We just moved the Lichess team (~100 persons) to @zulip, and I'm loving it. The topics in particular make it vastly superior to slack & discord, when it comes to dealing with many conversations.
Zulip is also open-source!

Lasting knowledge repository

  • Maintain access to your organization's entire message history with free Zulip Cloud Standard hosting. Information is at your fingertips with Zulip's powerful full-text search.
  • Permanently link to a Zulip conversation or a message in context from your issue tracker, forum, or anywhere else.
  • With the public access option, anyone can view, browse, and search your organization's public content — no account required.
  • Conversations are organized by topic, so you can review old discussions to understand past work, explanations, and decisions.
The core of the Recurse Center is the community, and the core of our online community is Zulip… Switching to Zulip has turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve made, and it’s impossible to imagine RC today without it. No other tool has a user experience that scales to a community of our size.
— Nick Bergson-Shilcock, founder and CEO, Recurse Center
How the Recurse Center community uses Zulip ↗

Build inclusive communities

  • Conversations in Zulip can continue for hours or days, enabling effective discussions between community members around the world.
  • Core contributors can answer a question when they have a few minutes, without digging through dozens of messages.
  • Part-time participants quickly zero in on the conversations they care about. This is not possible with other chat tools like Slack or Discord.
  • Topics provide a safe space to ask a question without interrupting other conversations.
  • Zulip offers dozens of features for moderating discussions. Members can also mute anyone they'd rather not interact with.
  • Check out Zulip for communities to learn more about how Zulip facilitates contributor engagement and inclusion.
When we made the switch to @zulip a few months ago for chat, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it was going to become the beating heart of the community, and so quickly. It's a game changer. 🧑‍💻🗨️👩‍💻
— Dan Allen (@mojavelinux), June 29, 2021

Open ecosystem

The Lean community switched from Gitter to Zulip in early 2018, and never looked back. Zulip’s stream/topic model has been essential for organising research work and simultaneously onboarding newcomers as our community scaled. My experience with both the app and the website is extremely positive!
Kevin Buzzard, Professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London
How the Lean prover community uses Zulip ↗

Powerful formatting

At rust-lang, at Ferrous Systems, and now at Near, Zulip is absolutely invaluable for making technical discussion work!
Aleksey Kladov, Senior software engineer, NEAR Protocol

Interactive messaging

Wikimedia uses Zulip for its participation in open source mentoring programs. Zulip’s threaded discussions help busy organization administrators and mentors stay in close communication with students during all phases of the programs.
— Srishti Sethi, Developer Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation

Effective workflows with integrations

Flexible administration and moderation

When and how you want it

  • With apps for every platform, you can check Zulip at your computer or on your phone. Zulip works great in a browser, so no download is required.
  • Zulip alerts you about timely messages with fully customizable mobile, email and desktop notifications.
  • Mention users, groups of users or everyone when you need their attention.
  • Use Zulip in your language of choice, with translations into 23 languages.
  • Zulip is built for scale and works reliably for open organizations with 10,000s of users, with modest hardware.
The Zulip threading model is fantastic and game-changing, and you are doing your community a disservice if you choose Slack or Discord over Zulip.
Juan Nunez-Iglesias, napari project co-founder and scikit-image core developer

Make the move today

The Zulip threading model is fantastic and game-changing, and you are doing your community a disservice if you choose Slack or Discord over Zulip.
Juan Nunez-Iglesias, napari project co-founder and scikit-image core developer