They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to Zulip.
It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine.
It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or stealing attention from me. It should be the default.
My former company adopted Zulip because we were in the cybersecurity space and needed an on-prem solution. When I first saw it I thought "oh god this is going to be awful" - very ugly UI compared to Slack and others. But after getting used to it, I found that the UX is excellent.
For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at Quill, which had a similar threading model but … was bought and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which is a total car crash. Can’t find anything.
It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.
Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community (https://zulip.com/development-community/)!
What made the learning curve higher for non-technical members on Zulip than it was on Slack? It’s been a few years since I used Zulip, but I don’t feel like it had a particularly different level of complexity.
I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have simply downgraded.
We tried Zulip a couple times and ended up setting up a Matrix server when Slack became unbearable. The advantages of being able to federate with other channels is high, like almost everyone I have severe channel overload and I want an application which will be open all the time to reach as many people as possible.
It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to move to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions. I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use Matrix for as much as possible.
> I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes
Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).
and Zulip has a "public access" view, which I wish more open source projects would adopt (:eyes: kubernetes.slack.com) since it allows search engines to index into the threads: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option
> Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.
We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for.
Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation.
You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
> Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly.
Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?)
Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.
We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!
We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program.
The community feedback on the Beta version has thus far being excellent, and helps us improve the user experience before we ship multi-server support as a stable release to everyone :)
> We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program.
This is fantastic news!
It is/was a problem having to choose which server to connect to, when I had multiple Mattermost servers.
This new feature will fix that quandary
Different Question: can I point `mmctl` to your managed cloud instance (are the "free tiers" exempt from this ability but paid tiers allow this?), have it create a backup and restore that backup to a local Mattermost team (the OSS) instance? This is just to be able to migrate old team chats off the Mattermost cloud instance but retain the ability to quickly read them now and then if needed
Thank you for the feedback but I’m going to wait until it’s published in the respective App Stores.
One piece of feedback for you and your org: the whole mobile v2 process was not very transparent from the outside. I tracked the ticket from time to time but gave up after a year as no visible progress was being made. Maybe that happened in some Atlassian forum, which to be blunt I’m not going to create an account for simply to read a thread.
I wished my Organization would adopt Mattermost. Using it for years as a Chat to stay in touch with my friends.
My Org uses MS Teams (because it is already bundled with MS 365). What Mattermost is missing is a Videochat / Videoconferencing option - there is a plugin but I didn´t tried it yet: https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/
When I was on a project that used Mattermost we had BigBlueButton integrated. It worked adequate. As a user, at first I didn’t even realize that BBB was a separate thing.
I like that Mattermost treads Channels as Groupchats, and you can reply to a Chatmessage or just add to the Conversation where in Teams you have Conversations where you can reply to or start a new one, this leads to people replying via new conversation or replying while it's a new conversation.
I also dislike the notion of Teams with Subchannels in Teams and the hard cut between Chat and Teams - I like the way Mattermost does it more: a <hr> Element between Channels and Chats.
Mattermost is amazing! We used it with multiple teams over a period of a few years. Self hosted. Cheap of resources. All of the necessary features are there and very well thought out.
Thanks for doing a great job. I really hate most of the software I have to use these days, but Mattermost is one of the few exceptions. It is fast, it isn't intrusive, it respects me and my time, all while doing what it promises.
To me it is better than the competition, since their products affect my computer speed, even though I just got an update. I'd much rather have the productivity not taken away by Mattermost than features (although Mattermost has 100% I need).
The only thing that prevented us from using MatterMost when switching away from Rocket.Chat was video/voice calls that would actually ring the mobile/desktop devices on the call. We had to settle with MS Teams and eventually got the MS365 bundle only because of the reliable calls in Ms Teams. Although chat is a pita in teams after using Rocket.Chat for years, we’re making more calls and writing fewer chat messages.
This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported. I could run a server for a group instead of using a hosted service, but it would never fly if the administrator (me) could read their messages.
I see there is a plugin for it¹, but not having something so core in the main product makes me sure there will be friction and user support issues.
Matrix and XMPP are excellent options worth considering for your use case. XMPP is more mature but modern clients implementing all the right RFCs are a bit scarce, Matrix clients are coming along relatively quickly but there's the occasional quirk.
Both have optional support for features like federation and bridging other chat clients as well, though the results are often not exactly perfect.
Personally, I'm quite happy using Matrix+Element/Cinny/Fluffychat to gather several chat services into one place. Experiments with native group chats have also gone down as of a year or so ago when encryption finally got most of its quirks worked out.
> This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported
The reality is people claim to need E2EE but it's not worth paying extra for it.
It's kind of like how people nod when you ask them if they hate companies like FB/GOOG stealing their personal information and then you offer them a dollar to give your their DOB, Address and SSN and they happily take the dollar and share all of that info.
… and those really serious about E2EE are using their custom stack anyways.
It's good that this exists, but Mattermost's threads are very suboptimal.
If Alice posts a message and Bob replies, then _that is_ the thread.
If that thread goes into a certain path you can't branch off of it, you can't reply to Alice's original message if you're talking about a different thing.
I don't know if this makes sense, but hopefully you got my point.
-- FWIW: Interviewed here about a year ago - interview process was by far one of the better ones - their community guy Jason was super super kind & their CEO seems to also be a really good human --
I've been using the self hosted version with a 10-person team for a year now and so far we like it. It's not as good as Slack (yet), but if you need to self-host, I can absolutely recommend it.
Readit News
It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine.
It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or stealing attention from me. It should be the default.
Zulip is just that: the vlc of team chat.
For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.
??? How were you getting priced per user on a self-hosted instance?
[EDIT] Ah, you had their enterprise edition on-prem.
It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to move to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions. I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use Matrix for as much as possible.
Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).
So, who knows, maybe you'll get the best of both worlds eventually. :-)
> Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 is the issue to track for the native search indexing feature.
Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation.
You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?)
Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.
We self host and haven't had any issues with that (pretty much zero maintenance so far). The Android app is awesome.
Searching messages sucks, and I don't know if Slack bots and apps are compatible.
Pretty much everything else is great, and we greatly prefer it to Slack and Mattermost (both of which we used before for years).
Two years ago someone on the mattermost team promised the new mobile application would be there by the end of 2021.
Yet in June 2022... you get the gist. Not a fan.
We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program.
The community feedback on the Beta version has thus far being excellent, and helps us improve the user experience before we ship multi-server support as a stable release to everyone :)
[1] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-mobile-app-beta-progr...
This is fantastic news!
It is/was a problem having to choose which server to connect to, when I had multiple Mattermost servers.
This new feature will fix that quandary
Different Question: can I point `mmctl` to your managed cloud instance (are the "free tiers" exempt from this ability but paid tiers allow this?), have it create a backup and restore that backup to a local Mattermost team (the OSS) instance? This is just to be able to migrate old team chats off the Mattermost cloud instance but retain the ability to quickly read them now and then if needed
One piece of feedback for you and your org: the whole mobile v2 process was not very transparent from the outside. I tracked the ticket from time to time but gave up after a year as no visible progress was being made. Maybe that happened in some Atlassian forum, which to be blunt I’m not going to create an account for simply to read a thread.
My Org uses MS Teams (because it is already bundled with MS 365). What Mattermost is missing is a Videochat / Videoconferencing option - there is a plugin but I didn´t tried it yet: https://mattermost.com/marketplace/microsoft-teams-meetings/
> Channels: Voice calls and screen share (beta)
[0] https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-v7-0-is-now-available...
have you tried running it using Mattermost team (the OSS) instance?
I also use their cloud instance to stay updated on new features but voice is a paid only plan, so couldn't check it out
out of the box you get free `jitsi` but you can attach your own instance as well
I also dislike the notion of Teams with Subchannels in Teams and the hard cut between Chat and Teams - I like the way Mattermost does it more: a <hr> Element between Channels and Chats.
To me it is better than the competition, since their products affect my computer speed, even though I just got an update. I'd much rather have the productivity not taken away by Mattermost than features (although Mattermost has 100% I need).
I see there is a plugin for it¹, but not having something so core in the main product makes me sure there will be friction and user support issues.
[1] https://github.com/quarkslab/mattermost-plugin-e2ee
Both have optional support for features like federation and bridging other chat clients as well, though the results are often not exactly perfect.
Personally, I'm quite happy using Matrix+Element/Cinny/Fluffychat to gather several chat services into one place. Experiments with native group chats have also gone down as of a year or so ago when encryption finally got most of its quirks worked out.
The reality is people claim to need E2EE but it's not worth paying extra for it.
It's kind of like how people nod when you ask them if they hate companies like FB/GOOG stealing their personal information and then you offer them a dollar to give your their DOB, Address and SSN and they happily take the dollar and share all of that info.
… and those really serious about E2EE are using their custom stack anyways.
If Alice posts a message and Bob replies, then _that is_ the thread. If that thread goes into a certain path you can't branch off of it, you can't reply to Alice's original message if you're talking about a different thing.
I don't know if this makes sense, but hopefully you got my point.
[0] https://github.com/gabrieljackson/mattermost-plugin-wrangler...
Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads?
Not the OP but this would really help
Happy to create an issue if this is a new request or upvote if there's an existing request
Do you have any wishes for improving Mattermost for your team?