I just recently started up zulip after a long break, to check some particular community discussions. Before it had felt a bit hacky/nerdy. But now, I was pleasantly surprised. The app and the service feels really fast and to the point, and I think it looks OK to.
But also that jumping in to random community, and browsing through it made sense to me, I was able to read discussions that kinda seemed interesting and skip the rest, with pretty good confidence!
Contrasting to say Discord, where I'm always overwhelmed by the number of channels in big communities, with very little way to efficiently check "whats going on lately", without just browsing through. (I'm sure sizes of communities matters here though)
Or Matrix, where everything just seems so slow and janky. Though I think it is trying to solve a harder problem being so distributed. It has real potential bringing related communities closer by having a well curated spaces that organise them neatly.
It sounds like Zulip is optimising for productivity (and I've read similar from the team in the past), where Discord and Matrix certainly aren't. Matrix is optimising for security/privacy at the cost of UX in other ways, and I get why.
Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities – moderation, having distinctive "servers" with their own personalities but within one "service". In many ways Discord is trying to replace phpBB, and no one ran internal company comms on phpBB (I hope).
What's interesting to me is that many new companies are choosing Discord despite it clearly not being designed for internal company comms. I suspect some choose it on the basis of being "open source" companies who are trying to grow a community using their stuff, but I'm not sure how true that is in practice for most. I suspect the real reason is that most of these people starting companies already hang out in a bunch of Discord servers in their personal lives, and so there's a (small) network effect and they just default to Discord for their professional lives.
> Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities
Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7
Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.
Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.
> Matrix is optimising for security/privacy at the cost of UX in other ways, and I get why.
I wouldn't say so. Have you used Element Messenger? The default trust policy is certainly optimised for something else. Similarly to default and encouraged synapse configuration. Not saying it's the wrong tradeoff but Matrix/Element are certainly not fundamentally putting privacy above their other goals.
Zulip had flown under the radar for me, looks interesting but the pricing makes me a bit sad.
We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so with self-hosting that puts up us to just about $40 a month only for the sake of getting mobile notifications. In practice most people won't be on their phones but notifications are still required for off-hours or on-the-move communications. But very low volume, like at current pricing maybe $0.5 per notification that wouldn't have been served by a desktop client.
I get it, it is a way to support development. But why does it always have to be per user? And why not keep first 10 users free, so that 11 users only pays for 1 user, 12 for 2 etc. That would mean a lot for small teams, and reflect value a ton better.
I guess with every service having a free tier means there truly can't exist a cheap offering. And the minute you go over any of the arbitrary limits you need to suddenly pay a lot.
Apparently notifications was completely free until December of last year. From completely free to $3.5 per user. It just feels weird (not saying free is sustainable, but $3.5 per user is a pretty arbitrary number).
Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards Zulip, but the entire industry that somehow converged on pretty much the same terms.
Also, that’s about half of what you’d pay for 11 users on most other group chat services.
From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.
Every single service is per user and it adds up. Communications are essential, but there doesn't have to be much to it either. Most communications are 1-1 anyway. We could do everything by SMS and email I guess, it is just not built for that.
As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
I suspect that the cost for push notifications might have to do with the costs imposed by Apple and Google for their respective OSes' notifications backends, but don't quote me on that. The $3.5/user/month smells like a way to recoup that kind of cost without making it overly burdensome for folks within one standard deviation of the mean.
That said, it appears that XMPP might be workable here: eJabberd is still actively maintained, and there are mobile clients (namely, Monal for iOS and Conversations for Android) that appear to support push notifications. Given your talk of self-hosting, I feel comfortable recommending something that requires some degree of system administration investment.
I know what you mean, but I'm happier paying for one specific feature that I know costs them than for an arbitrary tier, although the latter is fine too (they have to make money).
Generally, Zulip is one of those tools that I'm happy to pay for even if I don't need any of the non-free features. At $40/mo, it's worth it for the multiples of time it'll save you.
Maybe they need purchasing power parity adjustment for those outside the US? $3.5/user/month seems lowish compared to peers in the US, though I agree with what you’re saying about how to charge at 10+ users (that is a nice business model that keeps your free tier alive while not changing the economics of the enterprise at all).
Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards you personally, but the entire industry that somehow decided that the terms of everyone else's business and products that they are using to get try and individually achieve private jet levels of wealth should be free.
I'm trying to pay an amount that makes sense though.
It is like the olden days, where piracy of Photoshop didn't put a dent in Adobe. They got free advertising and everyone grew up learning their product. But since you could get the "best" tool for free that meant you wouldn't pay for a cheap alternative (that actually had you as their target group), completely killing an entire section of applications - they were the true victims of piracy.
I feel like that is happening with these kinds of tools. Slack et al do have free options that are completely obliterating the hope to target businesses that don't need as much.
99.9% of all the features you are paying for is pure bloat. It costs money to develop and I get that, but then I don't want it either.
why should a self-hosted server limit notifications by number of users? its not like the dev team is doing any hosting for notifications that they need to pay for bandwidth and stuff?
i do understand the need for "charging people somehow", same as how some say their product is open source but you still have to pay per user even when its hosted on your own machines, why bother then? its not like i have "security" concerns from E2EE of facebook.
when we are talking "self hosting" then that would mean i get to self-manage but also i am not restricted by features otherwise whats the point?
look at zulip for example.
their cloud hosted version is plus version for $10/user. same for self-hosted business version at $6.67/user. So at the cost of self hosting and management and storage and administration i am only getting a discount of $3.33? again, why bother at this point?
These prices make sense when you consider that the bulk of the cost of providing Zulip to you is not the cost of the compute and storage and bandwidth - those are fairly minimal.
It’s the cost of the developers who fix bugs and keep the product moving forward. Those cost a lot more, and you need them regardless of where your instance is hosted.
After having worked with Teams, Slack, Discord, … Zulip for me is the best. A mix of forum and chat, great search capabilities, customizable notifications. You feel empowered to decide how to filter the noise that can happen in a big community and when to jump in and participate.
Can it jump to a specific time yet? The inability of a chat app to quickly find a known point in the chat has to be one of the most baffling UI omissions I've ever seen but every time I've searched it seems like I really haven't missed anything and it really does require scrolling back manually for as long as it takes. :(
one of the killer features of Zulip is that when you mention your local datetime in a message the receiver sees that in their own timezone. So useful when teams are distributed.
That seems confusing to me. It would be better if Zulip just added the local timezone to the time instead of modifying what you send to people. Do you mean it shows it in a hover or tooltip?
Seems like there should be deadly sins for certain fields, and one such deadly sin is for an instant messenger to change what you send to people.
It appears that you have to type it in a specific format, and the localized time is displayed with different formatting than the rest of the message. See: https://zulip.com/help/global-times
> A date picker will appear once you type `<time`.
> Our next meeting is scheduled for <time:2020-05-28T13:30:00+05:30>
> A person in San Francisco will see:
> Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:00 AM.
> While someone in India will see:
> Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:30 PM.
Zulip is designed to use your OS/browser's timezone for this and all other displays of times (say, when messages were sent). This is usually what you want, since it means you just need to make sure your computer's clock is correct and not manually update every app you're using.
In the issue you linked, the root problem is that the anti-fingerprinting browser feature has the browser pretending that its preferred timezone is UTC, resulting in the user seeing all times displayed to them in UTC.
It has nothing to do with the "global times" feature -- that feature just renders an element in your message in the same timezone that it renders the timestamps.
> We’ve been hard at work on Zulip’s next-generation mobile app for Android and iOS, built with Flutter.
Interesting choice to choose Flutter ... will be interesting to see if that was the right choice in the long term. I get the impression Google has more people working on Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform.
One of the things that's made us at Zulip very happy with Flutter is that it's an honest-to-goodness functioning open-source project. The issue tracker is out in the open, as are the PRs and code reviews. You can (and we did) show up with bug reports and someone whose job is to develop Flutter will read it and make a cogent reply. And getting a change merged in Flutter is however easy or hard it is to do the change well, but no harder — the codebase is high-quality, and the maintainers are responsive. It's at quite a high percentile among all the open-source projects I've interacted with.
I don't know much about Kotlin Multiplatform or Compose Multiplatform. But from what I've seen, the Android group in general doesn't live up to that high standard as an open-source project. You can report bugs and might get a reply, but can't really participate in the discussion; the public bug often gets linked to a bunch of internal bugs you can't see, and the code reviews for any fix happen in private.
(I lead the Zulip mobile team, so the decision to use Flutter was primarily mine.)
I hope it works out well for you, at my company we made the decision to go with native because we were afraid of hitting a ceiling with non-native solutions, but I love Zulip and I hope your decision pays off.
Looks like conversations on Zulip still aren't accessible to search engines, unfortunately. I'm aware of zulip-archive, an "export everything to HTML" solution, but it sucks that this isn't possible to do this without setting up a separate solution.
Readit News
But also that jumping in to random community, and browsing through it made sense to me, I was able to read discussions that kinda seemed interesting and skip the rest, with pretty good confidence!
Contrasting to say Discord, where I'm always overwhelmed by the number of channels in big communities, with very little way to efficiently check "whats going on lately", without just browsing through. (I'm sure sizes of communities matters here though)
Or Matrix, where everything just seems so slow and janky. Though I think it is trying to solve a harder problem being so distributed. It has real potential bringing related communities closer by having a well curated spaces that organise them neatly.
Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities – moderation, having distinctive "servers" with their own personalities but within one "service". In many ways Discord is trying to replace phpBB, and no one ran internal company comms on phpBB (I hope).
What's interesting to me is that many new companies are choosing Discord despite it clearly not being designed for internal company comms. I suspect some choose it on the basis of being "open source" companies who are trying to grow a community using their stuff, but I'm not sure how true that is in practice for most. I suspect the real reason is that most of these people starting companies already hang out in a bunch of Discord servers in their personal lives, and so there's a (small) network effect and they just default to Discord for their professional lives.
Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7
Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.
Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.
I wouldn't say so. Have you used Element Messenger? The default trust policy is certainly optimised for something else. Similarly to default and encouraged synapse configuration. Not saying it's the wrong tradeoff but Matrix/Element are certainly not fundamentally putting privacy above their other goals.
We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so with self-hosting that puts up us to just about $40 a month only for the sake of getting mobile notifications. In practice most people won't be on their phones but notifications are still required for off-hours or on-the-move communications. But very low volume, like at current pricing maybe $0.5 per notification that wouldn't have been served by a desktop client.
I get it, it is a way to support development. But why does it always have to be per user? And why not keep first 10 users free, so that 11 users only pays for 1 user, 12 for 2 etc. That would mean a lot for small teams, and reflect value a ton better.
I guess with every service having a free tier means there truly can't exist a cheap offering. And the minute you go over any of the arbitrary limits you need to suddenly pay a lot.
Apparently notifications was completely free until December of last year. From completely free to $3.5 per user. It just feels weird (not saying free is sustainable, but $3.5 per user is a pretty arbitrary number).
Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards Zulip, but the entire industry that somehow converged on pretty much the same terms.
From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.
As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
https://zulip.com/help/using-zulip-via-email
You get to reuse already existing filtering and what not, and everyone can keep using their email client
That said, it appears that XMPP might be workable here: eJabberd is still actively maintained, and there are mobile clients (namely, Monal for iOS and Conversations for Android) that appear to support push notifications. Given your talk of self-hosting, I feel comfortable recommending something that requires some degree of system administration investment.
I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?
Definitely try it out without bearing the mobile experience any mind.
Generally, Zulip is one of those tools that I'm happy to pay for even if I don't need any of the non-free features. At $40/mo, it's worth it for the multiples of time it'll save you.
Definitely try it.
Deleted Comment
It is like the olden days, where piracy of Photoshop didn't put a dent in Adobe. They got free advertising and everyone grew up learning their product. But since you could get the "best" tool for free that meant you wouldn't pay for a cheap alternative (that actually had you as their target group), completely killing an entire section of applications - they were the true victims of piracy.
I feel like that is happening with these kinds of tools. Slack et al do have free options that are completely obliterating the hope to target businesses that don't need as much.
99.9% of all the features you are paying for is pure bloat. It costs money to develop and I get that, but then I don't want it either.
https://mattermost.com/
https://zulip.com/features/
https://zulip.com/self-hosting/#self-hosted
i do understand the need for "charging people somehow", same as how some say their product is open source but you still have to pay per user even when its hosted on your own machines, why bother then? its not like i have "security" concerns from E2EE of facebook.
when we are talking "self hosting" then that would mean i get to self-manage but also i am not restricted by features otherwise whats the point?
look at zulip for example.
their cloud hosted version is plus version for $10/user. same for self-hosted business version at $6.67/user. So at the cost of self hosting and management and storage and administration i am only getting a discount of $3.33? again, why bother at this point?
There was a blog article from Zulip explaining this.
https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-comme...
Which is better backed by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799
It’s the cost of the developers who fix bugs and keep the product moving forward. Those cost a lot more, and you need them regardless of where your instance is hosted.
Thank God! Hard to believe that it took until 9.0, but they made the right call.
Probably for "big community" things differ and make you like Zulip more? Or something else? I'm curious.
Seems like there should be deadly sins for certain fields, and one such deadly sin is for an instant messenger to change what you send to people.
> A date picker will appear once you type `<time`.
> Our next meeting is scheduled for <time:2020-05-28T13:30:00+05:30>
> A person in San Francisco will see:
> Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:00 AM.
> While someone in India will see:
> Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:30 PM.
(Note that the sender opts in to this with a specific syntax; we don’t try to heuristically match anything that looks like a time.)
In the issue you linked, the root problem is that the anti-fingerprinting browser feature has the browser pretending that its preferred timezone is UTC, resulting in the user seeing all times displayed to them in UTC.
It has nothing to do with the "global times" feature -- that feature just renders an element in your message in the same timezone that it renders the timestamps.
Interesting choice to choose Flutter ... will be interesting to see if that was the right choice in the long term. I get the impression Google has more people working on Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform.
I don't know much about Kotlin Multiplatform or Compose Multiplatform. But from what I've seen, the Android group in general doesn't live up to that high standard as an open-source project. You can report bugs and might get a reply, but can't really participate in the discussion; the public bug often gets linked to a bunch of internal bugs you can't see, and the code reviews for any fix happen in private.
(I lead the Zulip mobile team, so the decision to use Flutter was primarily mine.)
everything works, all the necessary ui widgets are there. no more tinkering around with css or new css flavor of the month. layout is easy peasy.
performance is great. and best, iteration speed is awesome.