Zulip has easily the best threading model among all the chat applications and I prefer it over Slack, Mattermost, RocketChat, Hipchat, Discord etc. Each and every conversation is a seperate thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations. Once you get used to the threading model of Zulip its hard to tolerate threading model like Slack which is really inefficient and time wasting.

I use Zulip instead of Slack, Mattermost, or RocketChat because of its first class threading. One week after switching to Gmail (in 2004) I realized I was never (willingly) going to use an unthreaded email product again. I had that same experience the first time I saw Zulip.

Zulip is also fully open-source, with a well-maintained (e.g. 90+% test coverage, fully static python), easily extensible code-base. In many companies, your communication platform (chat or email) is the center of the workplace -- no one asks for a chat integration into their calendar, they ask for a calendar integration into their chat. A fully open-source codebase means you can customize Zulip to your needs, and are never at the whim of a corporate maintainer who can't or won't fix simple bugs, or who will charge you tens of thousands of dollars for making minor customizations.

I use Zulip because I love how it lets me focus on my work, and doesn't need me to be constantly online to be able to participate in conversations that matter to me. Zulip's topics make it super easy to get an overview of all the conversations that happened while I was away, and pick and choose the conversations that I want to catch-up with. Slack 's threads seem like an after-thought and aren't effective for catching-up at all!

I also love the Zulip community, and the care and effort put in by the members to make it a friendly and welcoming community to new developers, and to make the contribution experience pleasant for all the contributors.

For many(if not all) small and medium size business time and cost matter a lot.

That's why languages, frameworks, tools, and services that are easy to use and provide 0 to productive in less time, it's best.

Maybe Node.js frameworks might provide better features compared to Rails but in terms of MVPs, for us Rails is the leading alternative.

Amazon EC2 might be cheaper and more customizable than Heroku but in the initial terms of a project, you need to complete configurationos and deploy early.

Advanced configurations can be done down the road, when the project is running and making money, not before.

But moving fast isn't the only thing we care about. We also take the job to leave a good codebase from the beginning and because of that we try to follow, as much as we can, style guides in Ruby with RuboCop and in JavaScript with ESLint and StandardJS.

Finally, comunication and keeping a good history of conversations, decisions, and discussions is important so we use a mix of Slack and Twist

Slack is the industry standard for managed instant messaging (IM). A good alternative would be to self (or cloud) host an open source IM such as Mattermost but as always it would be a good idea to do a cost benefit analysis between the solutions.

Some of the main things to consider:

• Having a good SDK for plugin creation
• Having good integrations with existing tools ( JIRA , GitHub , OpsGenie , etc.)
• Cost
• Maintenance and administration
• Covers all your businesses use cases

I use Slack because it offers the best experience, even on the free tier (which we're still using). As a comparison, I have had in depth experience with HipChat, Stride, Skype, Google Chat (the new service), Google Hangouts (the old service). For self hosted, Mattermost is open source and claims to support most Slack integrations, but I have not extensively investigated this claim.

We run a major community project named as @Donut which is an #OpenSource social platform which allows communities to set up their own social environment and @slack platform drives us through the best experience of community interaction. Though we have been using some Open Source Interacting platforms like Gitter and Zulip but the fact that Slack exists and is such an essential tool, it’s really helped us with scaling and still feeling connected to one another across remote places with various teams with appropriate features in it.

The #User-Friendly Slack brings all the organised conversations at one place giving a prospectus to feel the better user experience on desktop.

Followings its pros:

• Allow creating of various channels which can be best suited to organised #projects, #teams and #events.
• Allow multiple tools and integrations such as Google Drive and GitHub
• Video Conferencing addition helps teams to organise meetings.
• No limit for addition of users and its free.
• Allow threads to keep side conversations from derailing the topic or project at hand.

The most crucial thing it supports the best security and protection with 2 factors authentication.

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."