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Slack vs Zulip: What are the differences?

Introduction

Slack and Zulip are both popular messaging and collaboration platforms that offer various features for team communication and project management. However, there are key differences between the two.

  1. Message Organization: One significant difference between Slack and Zulip lies in how they organize messages. Slack uses a channel-based approach, where team members join specific channels and conversations occur around these channels. On the other hand, Zulip utilizes a topic-based approach, allowing users to organize conversations within streams, where each stream is further divided into topics. This topic-based organization in Zulip provides more granular control over discussions and helps prevent conversation fragmentation.

  2. Threads and Inline Replies: Another distinctive feature of Zulip is its support for threaded conversations and inline replies. When someone replies to a message in Zulip, they can either create a new thread or respond directly under the original message, keeping the conversation focused and organized. In Slack, replies to messages are not inherently threaded, making it easier for discussions to get dispersed across multiple threads or channels.

  3. Message Search: While both Slack and Zulip offer message search functionality, Zulip provides more advanced search capabilities. Zulip allows users to search for messages not only by keywords but also by stream, sender, date, and other criteria. In Slack, the search feature primarily focuses on finding messages based on keywords, which can be limiting when trying to locate specific conversations or information.

  4. Open-source vs Proprietary Software: Zulip sets itself apart by being an open-source platform, meaning its source code is available and can be modified and customized by users. This allows for greater flexibility, integration options, and potential self-hosting capabilities. Slack, on the other hand, is a proprietary software and does not provide access to its underlying code, limiting customization options to what is offered by the platform itself.

  5. Pricing Model: Slack and Zulip also differ in their pricing models. Slack follows a tiered pricing structure based on the number of users and additional features, such as increased storage or advanced administration controls. In contrast, Zulip offers its core features for free and charges based on optional add-ons like priority support or increased storage. This pricing approach makes Zulip potentially more cost-effective for small teams or organizations with specific needs.

  6. User Interface: The user interface in Slack and Zulip differs in terms of their visual design and layout. Slack follows a more traditional chat interface, emphasizing simplicity and familiarity with a vertically-oriented chat window. Zulip, on the other hand, presents conversations in a more structured manner, displaying streams and topics hierarchically on the left side of the interface. This hierarchical organization can be advantageous for users who prefer a more structured approach to message management.

In summary, Slack and Zulip differ in their message organization methods, support for threaded conversations, search functionality, open-source vs proprietary nature, pricing models, and user interface design. These differences provide varying benefits and cater to different preferences and requirements within teams and organizations.

Advice on Slack and Zulip
Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

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."

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Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

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Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 198.9K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

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Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

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Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 194.3K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

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Decisions about Slack and Zulip
Kamaldeep Singh

I still use slack, although I prefer discord. It can be intergrated with discord to work with clients who only want to use slack or even any other platform. API integrations are possible over at Discord.

The awful crappy dependency hell of a thing they call an API. Everything sucks. Slack is one of the worst messaging apps I have ever seen. It's incredibly slow and laggy.

Let me rant about everything I hate about slack. Even though I use it as an integration for another platform and will recommend it even though it's horrible as a whole. They are unstoppable towards companies who don't have people technically savvy enough to transition any other software.

It's so bad I am considering making my own mix of discord and slack.

Finding conversations you know you've had - but search is (Still) terrible, and if it was a direct message with a group of people, you have to remember exactly which group of people it was with

Search...absolutely awful. If they could figure out search, Slack would be unstoppable. it got better with ctrl f in conversations, but still isn't there

Badly arranged Chinese buffet of people, conversations, channels, files and links.. and search sucks too.. Break up the people into a separate window so I can have a buddy list ala Communicator or Skype. Give me some freaking organization and curation to the conversations - otherwise it's 1000 person cocktail party with everyone playing drinking games.

AGAIN! Search sucks. Spellcheck is still broken. Too many notifications.

Interface ist inconsistent between devices.

No way to forbid slack to touch my microphone settings (seriously, dont autoadjust my microphone level, it never works and i hate you so much for it)

Still no good screen sharing on linux.

The buggy red dot. Usually shift-esc will clear it (in itself a pain), but now even that hack won't help. The red dot number keep climbing even though I've read everything and used shift-esc.

I miss some features but I wish slack had a little more ability to organize, group channels, and navigate a little better.

user groups need work... If I search for a group, open it, I want to be able to not just see who is online from that group, but also a message button. I'm sick of searching that person, which closes user groups and if that person is actually AFK, I have to search for that group AGAIN and do it again... What a waste of time compared to other tools which are supporting this.

Date stamps needs to be more visible, or give us option in settings to make it more/less visible

Scrolling needs to be improved, I don't want random jumps there. Especially when time and date stamps are so tiny so it takes a while to get oriented again.

I used to really hate slack, but that's mostly because I have to use user groups a lot, most of the time I'm using slack it's to find someone who belongs to some group and message him... and that stuff is still pretty bad, even tho it was changed a bit...

oh and microphone settings... that hurts bad...

It's slow and laggy if you ever used a native program and got used to responsive user interfaces.

You can't remove someone from a call if they join by mistake

(or, to put it another way, if you start a channel call, you should be able to moderate it and remove those from it who are to meant to be there)

Video calls (using the "native" app on macOS) consume so much resources that the whole machine becomes unresponsive. A video call with the same number of people in a true native app is not a problem. So it's not the inherent bandwidth and processing power required. I mostly like Slack but for remote teams this is a problem.

You really want to know what I hate about SLACK...

The inability for the app to BLOCK DIRECT MESSAGING when outside work hours... I work for global company and I constantly get messaged after midnight by morons who think i am up at 3am

It has this Bullcrap Send Anyway function on messages which totally overrides my Do Not Disturb settings if said moron is blind of what time they are sending their damn message... I worked oncall before so the slightest him of my cell at night will wake me up...

Another annoyance on messaging... Idiots who message direct over chatting in the team channel for stuff that should be seen by the whole team working a ticket .... Or classic hey I opened a ticket not two minutes ago ' can someone look at this ticket pleaee' blah blah blah blah ... People who I don't know sending a random 'HI' and no other info about wtfh they are reaching out to me about ...

If SLACK wants to add a function to fix this I want control to block direct messages from anyone truly outside my direct team and line of management that is not a member of a group that can engage onCalls for issues ... I am so sick and tired of this I literally have to uninstall the app everyday to ensure no one bothers me after I am off work and then redownload it before the start of the next day... It's pathetic!

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As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.

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Hirotaka Ishihara
Undergrad at University of Toronto · | 3 upvotes · 181.8K views

Communication We have chosen two tools for our team communication.

  • Slack

We choose Slack since all of us are familiar with this communication tool. We have a private channel for our team Sphinx for text messages. We added Github apps inside our private channel for repo update notifications. Furthermore, we could contact the subject matter experts within the workspace DCSIL directly for the issues we meet.

  • Microsoft Teams

We use Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings for its fast connection speed. In addition, the call feature in Slack is a paid feature, and we could have virtual meetings and share screens for free in Microsoft Teams.

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Remotor Consulting
at Remotor Consulting Group · | 13 upvotes · 122K views

Keybase is a powerful and secure team-organizing software. And because Keybase is so transparently good at what it does, Keybase is a foundational software that facilitates the future of work: effective, inclusive, secure Remote Teams.

Keybase is a free, end-to-end encrypted, open-source program with almost limitless flexibility. Each Keybase user or team is a unique cryptographic identity. Each message or interaction that a user has with a team or other user, is verifiable and digitally-signed. Custom combinations of users/teams/bots, can be designed to catalyze Remote Teams of all kinds, this process can also be automated. Keybase includes Git integration for versioning, bots from multiple platforms to facilitate audio/video-conferencing, a Cryptocurrency wallet, and many advanced privacy features to make you more or less traceable.

Services like Slack and Discord are centralized platforms that perform analytics on your behavior and can sell or leak this data to 3rd parties. Any audio/video features available within Slack or Discord, are bound to be less secure and less flexible than excellent alternatives such as Jitsi. Slack and Discord do have a fun, causal feel to them, which can potentially facilitate social engagement in certain conditions (also many users are already on these platforms).

Centralized and Proprietary team platforms such as Discord and Slack have a large market presence (at least in the USA) based on their first-mover advantage, name recognition, and network effects from size. However these products do not have the flexibility or power of Keybase. Keybase excels on its own excellence, and also has an open and active developer community.

Find us on Keybase: @remotorteam (Keybase username) @remotor.public (Public Keybase Team)

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Stefan Schuchlenz

We chose RocketChat over other communications suites like Cliq or Slack mainly because we can self-host it on our own infrastructure. Since we have quite some projects going on which demand that we stay in touch with a lot of different stakeholders, pricing was an issue, too. With RocketChat, we have a huge set of features basically for free, RC offers apps for all major devices and systems and overall, we're very happy with it. The only downside is the limited amount of apps and integrations, but we can make due with what we have available.

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Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 248.8K views

we were using slack and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.

on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.

we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.

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Pros of Slack
Pros of Zulip
  • 1.2K
    Easy to integrate with
  • 876
    Excellent interface on multiple platforms
  • 849
    Free
  • 694
    Mobile friendly
  • 690
    People really enjoy using it
  • 331
    Great integrations
  • 315
    Flexible notification preferences
  • 198
    Unlimited users
  • 184
    Strong search and data archiving
  • 155
    Multi domain switching support
  • 82
    Easy to use
  • 40
    Beautiful
  • 27
    Hubot support
  • 22
    Unread/read control
  • 21
    Slackbot
  • 19
    Permalink for each messages
  • 17
    Text snippet with highlighting
  • 15
    Quote message easily
  • 14
    Per-room notification
  • 13
    Awesome integration support
  • 12
    Star for each message / attached files
  • 12
    IRC gateway
  • 11
    Good communication within a team
  • 11
    Dropbox Integration
  • 10
    Slick, search is great
  • 10
    Jira Integration
  • 9
    New Relic Integration
  • 8
    Great communication tool
  • 8
    Combine All Services Quickly
  • 8
    Asana Integration
  • 7
    This tool understands developers
  • 7
    XMPP gateway
  • 7
    Google Drive Integration
  • 7
    Awesomeness
  • 6
    Replaces email
  • 6
    Twitter Integration
  • 6
    Google Docs Integration
  • 6
    BitBucket integration
  • 5
    Jenkins Integration
  • 5
    GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
  • 5
    Guest and Restricted user control
  • 4
    Clean UI
  • 4
    Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
  • 4
    GitHub integration
  • 4
    Mention list view
  • 4
    Gathers all my communications in one place
  • 3
    Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Easy to add a reaction
  • 3
    Timely while non intrusive
  • 3
    Great on-boarding
  • 3
    Threaded chat
  • 3
    Visual Studio Integration
  • 3
    Easy to start working with
  • 3
    Android app
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    Message Actions
  • 2
    It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
  • 2
    So much better than email
  • 2
    Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
  • 2
    Great interface
  • 2
    Great Channel Customization
  • 2
    Markdown
  • 2
    Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
  • 1
    Great Support Team
  • 1
    Watch
  • 1
    Multi work-space support
  • 1
    Flexible and Accessible
  • 1
    Better User Experience
  • 1
    Archive Importing
  • 1
    Travis CI integration
  • 1
    It's the coolest IM ever
  • 1
    Community
  • 1
    Great API
  • 1
    Easy remote communication
  • 1
    Get less busy
  • 1
    API
  • 1
    Zapier integration
  • 1
    Targetprocess integration
  • 1
    Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
  • 1
    Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
  • 1
    I was 666 star :D
  • 1
    Dev communication Made Easy
  • 1
    Integrates with just about everything
  • 1
    Very customizable
  • 0
    Platforms
  • 0
    Easy to useL
  • 65
    Open source
  • 48
    Great Community
  • 40
    Extensive developer documentation
  • 38
    Powered by Python
  • 34
    Clean & Smooth UI
  • 26
    Full text search
  • 25
    Dozens of integrations
  • 25
    Threading model
  • 21
    On-premise deployment
  • 16
    Fully internationalized
  • 12
    Cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android)
  • 5
    Its very good forsearching and chatting with topics
  • 3
    Awesome open source alternative to Slack
  • 3
    Runs very well
  • 2
    Very Nice
  • 1
    Mobile Push Notification
  • 1
    LDAP Integration

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Cons of Slack
Cons of Zulip
  • 13
    Can be distracting depending on how you use it
  • 6
    Requires some management for large teams
  • 6
    Limit messages history
  • 5
    Too expensive
  • 5
    You don't really own your messages
  • 4
    Too many notifications by default
  • 1
    Integration with most of well known services
  • 0
    The interface require a lot of overhaul

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Slack?

Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together.

What is Zulip?

Zulip is powerful, open source team chat that combines the immediacy of real-time chat with the productivity benefits of threaded conversations. Zulip allows busy managers and others in meetings all day to participate in their teams chats.

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What companies use Slack?
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Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

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What are some alternatives to Slack and Zulip?
Microsoft Teams
See content and chat history anytime, including team chats with Skype that are visible to the whole team. Private group chats are available for smaller group conversations.
Discord
Discord is a modern free voice & text chat app for groups of gamers. Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built in DDoS protection with automatic server failover.
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.
Skype
Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.
Asana
Asana is the easiest way for teams to track their work. From tasks and projects to conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish--and get results. Available at asana.com and on iOS & Android.
See all alternatives