
Zulip
Team chat with threading
The Lens
Zulip fixes chat overload with threading that actually works. Every message belongs to a topic within a stream (channel). You can follow specific topics, mute others, and catch up on what matters without reading everything. It's how chat should have worked from the start. Apache 2.0. Full-featured: markdown, code blocks, integrations (GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, 100+), search, file sharing, video calls, and mobile apps. The web app is fast. The threading model means you can be away for a day and catch up in 10 minutes by scanning topic titles.
Zulip Cloud: free for small teams (up to 10K messages searchable). Standard at $6.67/user/month for full history and features. Self-hosting is free and unlimited.
The catch: threading is Zulip's superpower and its adoption barrier. People used to Slack's flat channel model find it confusing at first. Convincing a team to switch from Slack requires everyone to learn a new interaction pattern. And the ecosystem is smaller: fewer third-party integrations, fewer bots, less community tooling than Slack.
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Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
free self hosted paid cloud### Free (Cloud) - Unlimited users - 10,000 messages of searchable history - File storage: 5GB total - Core integrations - Community support
### Standard Cloud: $6.67/user/month (billed annually) - Full message history - 10GB file storage per user - All integrations - SAML/OIDC SSO - Guest accounts - Custom emoji
### Enterprise Cloud: $12.50/user/month - Everything in Standard - Compliance exports - Custom terms of service - Priority support - Advanced LDAP sync
### Self-Hosted: Free - Unlimited everything - All features (including SSO) - Docker or bare-metal install - You manage Postgres, RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcached
### The Math 25-person team on Slack Pro: $7.25/user/month = $181/mo. Same team on Zulip Standard: $6.67/user/month = $167/mo. Self-hosted Zulip: ~$20/mo for a VPS. The self-hosted route saves $147/mo but costs you ops time. Slack's free tier is more generous (90 days of history vs Zulip's 10K messages).
Self-host for free unlimited. Cloud is $6.67/user/month. Free tier has limited search history.
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