--- title: "Zulip Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice" description: "Reviews of Zulip. Learn how real users rate this software's ease-of-use, functionality, overall quality and customer support. Talk to our advisors to see if Zulip is a good fit for you!" source_url: "https://www.softwareadvice.com/remote-work/zulip-profile/reviews/" page_type: "reviews" language: "en" --- 1 million+ businesses helped. Get advice Get Free Advice [Home](https://www.softwareadvice.com/) / [Collaboration Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com/collaboration/) / [Zulip](https://www.softwareadvice.com/remote-work/zulip-profile/) / Zulip Reviews Software Advice offers objective insights based on verified user reviews and independent product and market research. When our advisors match you to a software provider, we may earn a referral fee. [Overview](https://www.softwareadvice.com/remote-work/zulip-profile/) Reviews [Alternatives](https://www.softwareadvice.com/remote-work/zulip-profile/alternatives/) # Zulip User Reviews ## Reviews summary - Overall rating: 4.9/5 - Total reviews: 196 ### Secondary ratings - Ease of use: 4.6/5 - Customer support: 4.8/5 - Value for money: 4.9/5 - Functionality: 4.6/5 ### Rating distribution - 5 stars: 172 reviews (88%) - 4 stars: 24 reviews (12%) - 3 stars: 0 reviews (0%) - 2 stars: 0 reviews (0%) - 1 star: 0 reviews (0%) ### Most mentioned pros - Zulip's interface is very fast, and both the web and mobile apps work well. When we reported a bug in Zulip, the team responded extremely quickly with both a fix and deploying the updated code. - It is a very powerful messaging platform that allows text, image, video, latex, markdown, and code blocks with syntax highlighting. - It encourages users to structure discussions into topics so that chat messages naturally evolve into knowledge bases. And if users are not systematic at the start then as a moderator one gets excellent tools to restructure topics, move them to different channels etc. ### Most mentioned cons - The delay in image uploads behaves strangely. If sending a message with an image, it is possible to send the message before the image is uploaded, but then the image will never appear in the message. - Even the mobile app push notifications are weird because if you get more than one message you can no longer tap the notification to go to the message. - I also think visually when writing a reply in a channel, it gets messy so I often choose to start a new message than reply directly to one. ## Zulip customer reviews Showing reviews 1-25 of 196 (page 1). ### Fast, high quality team chat - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Jacob W. - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 1-3 years · daily - Reviewed: January 2026 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Zulip's interface is very fast, and both the web and mobile apps work well. When we reported a bug in Zulip, the team responded extremely quickly with both a fix and deploying the updated code. There's a wealth of options for private and public channels, types of notifications and their behavior, and robust permissions. #### Cons Zulip has some unique preferences about threading in channels, where every post is intended to be associated with a "topic". It makes sense once you are used to it, but it requires a little relearning. --- ### Finally! Threads, done right! Thank you Zulip! - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Non-Profit Organization Management - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 1-3 years · daily - Reviewed: November 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Zulip is like a breath of fresh air after working with slack / discord and the like for so many years and struggling with their "threads" implementation. In Zulip, you can - wait for it - **move messages** to the right topic! Once a thread goes off-topic, it's so easy to spin off a different discussion and just move all the messages to the right place. With Zulip, you can finally have **on-topic**, organised, discussions in an instant messaging app! So, not only does Zulip improve on the UX of instant messaging, but it's also Open Source and can be self-hosted. What more to ask for ? #### Cons Not much. There was a little bit of a learning curve with streams / topics, but it's one of those things that makes it worth it so much that there's no going back. --- ### streams and topics makes this communication platform very unique and useful - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: less than 1 year · daily - Reviewed: February 2022 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. communication in several open source communities. internal communication in projects. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros the unique idea to organize communication in streams and topics looks so simple, but it is so effective and efficient. It is so much better than all other tools I use or I am forced to used in other projects. It is much easier to concentrate my attention on specific topics and at a specific time. #### Cons I want to subscribe to topics, but this is still on the roadmap. The mobile client is very limited and that's why even on the smartphone I use the web client. I am waiting for the feature to make content in public orgs public available so it can be found via search engines and accessed by guests. --- ### Better than slack - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Biotechnology - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: October 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Does the job at a great price! Have been using it on our 12 ppl team for more than 3 years now. Better than slack, that we used before. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Great value for money, Opinionated and strictly sorted in topics, New stable mobile app, Secure, Custom emojis are fun, Simple user management #### Cons Slow to implement new features. Would love to get a proper "archiving option for topics, not just adding a checkmark. --- ### Cool idea, lots left on the table for execution - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: less than 1 year · weekly - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 1/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Loads of UI config options, has a native mobile app that pairs with it. I haven't yet found a bug in how the software is intended to work. Messaging is speedy and reliable. Super easy to move messages from one channel/place to another, so if you're re-organizing you both don't lose things and also can better consolidate knowledge that accidentally got spread around in different areas. #### Cons Super confusing UI, even after going through all of the config to make it look/act more like you'd expect from a typical modern chat app. Constantly losing threads of conversation in different places, even after thoughtfully consolidating channels. Even the mobile app push notifications are weird because if you get more than one message you can no longer tap the notification to go to the message. --- ### Zulip: business chat for teams that want to review and retrieve information from even at high conversation volume - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Financial Services - Company size: 201-500 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: October 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I know most businesses use Slack, but the problem with Slack is that there's not enough structure to the conversations, which all get interleaved, which makes it impossible to get information out of them retrospectively. Zulip is exactly the right structure -- each topic is its own conversation thread -- to make the chat history easy to review and retrieve information from even at high conversation volume. #### Cons Because Zulip is a less common platform, most folks haven't used it before and have a bit of a learning curve to get fluent in it. I especially recommend that folks invest the time in learning the basic keyboard shortcuts. --- ### Great alternative to $lack - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Felipe B. - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: less than 1 year · daily - Reviewed: November 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. It's a great alternative to Slack, but cheaper and more stable, and it scale with you if you are a startup #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The possibility to organize the different conversation based on topics and channels, so you never missed anything. #### Cons The UI isn't beautiful but really functional. All the rest I think is well though and offers what's needed. --- ### Highly Recommended - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Automotive - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: less than 1 year · daily - Reviewed: October 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. It's been great! Teams crashed, wouldn't open properly and had to manually boot up the "old" version for it to work, it would randomly close in the middle of the work day or fail to show a notification so messages were missed. Zulip has none of these issues. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Easy to set up and easy to use. Microsoft Teams was giving me and my coworkers nothing but headaches until I found Zulip as an alternative. UI is great and straightforward, and works seamlessly with my phone. The search function is great and saves me a lot of time when looking for a specific keyword. I would recommend Zulip to anyone! #### Cons No cons from me. Works exactly how I hoped it would and has made internal communications simple and reliable. --- ### Excellent threaded communications app - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Environmental Services - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: less than 1 year · daily - Reviewed: October 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. We started to use Zulip to have threaded conversations about many different subjects after finding that things were getting lost on Chat, and it worked super well for our purposes. Highly recommended for dynamic remote teams. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Intuitive UI to have threaded conversations. Searchability and findability. Ease of use, minimal onboarding. #### Cons Nothing comes to mind, really! It's a great application (both web and mobile), and it does exactly what it needs to. --- ### A great Business application , would recommend. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: less than 1 year · daily - Reviewed: November 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Seamless experience. A great business centered application. Probably having some official videos about the usage of the application would have been nice. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros - Ability to create additional folders and topics under a channel. - Security and user assignment - Haven't used the bot but i can imagine the use of it. - Mobile APP for easy access. - Ability to invite user outside the organization. #### Cons - Sometimes takes time to load on mac after inactivity. Have to restart to make it work. - Sound notification is not easy to setup on windows. --- ### The best collaboration platform - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Entertainment - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 1-3 years · daily - Reviewed: May 2025 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered It's always been fantastic, from documentation to the community chat and open-source code, as well as implementing integrations. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Ease of use, mature and stable software, attentive support team, high quality code and experienced developer/product team! #### Cons A few nice-to-have features have not matured, such as widgets. --- ### Zulip is essential for running a succesful research group - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Research - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: March 2023 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Everything feels well done, and it's not a RAM hoarder unlike other similar systems. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Great customer support, they are super willing to help for both open source projects and research groups.The experience is just flawless, there is absolutely no need for slack when zulip exists.We rely heavily on the history log in zulip to look up old charts that were shared via Zulipand to document important points.Also we can share accounts with collaborators, which eases communication a lot, since zulip also worksvery well in its browser version. #### Cons The only thing I don't like about zulip is thatthere is no option to change the math behaviour and use $$ instead of the default ```math environment.This is however a super low priority thing. --- ### Excellent all around - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Excellent, zero complaints. I recommend it to anybody who needs a chat client for work. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Huge fan of the customisation options, the very functional UI and especially the topics system makes information way better organised than my time on Slack and Teams. #### Cons Not much to hate. I had a few features I missed from Slack when we moved but I put feature requests on GitHub and they were all implemented. --- ### Zulip is Great! - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Hospital & Health Care - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 1-3 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Excellent. Thank you to [sensitive content hidden] & the Team @ Zulip #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Functionality. Communication well organized in one place. Efficiency with team communication. #### Cons Slack has a more crisp UI. The interface for Zulip doesn't look great. The backend is good though. --- ### Great Team Communications Tool! - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Electrical/ Electronic Manufacturing - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 1-3 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Works great on desktop and mobile. Looking forward to implementing some integrations when we get the time. On the free plan right now but would gladly upgrade when our team expands and our usage picks up. Highly recommended! #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros We try to use and support smaller and open source technologies, and Zulip really fits the bill for team communications. I also like the fact that there's a self-hosting capability, though we haven't done it yet. #### Cons I don't have any dislikes. It's a little rough around the edges compared to Slack and Teams, but that has never been a problem. --- ### Zulip's top features are named threads - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 1001-5000 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Zulip's top feature is the ease with which you create named threads, you just type in the thread title, and then start a conversation. By using named threads, conversations are way easier to search, and feel less like a chat, more live a live forum. #### Cons Everything was great for me, I have recommended Zulip to my past employer and there are still using it, and I'm now using it in my team as well. --- ### Best Open-Source Slack Alternative - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: E-Learning - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 1-3 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. I use it for academic and small-team communication purpose instead of Slack. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Open-source, free tier is fantastic, ease of use, conversation labels make it fairly easy to find threads #### Cons I think Slack thread UI is a little more intuitive. I miss being able to branch off from an existing conversation and see number of replies to that thread. --- ### So far so good - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Telecommunications - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Our team went from hipchat to zulip (we also looked at alternatives) and after a few years I must say I really like zulip. We use it mainly for text chat, document exchange, code snippets reviews. The tool gets regular updates and works like a charm. Hope it continues that way. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Reliable. Easy to use. Powerful Search. Threaded Conversations. Integration with other tools (jenkins, ...) #### Cons Not plug and play for a small team but once setup it's OK. --- ### Loving Zulip! 💬 ❤️ - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Loved self-hosting it on my own server in Azure, but after we moved to zulip.com we are always running with the latest release which is fantastic #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Channels with topics, custom emojis, email alerts, mobile app, push notifications #### Cons Don’t have any complaints other than sometimes the iOS app gets a little slow or out of sync with incoming push notifications --- ### Great open source app for team communication - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Research - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I’ve been using Zulip as an open source alternative to slack. I use it for quick communication with my research group of 15-20 students. It provides easy navigation and organisation into channels and topics. Unlike slack, it does not delete messages after 90 days! #### Cons Some actions don’t feel intuitive. IIRC, various roles in the organisation have not worked as expected. New posts get added to a ‘no topic’ - and need to be moved manually. Adding a new person to a DM creates a new conversation- they can’t see older messages. --- ### Excellent experience - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Higher Education - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. It's very good. Our team migrants from Slack to Zulip because Slack will charge a fee. It took something to get used to using Zulip but overall it is very good. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros free, keep all information, good connection with email #### Cons i don't think i can view pdf attachments without downloading them. I would appreciate this feature. --- ### Old men using Zuilp - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Think Tanks - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: less than 1 year · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Very positive, our little global social group , would not survive without it. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 3/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 3/5 #### Pros The simple clean interface , and ease of managing diverse topics #### Cons No strong dislike, Im not a web developer, so would like so see more , easier to integrate features --- ### Simple, effective and not overloaded - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Computer & Network Security - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: October 2025 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Simple, effective, and not overloaded. Zulip is the perfect solution for us with a lot of control, while keeping it easy to organize. The self-hosting options are great if you want more control. #### Cons Creating bots might be a bit confusing at first as there are many different options and docs. But ultimately it worked great. --- ### Zulip enabled seamless 500x growth for our community - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Higher Education - Company size: 10000+ employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. The app seems to be run by a dedicated team who really care about getting things right at a high level. Again and again we saw very responsive reactions from the devs to even the smallest queries/suggestions for improvement. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros In six years our community grew from 20 users to 10,000 and Zulip scaled effortlessly. The thread/channel set-up enables many different conversations to happen simultaneously. Extremely fast and efficient technical support. Ability by admins to move threads around to new threads ensures conversations remain coherent even if they split and go off on a tangent. Very powerful linkifier system which we put to extensive use. #### Cons Search on the Android app is not as powerful as on the desktop app. It is also a great shame that our chat is not indexed by Google because it is by far the largest and most important resource for my community. --- ### Fun experience on Zulip - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Industry: Mechanical or Industrial Engineering - Company size: 10000+ employees - Product usage: 3-5 years · daily - Reviewed: December 2024 - Review source details: This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. Excellent. It has provided a significant boost to my team and some colleagues start adopting it. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Very easy to use and portable to all platforms. My students love it. #### Cons No complaint so far. Easy to manage on top of it. ---