
Chanty
Team chat and collaboration with channels, audio/video calls, and task management
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Threaded team chat that blends email clarity with real‑time speed
Zulip offers topic‑based threading for live and asynchronous conversations, enabling large organizations and open‑source projects to stay organized, productive, and focused on collaboration.

Zulip is a team collaboration platform that blends the clarity of email with the immediacy of chat through topic‑based threading. It serves distributed engineering groups, open‑source communities, and large enterprises that need both live discussion and asynchronous follow‑up without losing context.
Each conversation is organized into topics, allowing multiple threads to coexist in a single stream. The system scales to thousands of users, is backed by an active community of over 1,500 contributors, and includes extensive documentation. Teams can run Zulip on‑premises using Ubuntu/Debian packages, Docker images, or pre‑built droplets for Digital Ocean and Render, or they can adopt the managed Zulip Cloud Standard service. The Apache‑2.0 license ensures freedom to modify and integrate the platform with existing workflows.
When teams consider Zulip, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Cross‑functional project coordination
Threads keep each feature discussion separate, preventing information overload.
Open‑source community support
Contributors can catch up on discussions asynchronously, improving onboarding.
Compliance‑heavy enterprise communication
Threaded records provide clear audit trails for regulatory review.
Remote education or study groups
Students follow specific lecture topics without losing the broader conversation.
Messages are grouped under a topic within a stream, allowing multiple conversations to run in parallel while staying in the same channel.
Yes, Zulip provides Ubuntu/Debian packages, Docker images, and pre‑built droplets for Digital Ocean and Render for self‑hosting.
Zulip Cloud Standard offers a managed service for organizations that prefer not to maintain infrastructure.
You can contribute code, report issues, translate, or join outreach programs like Google Summer of Code; extensive documentation guides new contributors.
Zulip is released under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing free use, modification, and distribution.
Project at a glance
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