
Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading - tabbott
http://blog.zulip.org/2018/04/18/zulip-1-8-released/
======
voidmain
We used Zulip (then a commercial product) at FoundationDB, and really liked
it. We had teams in two cities.

The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it
more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It
also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about.

But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen
streams in more or less chronological order. It makes it much easier to keep
up with what you care about asynchronously without throwing everything into a
single stream. And therefore it is easier to _put down_ , and to use
notifications very selectively, which mitigates some of the major _downsides_
of company chat.

I haven't used Slack recently either, but as I understand it its "all unreads"
feature is much clunkier.

I haven't used a recent version, but I would definitely consider using it
again.

~~~
halestock
Off topic, but man I wish FoundationDB hadn't disappeared.

~~~
itp
(worked at FoundationDB)

Me too.

Back on topic, I really enjoyed Zulip as well. It wasn't perfect, but it very
much did feel like they were actually getting the marriage of email and chat
closer to right. Slack just feels like a shitty chat client that uses all of
my RAM.

~~~
voidmain
Hey, we should get lunch some time!

------
zestyping
It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or
videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most
productive group chat" and "email threading model."

The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to
[https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/](https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/)
and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to
find.

~~~
tabbott
We're definitely planning to provide a slick explanation on zulipchat.com.
Using chat.zulip.org is helpful, especially if you visit a day later and read
the message history; since you really only experience Zulip's magic properly
when catching up on a bunch of unread messages (the `n` hotkey in particular
is super great).

That said, [https://zulipchat.com/features](https://zulipchat.com/features)
has a screenshot; and
[https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985](https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985)
does a pretty good job of explaining the concept. And
[https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-
zulip](https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip) explains some of
how Zulip's model can make a big difference in how an organization
communicates.

(I'm the Zulip project leader and wrote the blog post)

~~~
mikekchar
Given that it's free software, it might be worth making the install
instructions a little bit more visible. At least then people can whip up a VM
and try it on their own. The instructions[0] look straight forward, though I
haven't tried it.

Just a quick question... How difficult is it to build, install and run from
source? I guess I'm slightly concerned about the "it expects to have the whole
machine" in the requirements section. Is that just for your installation
scripts, or are there assumptions baked into the server? (Apologies for asking
without looking myself!)

Making that build process super easy (if it isn't already) might lower some
barriers for the technical crowd (personally I don't like setting up VMs...
maybe it's just because I'm old :-) ). Possibly you can leverage more from
your free software angle.

[0] -
[https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.1/prod.html](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.1/prod.html)

~~~
tabbott
Building one's own release is easy. Before I get into how, you should be
linking to
[https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.8.0/prod.html](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.8.0/prod.html)
for installation instructions -- that's the much simplified install
instructions for the latest release.

In the Zulip development environment, you can build your own release tarball
with `tools/build-release-tarball`. Or you can just clone the Git repo and run
`scripts/setup/install` directly (similarly, you can use `scripts/upgrade-
zulip-from-git` to upgrade to any Git ref, which is great for running a pre-
release version or a small fork).

The "expects to have the whole machine" story is just that we need to
configure third-party services like nginx, postgres, redis, and memcached, and
it's very hard to write configuration for all of those to support Zulip that
doesn't carry some risk of breaking an arbitrary third-party app that might
have been installed first.

------
jaynagpaul
Another threaded slack alternative I've found enjoyable is Spectrum.
([https://spectrum.chat](https://spectrum.chat)) They've recently open sourced
as well,
([https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum](https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum)).
Their design is appealing, and I can see a lot of work being done on the
platform. Not affiliated or anything, just a fan.

P.S: I'm trying to create a community for "Bored Hackers", and you can check
it out here and say hi!
([https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers](https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers))

~~~
fiatjaf
I like Spectrum. It's just a forum.

------
zingmars
I love Zulip. I really wish other IM clients implemented functionality similar
to Zulip's threading. It allows for easily filtering converstations and makes
reading history that much easier.

That said, what Zulip lacks right now is polish. Server installation for
example is a mess. You basically need a dedicated Debian machine to install
it. There is a docker image that I'm using, but it's rather unstable (if I
will have to make changes to the configuration, I fear I will have to spend
hours trying to fix it). You also NEED to have a SSL certificate which means
that testing in a local network isn't as painless as simply installing the
server. There's also problems with the search function (it barely works),
lacks things like archiving topics (or hiding them), enabling app
notifications using their Google Play App requires you to send them an email
and a few other things. Their apps also feel sluggish. They have an old
Cordova app that is slowly losing compatibility with the server and a new app
that is fairly slow. The desktop app is an electron app and it also has some
issues.

Thankfully issue reporting is fairly painless.

~~~
tabbott
Thanks for the feedback! I agree with some of these complaints (e.g. I very
much wanted to fix the push notification registration process in this
release), but I'd like to clarify a few things:

* Needing an SSL certificate should not really be a barrier. We now have an installer option to use Certbot which works great if you're on the public Internet, and if you're not, we have simple instructions for creating a self-signed certificate.

* Zulip has never had a Cordova app. I assume you're referring to the [legacy Android app]([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.andr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.android)), which was written in Java (and is deprecated in favor of [an RN app]([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobil...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobile&hl=en)) which lets us share most of the hard work of mobile development between Android and iOS).

* I'm surprised by your comment about search; we often hear from users that they love Zulip's search. Can you open an issue with more details about what you're seeing? I'm wondering if e.g. search is broken in the Docker image.

As a sidenote, for the Electron desktop app in particular, all the performance
issues that we could reproduce went away with the latest update (not because
we changed something in our code, but because we upgraded Electron which had
upgraded Chromium to a newer version with fewer performance bugs). If you're
still seeing issues with app version 1.9.0, I'd love to see a profile captured
from the app's developer tools.

~~~
zingmars
Oh my bad then. I don't know why I though it was a Cordova app. Might have
been because our last chat provider had one and I was mixing them up. My
problem with search is that it doesn't find URLs. I think it was reported
already, but I will check anyway.

------
donaldguy
I feel like a little background would help this thread. I vaguely know/knew
some of the founders, but am not really in touch anymore

Zulip was started as, and basically still was last I used it, a
modernization/web-ification of the BarnOwl[1] curses/terminal client for,
mostly, MIT's (and CMU's, inter alia [2]) legacy Zephyr[3] IM protocol.
(though BarnOwl also has support for XMPP, IRC, AIM, and Twitter). MIT
students who were into the zephyr community also tended to like the
interleaved-thread with option to narrow to specific filters view. The Subject
part of threading comes as largely an accident of Zephyr's implementation[4]

Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014:
[https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-
a-s...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-
workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/)

and subsequently open sourced in 2015. Zulipchat.com is a second company
formed around Zulip by (OP) one of the original founding members of the pre-
acquisition company to (I'm speculating) keep the project healthy and active
and give people a hosted option. It is not primarily aggressively pursuing
market share, capitalization, etc. That is why it doesn't like price
aggressively to compete with Slack, etc. as someone EIT was confused about

I took the time to spin this out from memory, etc. but then I found it was
mostly covered (or if you prefer corroborated) here:
[https://zulipchat.com/history/](https://zulipchat.com/history/)

Anyway its a good model for organized communications once you get used to it
and I'd recommend it if you are in a small enough company/team with enough
latitude to experiment with such. It would also be cool to see a decent large
public instance as an alternative to ~Mastadon

[1] [https://barnowl.mit.edu/](https://barnowl.mit.edu/)

[2] [https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-
messa...](https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-messaging-
system-is-deployed))

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_\(protocol\))

[4]
[https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node...](https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node20.html)

------
SEJeff
Really fantastic (and simple) overview of zulip from Julia Evans aka b0rk:

[https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985](https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985)

------
needle0
When viewing the page on a Japanese Mac, the letter sequence "am" within "Open
source team chat" is incorrectly displayed as a single-character "A.M."
symbol. It appears the CSS is specifying "'dlig' 1" for the H tags - 'dlig'
stands for Discretionary Ligatures, which triggers all sorts of weird
inadvertent ligatures and should be used, as its name shows, with discretion.
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0)

------
rryan
They offer free hosting for open source projects. It has been really great for
Mixxx (floss DJ software), allowing our ~10 person distributed dev team to
work together much more effectively.

~~~
SXX
That one is interesting. Any major downsides / upsides compared to slack other
than limits?

~~~
rryan
We're coming from Freenode as our only real-time communication so the
difference is night and day. Slack is a no-go for many due to not being FLOSS
and I'm concerned about vendor lock-in if they were to stop being so generous
or run out money and shut down.

Slack's threading model is much worse than Zephyr/Zulip's IMO. Especially on
mobile. The streams/topics flow in the "all conversations" view is an
incredibly intuitive way to keep track of everything that is going on.

------
SXX
If someone tried to do it how easy is it to add to Zulip login with 3rd-party
SSO server like Discourse?

Want to find alternative to Slack for open source project since restricting
they apply getting annoying and it's would be nice to have single point of
registration after all.

~~~
tabbott
Zulip uses python-social-auth for some other backends, so for the more general
version of your question about doing some other third-party auth, the answer
is not super hard. That said, it looks like python-social-auth doesn't have a
backend for Discourse: [https://python-social-
auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends...](https://python-social-
auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/index.html).

It's also probably not super hard to just add a direct authentication backend
for Discourse.

~~~
SXX
Thanks for information. Seems like I should be able to do it.

Though if we want to have little customization like that does it mean we'll
absolutely need to host it on our servers or something like that possible on
hosted plan?

PS: Obviously I get that If I manage to push code upstream hosted option will
support it, but I suppose it's might take a while.

~~~
tabbott
Once something is merged to master in zulip.git, it's usually on zulipchat.com
production within a few days.

So if you do it in a way that gets merged (which requires, e.g., automated
tests appropriate for an authentication backend) and is configurable for just
one organization in a multi-organization server, you would not need to host
your own servers.

------
btrautsc
I was really interested in this.

The first intriguing thing I found was this product is owned by Dropbox.

Slack eating into Dropbox's territory with (decent) file sharing / searching
and Dropbox countering with a alternative chat/ threading app is a nice
battle.

~~~
geofft
Formerly owned by Dropbox, as I understand it—see
[https://zulipchat.com/team/](https://zulipchat.com/team/)

------
the_duke
How does Zulip compare to Mattermost?

Anyone got experience with both?

~~~
ptman
Mattermost is open core. Seems zulip might be as well, but the open source
version seems more featureful

~~~
tabbott
Zulip is 100% open source; we're not playing the "open core" game that
Mattermost is.

------
merinowool
Is it compliant with GDPR - for example can admin delete all user data at
request?

~~~
pknopf
Are companies required to delete employee records?

~~~
egeozcan
I can't answer your question but I'd like to note that users are not always
employees.

~~~
pknopf
Yeah, well, even if it is an open source project, what about git? You can't
remove an arbitrary commit in the tree. I'd argue discussions about code
follow under the same umbrella.

I really thing people are taking this GDPR thing WAY too seriously. They are
really only going after the obvious abusers, IMO.

------
stevenicr
moderators? admin panel?

banning users via subnet, hostname, cidr?

These are the things I need in a chat replacement.

I've discussed possibly funding these things for riot / matrix not sure I can
afford it, but I know I can't afford not to have these kinds of options in a
public chat system.

looking at the features, I'd need a way to have the server download any images
/ attachments, check for viruses, strip any exif data, before showing preview
to the room. (evil actors host an image on their server, post it to the room,
and bam they have everyone in the room's ip addy, at that point everyone's
router had better be updated.

Looks interesting, and I am looking to replace a java / flash chat system from
a decade ago that is yet to be beat sadly.

~~~
zerkten
This is designed to be run inside an organisation with some degree more trust
than what you have in your situation. You should submit some feature requests
([https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues))
for these things because they do come up in some business scenarios (e.g. a
way to plug-in virus scanning.)

------
pm
How is threading done right exactly as compared to Slack (I don't use
threading)?

~~~
usr1106
In Slack threads are an annoyance. They lead to missed answers and
discussions, because they are rarely used in average user groups. When they
are they default to private only for the writer and appear out of the natural
flow for the reader.

In zulip every message belongs to a topic. (Well there is the "no topic"
topic, but it shouldn't be used and even if it is it appears exactly like
every other topic). So no surprises.

I have used slack (and irc and xmpp) for a long time, and Zulip for 2 months.
Zulip is certainly much better for the geek.

Slack user experience is somewhat more straight forward for the naive user not
caring about things done "right".

For hacker news readers zulip is likely to be the preferred choice. Expect
resistence from your non hacker news colleagues / managers / team members.

~~~
pm
Appreciate the explanation.

Is threading such a big deal that people can't live without it? I honestly
never found it useful.

~~~
geofft
In busy channels in medium-sized companies, lack of threading is a huge pain:
person A says "Hi, I'm trying to do X, how do I do this," person B says "Hi,
I'm getting error message Y" 2 minutes later, someone shows up 5 minutes later
and says "Have you tried installing this thing" and they were talking to B
about solving Y but A tries to install it and use it for X and then everyone
is confused and wastes time.

Slack is positioning itself as an email replacement, and to some extent all of
these tools are replacing at least _some_ email. Imagine taking 20% of your
email and not having subject lines, just authors. What's the "LGTM" for? (Or
worse, the sender anticipates that and says "Re @pm at 00:10, agreed" and then
you get to track that down.) Or imagine taking your in-person conversations,
the ones that you'd eventually want to move to IM to support distributed or
remote teammates, and having a rule that you couldn't go up to someone's desk,
instead every in-person conversation had to take place at this one water
cooler. If multiple people wanted to talk, well, either they can have multiple
conversations in front of each other, or they can wait until one conversation
is done.

( _Slack 's implementation of threading_, meanwhile, doesn't actually solve
the problem that well because of the way it pushes threaded conversations to a
side. Imagine email without a reply-all button - it solves some problems and
creates so many others. You can and should live without Slack threading.)

... also, another argument that threading matters: you're using a threaded
forum right now. Remember phpBB? Would HN be improved by switching to a phpBB-
style UI? If you unindented all the comments on this page and sorted them by
time, would it be a workable experience?

~~~
the_new_guy_29
Why not to use direct messages for the example you gave ? Or even better reply
to the message itself which creates semi topic under it ? Also if you have
some specific topic you would like to discuss like k8s or linux there should
be specific channels for that in a company. You can reply to exact message in
slack. Ive been using it for over a year in a company hiring few thousend
people and we had no issues you describe here...

~~~
geofft
> _Why not to use direct messages for the example you gave ?_

Slack sells itself as a searchable archive. Ideally if someone asks the
question a second time, they (or someone else) can look up the answer. Direct
messages mean conversations don't get publicly logged, which is a serious
negative for the company.

> _Also if you have some specific topic you would like to discuss like k8s or
> linux there should be specific channels for that in a company._

My company has three channels for GitLab, Git, and software development /
build infrastructure, which sort of seem like overlapping topics already. But
even with this split, we regularly have multiple conversations attempting to
happen.

Think of, say, JIRA queues vs. tickets. We also have three separate JIRA
queues for GitLab, source control, and development tooling, but we still use
separate tickets in each queue, not one general-purpose ticket for all GitLab
discussions.

It's hard to describe the benefits of this system to someone who's only ever
used linear chat (or linear chat with weird thorns sticking out periodically,
like Slack). On Zephyr, which is what Zulip was modeled after, I was in chat
rooms that created a separate topic for each development issue and each
customer support ticket, which made it easy for different groups of people to
work on different things and still stay in the public chat room, and also
_extremely_ easy to go look up history later. Searching for things related to
a ticket or a pull request in Slack is basically impossible.

These problems aren't obvious because people learn to work around them, mostly
by avoiding public channels and IMing their friend, talking in person, keeping
things in email or an equally high-latency system like JIRA, etc. But they're
still problems that a good tool could solve. (Plenty of companies would say,
we don't have group chat at all, we're working fine with email and person-to-
person IM; probably you'd tell them that having something like Slack would be
worth trying.)

------
est
need more screenshots. I want to see exactly where it have done right instead
of downloading few megabytes of an electron app.

~~~
donaldguy
You could alternatively OAuth sign up for the chat.zulip.org server used for
project development and see the feature in action there
([https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-
zul...](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zulip-
org.html) ) so long as you kept testing traffic to the `#test here` stream :-)

~~~
icc97
Minor niggle - but I don't understand you and the github readme point to
readthedocs rather than just 'show me the money' of
[https://chat.zulip.org/](https://chat.zulip.org/)

Perhaps you want to give more context, but I did nothing on the readthedocs
page other than look for the link.

~~~
tabbott
We used to do that, but it turns out that having the Internet visit your chat
community without any briefing isn't the best plan. Linking to the ReadTheDocs
page has helped a lot in making sure people joining the community have some
sense as to what to expect (e.g. that it's at times running a super beta
version of Zulip, or that people are doing actual work, that we have a code of
conduct, and you should send your test messages to # __test here __).

~~~
icc97
Ok, that does make sense.

------
nqzero
is there a public server we can join to try this out ?

eg, my mattermost clone is [https://mm.nqzero.com](https://mm.nqzero.com)

just use a fake email (it's unused) and try it out. every time there's an
announcement in this space i go to the landing page and am disappointed that
trying out the product appears to be semi painful

~~~
kawera
You can login using OAuth on this server:
[https://chat.zulip.org/](https://chat.zulip.org/)

------
hailk
> Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software

Claims like these are really off-putting. Is it done for SEO purposes?

------
dade_
Does it federate? Unified communications and collaboration have been going
exactly backward the last 5 years.

~~~
Phrodo_00
5 years? XMPP was almost 20 years ago.

------
sandGorgon
Interestingly they do have a hosted option -
[https://zulipchat.com/plans/](https://zulipchat.com/plans/)

It's very expensive compared to slack though. I thought it would be priced
closer to the cheaper alternatives (around $2).

~~~
tabbott
Read more closely -- it's actually the same price for each of "billed
annually" and "billed monthly".

~~~
sandGorgon
not sure what you mean - it is 8$ per active user per month or 80$ billed
annually. The same as slack pricing.

Microsoft teams is around 2$ per month (for the most basic Office 360 plan...
else free).

Hipchat is 2$ per month

------
Bromskloss
How does it compare to Matrix, Rocket.chat, or Mattermost? Are there others I
should know about?

------
skrowl
I know it's marketed to gamers, but if you're looking for a free Slack
alternative check out discordapp.com. It's pretty great.

It supports bots, so you can easily integrate your git / trello / etc.

~~~
SXX
Problem with Discord is that unlike project targeted to corporate customers
it's might break APIs hard or change UI without notice or enforce whatever
weird rule they desire.

Also they burning VC money and don't yet have proven business model so
investing time in adopting it for non-gaming seems like strange decision.

~~~
degenerate
Agree, they are throwing piles and piles of money into their cloud costs, and
now they have implemented screen sharing too... a much requested feature to
put them in a Skype-kill positon. The free money is going to dry up
eventually, and how they lock it down and pivot to start making money is still
unknown.

------
cryptos
Is there a business model behind Zulip? If so, what is the business model?

~~~
rishig
Hosting and enterprise support:
[https://zulipchat.com/plans](https://zulipchat.com/plans)

------
zerkten
How frequent and painful are Zulip upgrades? This is one of the reasons folks
like SaaS for communications tools which always seem to be changing.

~~~
tabbott
Having your team's core communication tool go down and be hard to bring back
up can be quite painful. So as a project, we put a lot of effort into release
management to minimize the risk of that happening. I personally postmortem
every report of an error when upgrading.

As a result, for most folks, installing a security/bugfix release Just Works
with a few seconds of downtime. For a release like this one with 3000+
commits, dozens of database migrations, and tons of new features, our largest
sites found it Just Worked with about a minute of downtime while the database
migrations were running.

If you really care about availability like we do with zulipchat.com, it's
possible to have downtime be seconds even with the database migrations, but
that requires a bit more expertise on how Zulip works than we think it's fair
to expect server administrators to learn, so we don't recommend that to most
folks.

So the main downside in this space of self-hosting is that zulipchat.com runs
very close to master, which in practice means you'll get new features on
zulipchat.com first (though folks running their own server can always upgrade;
you just end up on the hook for the work). On the flipside, self-hosting is
better for i18n (since our volunteer translators generally make sure languages
get to 100% around a release, but new strings may not get translated for weeks
after the code gets into production on zulipchat.com).

------
hota_mazi
Not a single screen shot of that threading feature?

------
cygned
Too bad the installation requires a dedicated Ubuntu machine. I was hoping
that I could deploy it with little effort on my k8s cluster to try it out.

~~~
rahimnathwani
What is stopping you from running it in k8s? Don't you just need to create a
docker file based on the Ubuntu docker image, plus whatever installation steps
zulip requires?

EDIT: There seem to be some folks who have done that already:

[https://github.com/galexrt/docker-
zulip/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/galexrt/docker-
zulip/blob/master/README.md)

------
Dowwie
Zulip is yet another Python success story!

------
ttoinou
Does anyone know a slack-like cloud app but with project management features ?

~~~
donaldguy
Perhaps [https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/) ?

~~~
ttoinou
Thanks but doesn't look like it has a team chat

~~~
donaldguy
It has @mentions, notifications, and the ability to have some Google-Docs
style inline comment threads, so depending on the use case I'm not sure you'd
totally miss it

Otherwise perhaps phacility-hosted (so cloud) Phabricator, wherein it is
mostly (a less unified UI) project management system but has the realtime chat
component available in
[https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/conpherence/](https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/conpherence/)

------
kevml
Threading done right or wrong in in slack doesn’t really matter. What matters
is if your point gets across. Sometimes that’s fine via threads. Sometimes
threads get in the way.

------
ciupicri
The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke.

> You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements.

So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough
luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some
deb packages.

There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the
hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what other software is
required, e.g. for the database, how Zulip uses it, what libraries or other
kind of dependencies it has, etc.

[1]:
[http://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.htm...](http://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.html)

~~~
fipple
This comment is a great illustration of why companies and investors prefer
software as a service business models wherever possible.

~~~
andybak
When there are so many options for one-click repeatable deployments of complex
stacks that strikes me as an overreaction.

I recently had to test a complex Django-based Document Management System:
[https://www.mayan-edms.com/](https://www.mayan-edms.com/)

The install was a breeze. Even with very little experience with Docker it took
me a matter of minutes to fire up a Digital Ocean droplet, paste in a few
commands and have a fully working install.

Every open source web app should have some equivalent that is as simple as
this.

~~~
ciupicri
The install was a breeze because you practically installed a self contained
black box. What if you wanted to use Apache instead of nginx or a custom
compiled Python interpreter or PyPy?

~~~
detaro
Then you go to documentation for a more manual installation and adjust it to
your tastes.

~~~
ciupicri
Problem is there doesn't seem to be much documentation at a quick glance. At
least for Zulip.

~~~
zerkten
There seems to be a lot more information within the section of docs focused on
developers like [https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/development/setup-
adv...](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/development/setup-
advanced.html#installing-directly-on-ubuntu).

------
jlebrech
we use it. it's ok

------
tills13
What an awful name

------
soneca
It is not "Free", it is freemium. _Zulip On Cloud_ is the exact same freemium
model and pricing of Slack. _Zulip On-Premise_ also is freemium (Enterprise
plan do not show the price).

[https://zulipchat.com/plans/](https://zulipchat.com/plans/)

~~~
olalonde
It's open source (Apache License 2.0):
[https://github.com/zulip/zulip/](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/)

------
haffla
Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a
chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent
users.

I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and
MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But
hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything.

Does anyone know about any hard limits with either Zulip or Rocket.Chat?

~~~
eksmast
If you care to login, there is a thread on zulip here
[https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scal...](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scaling/near/360250)

regarding scaling.

Relevant info- Zulip is designed for ~15k users with real-world tests of 3k
users. Not sure about concurrent users.

~~~
johnx123-up
Just curious, is there any integration with Restyaboard?

------
fiatjaf
> The project survived my becoming a parent in December and taking 2 months
> off to bond with my baby daughter Lily. For me, it was a great stress test
> of Zulip’s catch-up experience; I was able to catch up on over 20,000
> messages of chat history when I returned, following up on more than 100
> conversations that needed my attention.

So is that what you've supposed to do when you become a parent? Stop doing
everything else for two months, than never look at your child again? (Not
saying the person did this.)

~~~
snowwindwaves
I think people normally take some time off work when they have a child. Does
that seem strange to you?

~~~
fiatjaf
I asked first.

~~~
dsr_
Explaining my downvote here: this doesn't add anything valuable to the
conversation. Either you have a defensible point or you don't; this sort of
behavior suggests that you are more interested in having an argument than a
discussion.

~~~
fiatjaf
Yes, but only because the previous commenter had that position also, by asking
me the stuff he did. I hope you have downvoted him also.

