Zulip's

There are a lot of team chat apps. So why did we build Zulip? We talk about Slack in the discussion below, but the problems apply equally to other apps with Slacks conversation model, including IRC, Mattermost, Discord, Spark, and others. Reading busy Slack channels is extremely inefficient. Anyone who wakes up to this frequently can tell you it is... not fun. The lack of organization and context in Slack channels means that anyone using Slack heavily has to manually scan through hundreds of messages a day to find the content that is relevant to them. Senior people rarely use large Slack channels. Slack channels are even worse for managers and other people involved in multiple projects. Even modest usage of Slack leads to more channel messages a day than most managers have time to handle. In practice, in organizations that use Slack, many senior personnel (sensibly) dont read their channel messages at all, or only read a handful of smaller channels. This means you now have a company communication platformwith everyone but the decision makers. Channels rapidly devolve into GIF posts. Once a channel reaches dozens of messages a day, substantive conversations become increasingly difficult or even impossible. If you send a thoughtful question at 10am, anyone who checks in after lunch is too late to reply, since someone else will have already started another conversation in that channel. This means that even moderately busy channels cant be used for serious discussion, and they devolve into a mix of quick questions and random spam. This means that workers in different timezones can only effectively collaborate during the narrow windows when everyone is at their keyboards. As a result, Slack isnt an effective communication platform for remote work. In contrast, the Zulip team has over 30 core team members distributed across a dozen time zones, and uses only Zulip and GitHub issues for communication (no email lists, video meetings, etc). Teams that love Slack are often mostly using DMs and small channels. Slack is ...Read More