See what Zulip offers in 2026: open-source, topic-threaded team chat with self-hosting options, Cloud pricing from free to Plus, and how it compares to Slack.
Zulip is an open-source team chat platform built around a topic-based threading model. Instead of one continuous stream of messages per channel, every conversation lives inside a named topic within a stream, so unrelated discussions never blend together.
The project started in 2012, was acquired and later open-sourced by Dropbox, and has since been developed by Kandra Labs and, as of 2026, the nonprofit Zulip Foundation. Because the codebase is fully open source, organizations can run Zulip on their own infrastructure or use the hosted Zulip Cloud service.
Zulip is aimed at teams that value organized, searchable, asynchronous communication over the fast, ephemeral feel of typical chat apps, making it popular with software teams, open-source projects, research groups, and educational institutions.
Zulip's core feature is topic threading: every message belongs to a topic within a stream, keeping parallel conversations legible even in high-volume channels.
It ships with desktop, web, and mobile apps, a REST API, incoming and outgoing webhooks, and a library of bots and integrations for connecting to other developer and business tools.
Administrators get self-hosting flexibility, data export, and migration tools between self-managed and cloud deployments, along with enterprise controls like SSO and audit logging on higher tiers.
Zulip Cloud has three tiers: a Free plan, a Standard plan at $6.67 per user per month billed annually, and a Plus plan at $10 per user per month billed annually, with slightly higher monthly-billed rates.
Self-hosted users can run the software entirely free, or subscribe to Basic, Business, or Enterprise self-hosted support plans that unlock features like read receipts, unlimited message history, and priority support.
Pricing is based purely on the number of active users, and the Zulip Foundation sponsors free access for open-source projects, nonprofits, researchers, and educators.
Zulip is an open-source team chat application that organizes conversations into topic-based threads, designed to keep distributed and asynchronous teams focused and organized.
Yes. Zulip offers a free Zulip Cloud tier and a completely free self-hosted option, alongside paid Cloud and self-hosted plans with additional features and support.
Yes. Zulip's full codebase is open source, so organizations can deploy and manage their own Zulip server instead of using the hosted Cloud service.
Zulip's defining difference is topic-based threading, where every message belongs to a named topic within a channel, which keeps parallel conversations organized in a way flat channel chat does not.
Zulip is stewarded by the nonprofit Zulip Foundation, formed in 2026, with Kandra Labs continuing as the primary development team.
Yes. Zulip sponsors free Cloud plans for more than 1,000 qualifying organizations, including open-source projects, educators, researchers, and nonprofits.
Zulip provides apps for web browsers, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.
Yes. Zulip offers a REST API, incoming and outgoing webhooks, and a library of bots for integrating with other developer and business tools.