[filam]

I used Zulip while at Akamai. At the time, Zulip was a Boston-based start-up and I believe some engineers at Akamai had a connection to engineers at Zulip. It wasn't used throughout the whole company, but it did have a significant user base and was growing.

My experience was so positive that I've continued to evangelize it at other companies since then. The acquisition by Dropbox was definitely disappointing, but the fact that they managed to open source the code and have since started providing a service is very impressive.

The most important feature of Zulip is threading. It doesn't make a big difference for a very small organization, but it is a huge win for larger organizations. Not only does it make it easier to organize information, it allows you to improve the signal to noise ratio by muting specific topics of conversation. I remember being both very excited for Slack's thread implementation and then soon after the release very disappointed. It feels like an after thought and doesn't improve a fundamental problem with Slack, the exponential growth of channels as new users are added. There is a little more upfront learning required to use Zulip, but it is vastly outweighed by the benefits. And don't forget that Slack has a learning curve too, especially for those that aren't as technically savvy (e.g. markdown, Slack commands, bots).

[rkangel]

We are getting enormous value from using zulip topics between just 2 people.

Myself and my cofounder use Zulip effectively as 'WhatsApp with topics'. We can chat to each other on a variety of things, and they're easily retrievable, searchable and persistent.

For example, one of our topics is 'interesting articles' where we send HN Links etc. that the other might be interested in. They can be separated from other conversation but it's easy to go back and scroll through them when you've got some time to kill.