Zulip, Leading Open Source Team Chat App, Releases Version 3.0

This major release is a significant redesign, adding Zulip’s most-requested features and enhancing Zulip’s unique threading model.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#zulip—Zulip, the open source threaded team chat app, today announced the release of Zulip Server 3.0, with new features to help distributed and remote teams stay productive and focused.

Used by thousands of teams globally, Zulip’s unique topic-based threading experience combines the immediacy of real-time chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading. Zulip Server 3.0 contains major visual design improvements, dramatic scalability and performance improvements, a new logo, and several of Zulip’s most requested features to help users efficiently read, skim, search, and refer back to their messages. Zulip Server 3.0 ships with translations for 16 languages.

“We created Zulip because we wanted to work with the best people anywhere, not just those in our town, and traditional team chat tools are very inefficient.” said Tim Abbott, Founder and CEO of Zulip. Zulip has built the most active open-source community of any team chat software, with over 600 code contributors, including 54 who’ve contributed over 100 code changes. Abbott said “Our global community positions us to refine exactly what is most critical to distributed work environments. We’re excited to release Zulip Server 3.0 today to meet that demand.”

Zulip Server 3.0 is Zulip’s largest release yet, with over 4000 changes contributed by 115 people from all over the world. Essentially every part of the product had major usability improvements:

• One can now move topics to another stream, which was by far Zulip’s most requested feature.
• The top navbar was redesigned to both be cleaner and provide rich details on the stream (Zulip’s second-most requested feature).
• Added “Recent topics”, an invaluable tool both for skimming and for finding recent conversations. Currently in beta, Zulip plans for this view to be the default view users see when entering Zulip.
• Top navbar/search area now offers useful data analytics like subscriber counts and stream description views
• Support for Ubuntu 20.04 Focal and Postgres 12.
• A complete rewrite of Zulip’s API documentation to use the popular OpenAPI standard, with automated tests to ensure the API documentation is always correct.
• Notification settings are accessed through an intuitive table format.
• Multitude of strengthened integration support for Github, Sign In With Apple, Google, Zoom, Big Blue Button SAML and many more.

“Zulip Server 3.0 would not be possible without the amazing global Zulip development community. Many of the features released today were built by Zulip’s 18 Google Summer of Code students,” said Abbott. “Zulip is the perfect place to work a summer internship during a global pandemic and despite the challenging summer our 18 students continue to impress the Zulip team with fantastic work.”

For more information on how to get involved with the Zulip open-source community, please see https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zulip-org.html.

Zulip Cloud is offering a 60-day free trial. Sign up for free at https://zulip.com.

To learn more about the Zulip 3.0, visit Zulip’s blog for more details. Connect with Zulip on social media at @zulip on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Zulip

Zulip, developed by Kandra Labs, Inc. utilizing a true open source ethos, is the most productive team chat software for distributed teams. Zulip is built by a distributed team, with its leadership based in San Francisco, California and over 700 open-source contributors from around the world. Zulip’s threaded conversations help thousands of companies of all sizes, open-source projects and non-profits stay organized, seamlessly melding asynchronous and real-time communication. Current Zulip users include teams from Akamai Technologies, Wikimedia Foundation, DoctorOnDemand, Pilot, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, LevelUp, MariaDB Foundation, HL7 International, and many more.

The first Zulip Inc. startup was acquired by Dropbox in early 2014 while the product was still in private beta. In late 2015, Dropbox generously released Zulip as open-source software. In 2016, Tim Abbott, one of the original founders of Zulip, founded Kandra Labs to sustain and grow Zulip’s ongoing development. Kandra Labs is a values-focused company supported by $1M in SBIR grants from the US National Science Foundation.

Contacts

Media contact:
Jessica Gomez-Rees

Jess@publicity.im

Marketing and Sales:
Trent Lapinski

e-mail: trent@zulip.com
phone: (415) 562-6820