Top all-time · #2906
The Zulip Blog
Company blog · blog.zulip.comprogrammingbusiness
The Zulip Blog is the company blog at blog.zulip.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2020, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 58 times, most often “A new Zulip plan for self-hosting without commercial support”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Zulip's blog for product and release news, security disclosures, and the Flutter mobile rewrite. Most comments cite the posts as support rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Zulip is an open source threaded team chat app that helps distributed and remote teams stay productive and focused.
Most-linked posts?
- A new Zulip plan for self-hosting without commercial support4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-19
- Why Zulip Is on GitHub Sponsors3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-04-29
- Zulip introduces public access option for open source communities3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-05
- New plans for self-hosted Zulip customers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-12-15
- Zulip 11.0: Organized chat for distributed teams (FOSS)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-14
- /2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launched/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-18
- Zulip 12.0: Organized chat for distributed teams2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-04-28
- Zulip Cloud Security Incident2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-03-20
- Zulip 6.0: Threaded open-source team chat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-17
- When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-05
What Hacker News says?
Microsoft Teams dominates the team chat market thanks to anti-competitive bundling practices. Slack's proprietary "Slack Connect" federation system requires both users to pay for Slack for their entire workspace. Slack has very aggressive restrictions on exporting your organization's own messages ( https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor... ). And yet the "red flag" being discussed is Zulip havi…
Comment linking /2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-history/
on “Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year”Submitted Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus as a story · 687 points
HN discussion> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it? Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution…
Comment linking /2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launched/
on “Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year”Submitted Zulip 4.0: Threaded open source team chat as a story · 617 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche... and the previous blog post linked from there gives some context as to why we rewrote the Zulip mobile apps from React Native to Flutter. Our Flutter experience over the last few months since launch has been very positive. Most importantly, development velocity is much faster than it was on React Native.
Comment linking /2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launched/
on “Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year”Submitted Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat as a story · 500 points
HN discussionZulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
Comment linking /2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-history/
on “Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year”Submitted Zulip 5.0: Threaded open-source team chat as a story · 356 points
HN discussionI think there's merit in objecting to "that will never happen" checks in some cases (though, to be clear, I'm not saying the people objecting to your code are thinking about the same thing I am). Specifically, if you have data that is loaded from some other source, your extra safety check might be checking data that's loaded from the same source, in a way where if something did go wrong, it went wrong in both places…
Comment linking /2021/03/20/zulip-cloud-security-incident/
on “Klarna users are being signed in to random accounts”Submitted Why Zulip will not get on the blockchain bandwagon as a story · 248 points
HN discussionZulip have web community support. https://blog.zulip.com/2022/05/05/public-access-option/
Comment linking /2022/05/05/public-access-option/
on “Show HN: Linen – Open-source Slack for communities”Submitted Why Zulip will stand the test of time as a story · 166 points
HN discussionZulip, which I lead, absolutely aims to solve this problem. We provide our full Zulip Cloud Standard paid plan for free to open source projects (and various other worthy causes!). We also prioritize and build features specifically because OSS projects asked for them: https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ Hundreds of open source projects, including Rust, Julia, MariaDB, and Clojure, use Zulip as their team chat platform…
Comment linking /2021/04/28/why-zulip-is-on-github-sponsors/
on “Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack”Submitted Zulip 9.0: Organized chat for distributed teams as a story · 139 points
HN discussionI agree with all the benefits of mypy cited in this article. For me, most important thing for the long-term health of a codebase is its readability/maintainability, and mypy static typing makes such a huge difference for that in large Python codebases. I'm really excited to see large libraries doing this migration. I'll add for folks thinking about this transition that we took a pretty different strategy for convert…
Comment linking /2016/10/13/static-types-in-python-oh-mypy/
on “Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3”Submitted Zulip Cloud security vulnerability with reusable invitation links as a story · 87 points
HN discussionZulip has long been popular with open source projects ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ ), as well as a bunch of other non-business use cases (teaching, research, conferences, etc.). One reason folks might feel like it's new is that we recently reworked the Zulip website to discuss these other use cases for which Zulip is popular. We have always had a practice of prioritizing feedback and feature requests from op…
Comment linking /2022/05/05/public-access-option/
on “Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams”Submitted Self-hosting keeps your private data out of AI models as a story · 70 points
HN discussionActually since push notifications for an app are centralised: there is a hosting cost for the app maintainer. There was a blog article from Zulip explaining this. https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-comme... Which is better backed by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799
Comment linking /2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-commercial-support/
on “Zulip 9.0: Organized chat for distributed teams”Submitted When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months” as a story · 44 points
HN discussion> It's well known that a non-profit sitting close to a for-profit just is often just a structural maneuver at this point. A case in point is the recent WordPress controversy. I agree there. Which is why we have been separating Matrix and Element more and more - eg by setting up the Governing Board https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/electing-our-first-governing... and removing as much of the historical interdependencies…
Comment linking /2023/12/15/new-plans-for-self-hosted-customers/
on “It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights (2021)”Submitted Zulip 10.0: Organized chat for distributed teams as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAs a side note, I'm surprised that this specific security disclosure ended up on the Hacker News homepage, while our security release about an RCE issue affecting self-hosted Zulip servers last month did not ( https://blog.zulip.com/2022/01/25/zulip-server-4-9-security-... ). The core bug there an insecure secret generation algorithm in upstream Erlang/RabbitMQ, which seems more broadly notable to me! Despite our sp…
Comment linking /2022/01/25/zulip-server-4-9-security-release/
on “Zulip Cloud security vulnerability with reusable invitation links”Submitted Zulip 6.0: Threaded open-source team chat as a story · 10 points
HN discussionMuch easier to read: https://blog.zulip.com/2022/02/25/zulip-cloud-invitation-vul...
Comment linking /2022/02/25/zulip-cloud-invitation-vulnerability/
on “Zulip Cloud security vulnerability with reusable invitation links”Submitted Zulip introduces public access option for open source communities as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis looks distressingly similar to https://blog.zulip.com/2021/03/20/zulip-cloud-security-incid... . Klarna: Our app is configured specifically to avoid inadvertent caching through the use of cache control directives found in the HTTP standard (no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate). However, the CDN configuration can at times override the app configuration. Zulip: Zulip separately marks its responses as non-cacheabl…
Comment linking /2021/03/20/zulip-cloud-security-incident/
on “Post Mortem: Incorrect Cache Configuration Exposes Personal Information”Submitted Zulip Cloud Security Incident as a story · 6 points
HN discussion(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications). Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0. Some important context is that we retired t…
Comment linking /2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launched/
on “Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month”Submitted Try Zulip's next-gen mobile app, powered by Flutter as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
