After I used Discord in different contexts for months now (and Slack for years), I can't understand why someone willingly chooses Slack.

It's the Atlassian of chat tools. Horrible performance and bad usabillity.

I use Zulip for the day to day (it's amazing, I can't recommend it enough), but sometimes use Slack because some open source communities use it, and I'm always amazed at how damn slow it is. I can consistently out-type it, it's terrible.

I guess it was great when it started out, but they're slowly boiling the frog, who is us.

mikecoles

Zulip won my last bake-off for chat systems. Integration was easy and the topic method of providing threads was amazing. The only feature it was missing was federation. In the XMPP world, you could communicate with users on other XMPP instances. With Zulip, you can only communicate with local users. Do you know if this is still the case?

tabbott

As other folks have mentioned, Zulip has a number of cross-server integrations with both the Zulip protocol and other protocols like XMPP. There's a few we document here as well as Matterbridge:

* https://zulipchat.com/integrations/communication * https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

We'll eventually add a more native way of connecting a stream between two Zulip servers; we just want to be sure we do that right; federation done sloppily is asking for a lot of spam/abuse problems down the line.

(I'm the Zulip lead developer)