Yes! Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open source projects and affiliated institutions. We also offer steep discounts to non-profits, educational institutions, groups of friends, and in scenarios where most of the users are not paid employees (e.g. company support forums). Just contact sales@zulipchat.com and we’d be happy to discuss your situation!
You may also be interested in Zulip for open source projects or Zulip for working groups and other part-time communities.
Yes! Some of our biggest fans have hundreds or thousands of users, including Fortune 500 companies like Akamai, and open source communities like The Recurse Center. If you'd like to see a large Zulip in action, the Zulip community server has thousands of accounts and hundreds of weekly active users, and is run on a single machine with 8GB of RAM.
You can always use a credit card to pay, and we can bill by invoice for amounts over $1000.
Yes! Our high quality export and import tools (cloud, on-premise) ensure you can always move from our hosting to yours (and back). If you’d like to do a migration, email support@zulipchat.com and we'll get you started!
Guests cannot see or join streams they are not invited to. Guests subscribed to more than 1 stream are billed like regular users. Guests subscribed to a single stream are generally free, unless you have more than 5 times as many single-stream guests as paying users. More details are available here.
Stop by the Zulip community server to see Zulip in action and chat with the developers, tweet @zulip, or shoot us an email at sales@zulipchat.com!
| Feature | Zulip | Slack | Mattermost | Discord |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apps for every platform | ||||
| Hundreds of integrations | ||||
| Hosting available | ||||
| Emoji reactions | ||||
| Markdown formatting | ||||
| Topic-based threading | ||||
| Lightning-fast search | ||||
| Free and open source | See below* |
* On Mattermost's licensing: Mattermost Team is open source, but most enterprise-grade features are in Mattermost Enterprise, which is not.