Our company wants to migrate from Skype for Business to either Zulip, Mattermost or Hipchat. As todays news hit, we removed Hipchat from out list.
Our questions are: 1. Does the Zulip desktop app for Linux store messages for offline reading? 2. Do you use it on-prem or cloud based? (if on-prem did you by the enterprise support? 3. Do you have any video or screen sharing software in use with Zulip? We are looking into the recommended on-prem Jitsi. Also is doesn't offer much group/channel management beyond moderators and guests.
Also, there's a native desktop client on the way for Rocket.Chat, called Ruqola. Qt based, so all the platforms.
2. We have used cloud-based from the beginning and never had issues. Zulip's uptime is fantastic. There may have been one or two minor issues during the five year time period that we've used them.
3. We tried out the Jitsi integration when it was first introduced and it works fine but I don't think anyone at our company uses it since we have Google Apps for Business so everyone just uses Hangouts if we need video / voice.
I will say that the mobile app experience has been improving very rapidly so it’s going in the right direction. For a while the poor mobile experience was Zulip’s biggest drawback but they’ve made huge strides.
Our engineering team tried alternatives to Zulip (Slack, Mattermost, and others) during the period when Zulip’s future was unclear and it was receiving very little support. We preferred Zulip enough to switch back to it even though the mobile apps were basically non-functional (they’re now supported again).
The “killer features” for me were:
- Topic-based threading, which allows multiple conversations to occur simultaneously without having to creat a new stream (Zulip’s equivalent to channels) every time. This also makes it easy for me to contribute to a conversation hours (or days) later and have everyone else understand what I’m talking about.
- Relatedly, he ability to mute topics I don’t care about but see everything else within the stream.
- An intelligent global view that makes following multiple conversations at once easy