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Comment by jacinda | Hacker News Reader

+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.

Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...

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I believe we considered Zulip, but determined it's mobile app to be poor.

When was it looked into? The Zulip mobile app was rewritten in Flutter recently, that version was in beta for several months and was finally made the default Zulip app about a month ago. I haven't used Mattermost so can't compare, but the Flutter Zulip is much more responsive and nice than the previous Zulip app.

Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from Flutter.

To what? What is the alternative?

Expo/RN TBH.

Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework, and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the context of OP’s situation.

It's just react native tooling

Native is also a good option, for something used that extensively.

Flutter compiles to native though? I’m not sure I understand what you are saying.

Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real native views, so you get actual platform widgets, accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of shipping your own game engine.

Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).

I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V

Makepad looks really promising

Why?

https://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.

I liked Zulip a lot until that Flutter rewrite. Maybe it's more accessible now but the new look is not for me. I believe the app navigation is largely unchanged, and still doesn't quite feel right. I love the topic-based model nonetheless.

What's poor about it? I've used it for a while and didn't notice anything bad.

Mattermost's mobile app is also pretty bad though.

It's better these day

Mattermost is also open source, (AGPLv3 with lots of components optionally available via MIT or Apache terms). It does require contributors to sign a CLA though (unlike Zulip as far as I can tell?), and this likely reduces community involvement.

Mattermost has threads, though they work different from Zulip.

I haven't used both extensively, and for an open community like Hack Club, I suppose it's possible Zulip may even be a better fit. Mattermost will offer a much more direct migration path from Slack however.

I'm curious what makes some recommend Zulip so highly over Mattermost.

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