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Comment by carolosf | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Mattermost. Highly recommend looking at Zulip as an alternative. (It’s my favourite slack alternative and even better than Slack because it’s the best at managing distractions IMO. It also has an interesting history was acquired by Dropbox and then back from Dropbox I believe)

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I love Zulip too, use it daily, wrote some nice integrations for it. Never got why people preferred Mattermost over it

Hope Zulip's discoverability improves.

In what sense?

I assume they mean the fact I myself know what Mattermost is but I've never heard of... now I even have to go back and load up the comment to find it's name again, Zulip

Exactly this. :)

Zulip is a kind of annoying name, and every time I encounter it it's in the context of some open source platform hiding their community discussion forum behind a login. I'm left with a not very great impression.

FYI, for a while now you can mark any Zulip channel as public, which means the chat history for that channel does not require a login to view. See https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option for more details.

I don't like the way they push you to give a subject to every discussion. In a way it's more like a newsgroup replacement than Slack, whereas Mattermost is a straight-up Slack clone.

How does Zulip compare to Matrix/Element?

Zulip too has similar restrictions even on their self hosted plans. SAML/LDAP is behind paywall too.

What restrictions have you hit ?

Seeing their pricing page, mobile notifications for upto 10 users is too less.

But you mentioned similar...this is a discussion about message limits (and saml ?). Those are free for self hosted.

Push uses _their_ services. That's why it costs $$$. But you can build your own apns endpoint and plug into that at that volume

Push costs pennies. It's an arbitrary restriction.

Then you pay for it. Nothing stops you

That's precisely my point. It's an arbitrary rent-seeking restriction.

Publishing an app in popular app stores, for an organization, requires several $100 in annual fees. That’s before any mobile app is even published.

At this point I think he's just trolling. Nobody can be this entitled

It's a yearly fee that amounts to a couple hundred dollars. That's about an hour of an engineer's salary. Zulip's customers make this less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a rounding error.

If you want to run your own push for pennies all you have to do is compile the client yourself.

I'm not going to recompile and redistribute a binary outside the Play Store.

Then your piggybacking on their infrastructure. I don't think they are unreasonable. "It can be done for pennies, but I won't" sort of implies that it does indeed take more than pennies worth of effort.

Just looked to their self hosted plans:

    - No limitation on search, members, etc.
    - 10 user limit for mobile notifications, can be relaxed via community (for non-profits, FOSS projects, etc.)
    - SAML/LDAP *support* is available, you can configure it. They won't provide answers to your questions.
    - Actually, all Zulip features are enabled sans Mobile Notifications, but for most of them, you're on your own. If you know what you're doing, it's not a problem, I assume.

IOW, for self-hosted plans, you pay for support, not the software. a-la early RedHat model.

Ref: https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted-sponsorships

This is false, SAML and LDAP are available. Zulip self hosted has all features with no restrictions, except for mobile notifications which require a subscription for $3.50/u/m (unless you are less than 10 users or are not a non-profit of any kind)

> unless you are less than 10 users or are not a non-profit of any kind

They only give free accounts to non-profits with zero paid staff.

It’s a bit odd though that Zulip charge $ for mobile notifications but still don’t have basic end-to-end encryption for those push notifications .

The feature is deployed in the server, mobile clients are still pending the release iinm. But it's coming.

It's a mix of "because they can" and "because they need to maintain infrastructure for mobile push".

I stand corrected. SAML & LDAP is free in zulip.

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