Comment by ghostpepper
8 months ago
I wonder why Zulip isn't mentioned more in these comparisons. Personally I would pick Slack over Mattermost any day in terms of sheer usability, corporate lock-in notwithstanding. I find Discord's UX to be pretty awful in terms of visual clutter and notifications demanding attention - constantly being notified to subscribe to Nitro etc.
I think Zulip is missing out on a lot by not having a "complaint" (SOC2-type2, etc) offering. I think Zulip is brilliant.
Discord at least has "forums" for forced threaded discussions, and the in-room threaded conversations work far better than Slack or Matrix's.
Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)
We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?
Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.
I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.
[0]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...
[1]: "User limit reduced to 250 (from 1,000)." https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
We just evaluated zulip as well and the mobile app was extremely bare bones. Also, I liked the UX of the web but others felt it was way too technical to give to our staff (some of whom will really struggle with any kind of change).
I haven’t really decided yet though. Has anybody had a success with Zulip with nontechnical? I’m looking at mattermost now but it just seems to be a different point on the enshittification arc.
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