Zulip for research
Chat for your project, research group, department or scientific
field.
Zulip Cloud Standard is free for academic
research!
Learn how the Lean theorem prover
community is using Zulip.
Make Zulip the communication hub for your research community.
Zulip is the organized team chat app that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Coordinate with collaborators, post questions and ideas, and learn from others in your field.
Use topics to organize the discussion
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Zulip topics create a separate space for each discussion.
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Find active conversations, or see what happened while you were away, with the Recent conversations view.
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Check out Zulip for communities to learn how Zulip empowers welcoming communities by making it easy to participate on your own time.
The Lean community switched from Gitter to Zulip in early 2018, and never looked back. Zulip’s model of conversations labeled with topics has been essential for organising research work and simultaneously onboarding newcomers as our community scaled. My experience with both the app and the website is extremely positive!
Lasting knowledge repository
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Maintain access to your organization's entire message history with free Zulip Cloud Standard hosting. Information is at your fingertips with Zulip's powerful full-text search.
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Permanently link to a Zulip conversation or a message in context from emails, notes, talk slides, or anywhere else.
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With the public access option, anyone can view, browse, and search your organization's public content — no account required.
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Zulip is 100% free and open-source software, so you are never locked into a proprietary tool. You can move your data with our high quality export and import tools.
Zulip has been a game changer for our group’s collaboration. It combines the immediacy of chat with the structure of email, allowing complex projects and parallel discussions to stay organized without chaos. We no longer lose context between meetings; every idea, file, and decision is easy to find and build on.
Powerful formatting
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Type LaTeX directly into your Zulip message, and see it beautifully rendered.
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Zulip code blocks come with syntax highlighting for over 250 languages, and integrated code playgrounds.
- Structure your points with bulleted and numbered lists.
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If you made a mistake, no worries! You can edit your message, or move it to a different topic or channel.
Several research communities I’m a part of use Zulip very effectively. Great for math/code, very well structured and keeps up with hundreds of users (across many countries/nationalities).
Interactive messaging
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Start a video call with the click of a button, or make plans for later without worrying about time zones using global times.
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Use emoji reactions for lightweight interactions. Have fun with custom emoji and gather feedback with polls.
- Share papers, presentations or images with drag-and-drop file uploads.
For more than a year, Zulip has been the cornerstone of our online Category Theory community. We greatly appreciate the seamless integration of Latex in every message as well as being able to get sidetracked (which, let's face it, happens a lot with mathematicians) without compromising an entire conversation: we can simply create a new topic for every tangent! Moreover, the flexible channels-and-topics system greatly helps us navigate through the constant influx of messages, as it is simple to tell if a message is relevant to one's interests.
All in all, Zulip enabled us to create an unprecedentedly extensive, active and vibrant community for all category theory enthusiasts out there.
Flexible administration and moderation
- Invite new members with multi-use invite links, or allow anyone to join without an invitation.
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Automatically subscribe members to channels when they join.
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Manage your community with fine-grained permission settings you can assign to user roles, user groups, and individual users.
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Zulip offers dozens of features for moderating discussions. Members can also mute anyone they'd rather not interact with.
I have used Zulip for 7 years and whenever I have to use another platform it always results in frustration… The organization and storage of messages has enhanced the productivity of myself and colleagues for years.
When and how you want it
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With apps for every platform, you can check Zulip at your computer or on your phone. Zulip works great in a browser, so no download is required.
- Zulip alerts you about timely messages with fully customizable mobile, email and desktop notifications.
- Use Zulip in your language of choice, with translations into 23 languages.
As a research consortium spread across 14 locations in Germany, we use Zulip to communicate with each other in a low-threshold manner, without the overhead of email. Even with more than 200 users across different institutions, Zulip’s model of topic-labeled conversations makes it easy for our team members to keep up-to-date on what's relevant, and work productively together.
Make the move today
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Zulip's founder is a former MIT PhD student, and we love helping academics succeed. Learn about using Zulip for teaching and conferences.
- Getting started or moving from another platform is easy! Import your existing organization from Slack, Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat.
- If you have any questions, please contact us at sales@zulip.com. You can also drop by our friendly development community at chat.zulip.org to ask for help or suggest improvements!
I have to use Slack for some other research groups I collaborate with, but my own graduate students voted to switch to Zulip a few years ago and it's just vastly better.