I love Zulip. I really wish other IM clients implemented functionality similar to Zulip's threading. It allows for easily filtering converstations and makes reading history that much easier.
That said, what Zulip lacks right now is polish. Server installation for example is a mess. You basically need a dedicated Debian machine to install it. There is a docker image that I'm using, but it's rather unstable (if I will have to make changes to the configuration, I fear I will have to spend hours trying to fix it). You also NEED to have a SSL certificate which means that testing in a local network isn't as painless as simply installing the server. There's also problems with the search function (it barely works), lacks things like archiving topics (or hiding them), enabling app notifications using their Google Play App requires you to send them an email and a few other things. Their apps also feel sluggish. They have an old Cordova app that is slowly losing compatibility with the server and a new app that is fairly slow. The desktop app is an electron app and it also has some issues.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree with some of these complaints (e.g. I very much wanted to fix the push notification registration process in this release), but I'd like to clarify a few things:
* Needing an SSL certificate should not really be a barrier. We now have an installer option to use Certbot which works great if you're on the public Internet, and if you're not, we have simple instructions for creating a self-signed certificate.
* I'm surprised by your comment about search; we often hear from users that they love Zulip's search. Can you open an issue with more details about what you're seeing? I'm wondering if e.g. search is broken in the Docker image.
As a sidenote, for the Electron desktop app in particular, all the performance issues that we could reproduce went away with the latest update (not because we changed something in our code, but because we upgraded Electron which had upgraded Chromium to a newer version with fewer performance bugs). If you're still seeing issues with app version 1.9.0, I'd love to see a profile captured from the app's developer tools.
Oh my bad then. I don't know why I though it was a Cordova app. Might have been because our last chat provider had one and I was mixing them up.
My problem with search is that it doesn't find URLs. I think it was reported already, but I will check anyway.
That said, what Zulip lacks right now is polish. Server installation for example is a mess. You basically need a dedicated Debian machine to install it. There is a docker image that I'm using, but it's rather unstable (if I will have to make changes to the configuration, I fear I will have to spend hours trying to fix it). You also NEED to have a SSL certificate which means that testing in a local network isn't as painless as simply installing the server. There's also problems with the search function (it barely works), lacks things like archiving topics (or hiding them), enabling app notifications using their Google Play App requires you to send them an email and a few other things. Their apps also feel sluggish. They have an old Cordova app that is slowly losing compatibility with the server and a new app that is fairly slow. The desktop app is an electron app and it also has some issues.
Thankfully issue reporting is fairly painless.