What do you do to make Zulip better than Slack? A vanilla installation is not better, and scales worse with more users, more devices per user more mobile users and more integration sources. But, I’ve never been in a situation where I was forced to make Zulip an attractive communication tool to an organization; there must be a lot that is possible. Getting away from a Salesforce product is a good goal.
What I would do if hosting Zulip for a company, is:
(1) host an up to date Zulip version
(2) setup or rent a Jitsi Meet or other open source / free software voice + video chat solution. Jitsi Meet might be a bit difficult to properly set up, compared to Zulip, because of extra things needed, like TURN server and in general the complexities of web RTC. Maybe renting that for some < 10 EUR is fine for a company.
(3) Configure Zulip to have for example `/jitsi` or `/meeting` for creating meetings right out of Zulip.
(4) Setup other integrations, that exist for Zulip.
(5) Setup backups for the Zulip database. It is just a postgres database. One can dump it and move the dump to a backup store.
If this is too much, for example because the company doesn't have the knowledge in their employees to manage this, then one can also rent Zulip hosted solutions.
Getting away from Salesforce alone is in my opinion already worth it.
I’ve never touched a scaling issue with Zulip, how many devices are we talking about here? Maybe I’ve just never touched the walls of scaling it. The architecture seems fine to scale if you self host though.
The only issues I’ve found with Zulip is how it looks and training people to use it right. I’ve had a lot of comments that Zulip has ruined people because they realised how good it is only after they stopped using it, and can tell that everything is so much worse, but the whole time they used it- they hated it.
The other issue, if we can call it as such, is that there’s not that many native third party integrations, we had to write our own bots for some pretty basic things. But writing bots is so much easier in Zulip than Slack (and for Teams its a lesson in genuine masochism) so I give them a pass.
