Most companies don't actually do anything useful, and their internal chat is just for socialization. Slack is terrible for having actual productive conversation and great at unstructured socialization, whereas Zulip is the reverse.

“because its not slack” was the consensus when I conducted an internal survey.

Sadly people were not clearer than this. I suspect some UI prettiness things, some ease of use things (onboarding) and a fair few misgivings (such as voice chat and how images work) that makes it feel user-unfriendly.

But I am speculating.

We used Zulip for over a year and then eventually switched to Slack. I still miss Zulip.

The major reasons for us moving were:

* it is not Slack!

* lack of plugins from other applications

* inability to collaborate with external parties - customers, vendors etc

I usually invite externals as guests to my Zulip instance.

Unlimited guests is nice

My stance would probably be:

- I already learned Slack at my last 9 jobs

- I don't feel like blowing up my workflow and learning something new

- unless the value is overwhelmingly clear

if someone tried to switch my company to Zulip or anything else.

"what problem are you trying to solve?"

Having used Zulip, it's one of those things that sound dumb before you use them, but then you wonder how all these savages live without it.

Basically, Zulip is the chat equivalent of a bidet.

It’s a chat app. What is there to learn?

I assume because it can be a little hard to navigate and doesn't have as polished a UI.

But also you can actually pick up a conversation from a month ago, so is infinitely better.