We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 7.0, containing hundreds
of new features and bug fixes!

Zulip
is an open-source team chat application designed to help people collaborate to
solve any challenge. With conversations
organized by topic, Zulip is
ideal for both live and asynchronous
communication. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, and
thousands of other organizations use Zulip every day. Zulip’s 100% open-source
software is available as a managed cloud service or
a self-hosted solution.

Zulip Server 7.0 is a major release, with over 3800 new commits merged across
the project since the 6.0 release last November. Notable new features include
scheduled messages, unmuting topics in muted streams, many design improvements,
and much more!

A total of 107 people contributed commits to Zulip since the 6.0 release,
bringing the project to over 1200 code contributors. Zulip is remarkable for its
number of major contributors, with 80 people who’ve
contributed 100+ commits.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s
contributed
to Zulip over the last few months, whether by writing code and documentation,
reporting issues,
translating,
supporting us financially, participating in
discussions in the
Zulip development community, or just
suggesting ideas! We could not do this without the hundreds of people giving
back to the Zulip community.

Today marks a release of the Zulip server and web application. We’d also like to
share important news and updates for the project as a whole since the 6.0
release last fall:

Customer stories

• Our website now features the story of how the End Point Dev software
  consultancy uses Zulip to
  manage hundred of projects at once.
  End Point uses a variety of chat tools picked by their clients, from Slack and
  Teams, to Google Chat and Skype. Having experienced the whole gamut of
  options, Zulip is the clear winner for End Point’s internal communication.

  “Zulip removes much of the pain that makes people not want to use team chat
  apps. We love it.”
  — Jon Jensen, CTO of End Point Dev
  [customer story]

• We also shared the story of how the startup Atolio
  built a transparent communication culture
  with Zulip.

  “In Slack, two thirds of communication is not in public just to avoid noise…
  Zulip lets us have conversations in public, not behind closed doors.”
  — Gareth Watts, co-founder and CTO of
  Atolio [customer story]

• We have rewritten the page on our website that explains how Zulip’s unique
  topic-based threading model
  helps teams communicate more effectively,
  incorporating the experiences that so many of our users have generously shared
  with us.

• Our
  year in review blog post
  highlights some stats from 2022, including the most popular emoji on Zulip
  Cloud. You can also learn about Zulip’s most underused features (and give them
  a try!).

Apps

The Zulip mobile apps for iOS and
Android have made
numerous improvements for a
better user experience and a fuller set of Zulip features:

• Support for Zulip Server 7.0 features, notably
  unmuting topics in a muted stream.
• More and better options for
  attaching files and images:
  attaching multiple images at once, attaching arbitrary files on iOS (already
  supported on Android), and combining text with attachments.
• Quote and reply, more results in
  search, better troubleshooting for missing
  notifications… and lots of
  other improvements, including many fixed bugs.

In addition to all our work on the existing apps, we’ve
started a prototype
of a next-generation Zulip mobile app in Flutter. We are
hiring for that project; if the role sounds
like it would be a good fit, we’d love to hear from you.

Zulip Terminal updates since
the Zulip Server 6.0 release include better topic autocomplete, as well as many
improvement to
user documentation.

Reviews and interviews

• Zulip now has
  over 100 reviews on Capterra!
  Our 4.8 star rating beats out reviews for other team chat apps like
  Slack and
  Microsoft Teams, and has
  earned Zulip “Best value” badges for Internal Communications and Collaboration
  software.
• If you are curious to learn about Zulip’s history, our goals for the product
  and how we approach its design, Zulip’s engineering philosophy, and more,
  check out this
  long-form interview with Tim,
  Zulip’s founder and project leader.
• Zulip has garnered a number of video reviews in the last few months, with
  reviewers describing the product as a
  privacy friendly open-source alternative,
  and
  asynchronous, open-source chat that’s better than Slack.

Sharing your experience with Zulip on product comparison websites helps others
decide whether Zulip is the right tool for them. If you would like to leave your
feedback (good or bad) on G2,
Software Advice,
or other sites you use, we’d really appreciate it!

Mentorship

Our community is
fully committed to
helping bring up
the next generation of open-source contributors. 2023 is the 8th consecutive
year that Zulip is participating in
Google Summer of Code, and even though
the program has yet to officially begin, the 7.0 release includes numerous
contributions by this year’s cohort. We can’t wait to see what our thirteen GSoC
2023 participants accomplish this summer!

“Today marks my 8-month milestone of contributing and being active in the
community. Through this beautiful journey, I have learned a lot from experienced
developers and the community, and I just love contributing to this community. I
couldn’t have asked for a better organization ❤️.”
— Palash Baderia, Google Summer of Code 2023
participant

We proudly sponsor free Zulip Cloud Standard hosting
for about 1200 open-source projects,
non-profits,
educational institutions, and
academic research groups. All eligible
organizations are encouraged to
join the program!

The major features and improvements described below are the tip of the iceberg
of all the work that goes into a major Zulip release. We dedicate a lot of
attention to the little things that help make Zulip
a joy to use,
such as fine-tuning common interactions, investigating and fixing hundreds of
minor bugs, clarifying the UI and the API, etc. Even if you aren’t looking for
new features, each major Zulip Server release offers a significantly better
overall experience.

Redesign

The biggest news for this release is that Zulip is midway through a major visual
redesign. The redesign is intended to give the app a clean, modern look, while
preserving and enhancing Zulip’s highly efficient interaction design. Key
changes in this release include:

• New background colors help you focus on the messages you’re reading.
• Fully colorized message header bars make it easier to tell which stream you’re
  viewing.
• Messages with a personal
  mention are highlighted in a
  different color than group or wildcard mentions, and your name is bolded to
  stand out when you are mentioned.

• The divider lines showing dates have been streamlined, so you can always see
  at a glance when all the messages on your screen were sent.
• Banners in the compose box have been redesigned with a fresh look, and special
  formatting has been added for
  keyboard shortcuts noted in
  tooltips.

New and improved workflows

New keyboard shortcuts

Zulip is designed to be just as easy to navigate with its