Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Google Chat

Zulip is a team chat platform focused on keeping conversations organized using topic-based threading. It combines real-time chat with long-lived discussion history, making it easier to follow multiple conversations across teams and projects.

Key Features

• Stream-based channels with per-message topics (threading) to keep discussions organized and searchable
• Powerful full-text search across message history (including with operators/filters)
• Rich message formatting (Markdown), code blocks, file uploads, and emoji reactions
• Extensive integrations (incoming/outgoing webhooks, bots, and common SaaS integrations)
• Role-based permissions and administration for organizations and multi-team deployments
• Multi-platform clients: responsive web app plus desktop and mobile apps
• SSO options and enterprise-friendly auth features (e.g., SAML/OIDC in supported editions)

Use Cases

• Engineering team communication where multiple parallel threads need to remain readable
• Open-source/community coordination with many topic-centric conversations
• Incident response and operations chat with structured, searchable timelines

Limitations and Considerations

• Best experience relies on adopting the “streams + topics” workflow; teams used to unthreaded chat may need onboarding

Zulip is well-suited for teams that want chat to remain navigable over time, especially in environments with many concurrent discussions. Its topic-first model and strong search make it a strong alternative to traditional channel-based chat tools for technical and community collaboration.