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portico: Update text of why-zulip.
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Rishi Gupta
Tim Abbott
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@ -22,35 +22,6 @@
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div class="testimonials">
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<div class="padded-content">
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<div class="carousel slide" data-ride="carousel">
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<div class="carousel-quotes">
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<div class="carousel-inner">
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<div class="item active quote-container">
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<blockquote>
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Zulip helped the FHIR community grow from a tiny group of dreamers to 500 active users sending 6000 messages per month, all driving the creation of better healthcare standards. Zulip’s topic-based threading helps us manage simultaneous discussions with clarity, ensuring the right people can pay attention to the right messages. This makes our large-group discussion far more manageable than what we’ve experienced with Skype and Slack.”
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</blockquote>
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<cite>Grahame Grieve, founder, FHIR open health care standard</cite>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div class="main">
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<div class="padded-content why-zulip-padded-content">
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<div class="inner-content">
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<h2>Read more about how we’ve made Zulip work for you</h2>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="/for/companies">Zulip for companies</a></li>
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<li><a href="/for/open-source">Zulip for open source projects</a></li>
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<li><a href="/for/working-groups-and-communities">Zulip for working groups and part-time communities</a></li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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{% endblock %}
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@ -1,71 +1,166 @@
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# Why Zulip?
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<center id="cartoon-caption">Explanation of Zulip by [Julia Evans](https://twitter.com/b0rk)</center>
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There are a lot of team chat apps. So why did we build Zulip?
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Zulip is not just a “better Slack”, in the same way that iPods were not just
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“better CD players”. Zulip’s topic-based threading changes what is possible
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in chat. If you haven’t seen Zulip in action, log on to our developers’
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server at [chat.zulip.org](https://chat.zulip.org),
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or check out our short screencast (coming soon) on topics and threading.
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We talk about Slack in the discussion below, but the problems apply equally
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to other apps with Slack's conversation model, including Hipchat, IRC,
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Mattermost, Discord, Spark, and others.
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## Zulip vs. Slack
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## Slack channels are a huge waste of your time
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Zulip’s threading model allows for long-running conversations to co-exist
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with real time chat. This allows senior staff, remote team members,
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part-time contractors, internal clients, and others who aren’t going to be
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on your chat full-time to participate effectively.
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Anyone who wakes up to this frequently can tell you it is not fun.
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In Slack (or Hipchat, Mattermost, or many others), if Bob starts a
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conversation in a busy channel at 10am, and Ada swings by sometime in
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the evening, there is no way for Ada to effectively participate in
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that conversation. If Ada is a manager who spends most of her days in
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meetings, or is a remote engineer living 8 time zones away, she won’t
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be able to participate in most conversations at all.
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This means that
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in an organization that has adopted Slack, the vast majority of Ada’s
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conversations will still be over email, during meetings, or over Slack
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direct messages.
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The lack of organization and context in Slack channels means that anyone
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using Slack heavily has to manually scan through hundreds of messages a day
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to find the content that is relevant to them.
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By contrast, Zulip’s lightweight threading model allows busy team
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members and remote workers to fully participate, even if they are
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reading messages hours after they are sent (or the next day!).
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## Senior people rarely use Slack channels
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This
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enables conversation that would otherwise happen over meetings or
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email to happen in Zulip itself. It also enables easy participation
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and information spread to those that have the least time to attend
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meetings which have only a nugget of information that is relevant to
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them.
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Slack channels are even worse for managers and other people involved in
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multiple projects. Even modest usage of Slack leads to more channel messages
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a day than most managers have time to handle.
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## Zulip vs. Email
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In practice, in organizations that use Slack, many senior personnel
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(sensibly) don't read their channel messages at all, or only read a handful
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of smaller channels. This means you now have a company communication
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platform ... with everyone but the decision makers.
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Email is clunky for real-time communication. A thread with even 50
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messages feels cluttered and slow, whereas real-time chat
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conversations (on any platform) regularly exceed that. Typing
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notifications, emoji reactions, keyboard shortcuts, and blazingly fast
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clients make Zulip a daily pleasure.
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## Channels rapidly devolve into GIF posts
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Usability matters; in an
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organization that relies on email for communication, things that could
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have been resolved over chat end up being pushed to meetings instead.
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Once a channel reaches dozens of messages a day, substantive conversations
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become increasingly difficult or even impossible. If you send a thoughtful
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question at 10am, anyone who checks in after lunch is too late to reply,
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since someone else will have already started another conversation in that
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channel. This means that even moderately busy channels can't be used for
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serious discussion, and they devolve into a mix of quick questions and
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random spam.
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## Zulip changes the way you operate
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## Remote workers can't participate
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The Zulip project has over 30 core team members, working from over 10
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different time zones and 25 different locations. Outside of one-on-one
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conversations, Zulip doesn’t have a single phone or video-based
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meeting. Zulip also has zero internal mailing lists, and zero internal email
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discussions. By contrast, even Slack doesn’t rely on Slack for remote
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work; their
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[careers page](https://slack.com/careers/location/all-locations/dept/all-departments)
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doesn’t list a single position where you could work from anywhere.
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This means that workers in different timezones can only effectively
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collaborate during the narrow windows when everyone is at their
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keyboards. As a result, Slack isn't an effective communication
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platform for remote work.
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Threaded conversations mean that all stakeholders can see and respond to
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every message, just like in meetings and email.
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As a pointed illustration: The company that makes Slack has over 1000
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employees and yet advertises no remote job positions (positions where
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you could work from anywhere).
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But unlike meetings, Zulip
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conversations don’t require coordinating busy schedules, or hour long
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commitments from folks that just need a 5 minute update. And unlike email, a
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lively discussion of 300 Zulip messages is just as easy to digest and
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respond to as an in-person conversation.
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In contrast, the Zulip team has over 30 core team members distributed
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across a dozen time zones, and uses only Zulip and GitHub issues for
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communication (no email lists, video meetings, etc).
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## Teams that love Slack are often mostly using DMs and small channels
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Slack is great for private messages ("DMs"), integrations, and quick
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questions when everyone's online. Most glowing reviews of Slack are
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actually of these aspects of Slack. We find that even people that
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love Slack typically send the vast majority of their messages in DMs,
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and avoid using public Slack channels.
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## So where is the communication happening?
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In organizations that have adopted Slack, mostly the same place it happened
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before they adopted Slack: email, meetings, and small group chat.
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Email is great for asynchronous work; that’s a big part of why
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everyone uses it. Email’s simple subject line model, used properly,
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can solve all of the issues above. However, it is too clunky for
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conversations; even a 10-message thread is unwieldy. And it lacks many
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of the conversational features of modern chat apps, like instant
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delivery of messages, typing notifications, emoji reactions,
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at-mentions, and more.
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Meetings are the current state-of-the-art for conversations where busy
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people like managers, PMs, or other senior people
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participate. However, meetings are often extremely
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inefficient. Participants may need to be present for an hour-long
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meeting when their input is only needed for five minutes portion of
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the discussion. If someone is unable to attend the meeting, their
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input is lost. Someone has to take notes for there to be any record of
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what happened or any follow-ups. And meetings add delay and scheduling
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overhead to decisions.
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Finally, small group chat works for the short term, but it doesn't build
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knowledge within the team, and leads to only managers having the full
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picture on projects. Having discussions accessible to larger lists allows
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more stakeholders to stay in the loop.
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## Asynchronous communication is fundamental to productive work
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These problems are all symptoms of the underlying fact that the channel
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model used by Slack and similar tools is a really bad way to structure
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asynchronous communication.
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However, asynchronous communication is fundamental to how work happens today:
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* Managers, PMs, and others in meetings all day need to reply to things in
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batch, either in the few minutes they have between meetings, or at the end
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of the day.
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* Anyone in a different timezone or on a different work schedule than the
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rest of the team has parts of their day where they are working
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asynchronously.
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* Individual contributors cannot do focused work if they need to check their
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communication tool every 5 minutes to use it. Asynchronous communication
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is essential to being able to focus for an hour or more, which has been
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shown to have a huge impact on developer productivity and happiness.
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The fact that you can't do asynchronous work in Slack channels puts a
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ceiling on how useful Slack can be to an organization.
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## Ok. What does Zulip do differently?
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> Zulip’s unique threading saves me well over an hour a day in working with
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> our distributed team of engineers and PMs across 7+ time zones. We tried
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> Slack, Mattermost, and other team chat products that claim to support
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> threading, and nothing handles synchronous and asynchronous communication
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> so intuitively.
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>
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> -Jacinda Shelly, CTO, Doctor On Demand
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Zulip provides the benefits of real-time chat, while also being great
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at asynchronous communication. Zulip is inspired by email’s highly
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effective threading model: Every channel message has a topic, just
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like every message in email has a subject line. (Channels are called
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streams in Zulip.)
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Topics hold Zulip conversations together, just like subject lines hold email
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conversations together. They allow you to efficiently catch up on messages
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and reply in context, even to conversations that started hours or days ago.
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## Zulip changes how you can operate
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It's simple in concept, but switching from Slack to Zulip can
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transform how your organization communicates:
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* Leaders can prioritize their time and batch-reply to messages, and
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thus effectively participate in the chat community.
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* More discussions can be moved from meetings and email to chat.
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* Individual contributors can do focused work instead of paging
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through GIFs making sure they don't miss anything important.
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* Remote workers can participate in an equal way to people present in
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person.
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* Employees don't need to be glued to their keyboard or phone in order
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to avoid missing out on important conversations.
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* Everyone saves a huge amount of wasted time and attention.
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> "Zulip's topic-based threading helps us manage discussions with clarity,
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> ensuring the right people can pay attention to the right messages. This
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> makes our large-group discussion far more manageable than what we've
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> experienced with Skype and Slack."
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>
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> -Grahame Grieve, founder, FHIR health care standards body
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## Further reading
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- [Zulip features](/features)
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- [Plans and pricing](/plans)
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- [Zulip for companies](/for/companies)
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- [Zulip for open source organizations](/for/open-source)
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- [Zulip for working groups and communities](/for/working-groups-and-communities)
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@ -100,7 +100,7 @@ class DocPageTest(ZulipTestCase):
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self._test('/apps/', 'Apps for every platform.')
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self._test('/features/', 'Beautiful messaging')
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self._test('/hello/', 'productive group chat', landing_missing_strings=["Login"])
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self._test('/why-zulip/', 'all stakeholders can see and')
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self._test('/why-zulip/', 'Why Zulip?')
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self._test('/for/open-source/', 'for open source projects')
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self._test('/for/companies/', 'in a company')
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self._test('/for/working-groups-and-communities/', 'standards bodies')
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