Zoom vs Zulip
No clear leader: Zoom (64.4) and Zulip (61.7) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for collaboration software. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Zoom
A comprehensive unified communications solution offering video conferencing, instant messaging, cloud-based phone service, webinars, and workplace collaboration features, deployable in cloud or on-premises environments.
Zulip
An open-source team collaboration application that organizes conversations into topic-based threads, blending instant messaging with email-style threading to support both real-time and delayed communication patterns.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Zoom
- School and Campus-
- Meetings up to 300 participants for 30 hours
- Team Chat with direct, channel, and group messaging
- Unlimited whiteboards
- Screen sharing with co-annotation
- Breakout rooms and polling
- +9 more
- School and Campus Plus-
- All School and Campus features plus:
- Zoom Phone with unlimited internal calling
- Metered outbound calling within US & Canada
- 10GB cloud storage per user
- LTI integration
- +5 more
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Meetings up to 500+ participants
- Webinars up to 500 attendees
- Unlimited cloud storage
- Zoom Phone with unlimited calling
- Conference Room Connector
- +3 more
Zulip
From $6.67/user/month (cloud annual), free open-source self-hosted option, or $3.50/user/month for commercial self-hosted support. Free tier available.
- FreeFree
- Message history search (10,000 limit)
- File storage up to 5 GB total
- Complete team chat solution
- Hundreds of integrations
- Advanced roles and permissions
- +1 more
- Standard$6.67/user/month billed annually or $8/month
- Unlimited search history
- File storage up to 5 GB per user
- Flexible permissions with custom groups
- Message retention policies
- Brand Zulip with your logo
- +2 more
- Plus$10/user/month billed annually or $12/month
- All Standard plan features
- File storage up to 25 GB per user
- SSO with SAML (Okta, OneLogIn)
- SCIM user and group sync
- Custom domain
- +1 more
- Self-hosted (Open Source)Free
- Complete team chat solution with all Zulip features without limitation
- 100% open-source software
- Retain full control over your data
- Self-hosted Basic$3.50/user/month (with $20/month first-year discount)
- Unlimited support
- Email and chat support
- SSO with SAML and Microsoft Entra ID
- AD/LDAP user sync
- Full compliance
- +2 more
- Self-hosted EnterpriseContact sales
- Email, chat and phone support
- SSO with OpenID Connect
- AD/LDAP, SAML and OpenID Connect group sync
- Implementation consulting
- Custom feature development
- +1 more
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
Zoom
- Skype for Business (Lync)
- Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)
- Third-party applications via App Marketplace
- Microsoft 365
Zulip
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Discord
- Mattermost
- Rocket.Chat
- Matrix
- IRC
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Bitbucket
- Asana
- Jira
- Linear
- Trello
- Basecamp
- Jenkins
- CircleCI
- GitHub Actions
- Travis CI
- TeamCity
- Heroku
- Netlify
- Docker
- +39 more
Zoom or Zulip: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.