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When comparing Rocket.Chat vs Zulip, the Slant community recommends Rocket.Chat for most people. In the question“What are the best on-site Slack alternatives?” Rocket.Chat is ranked 1st while Zulip is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Rocket.Chat is:
Rocket.Chat is available for free. It's licensed under the MIT license with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Rocket.Chat is available for free. It's licensed under the MIT license with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Native apps for all major desktop and mobile platforms
Rocket.Chat has native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Pro Supports a wide variety of authentication methods
In addition to the usual email / username + password combination, Rocket.Chat supports authenticating via Facebook, Github, Gitlab, Google, Linkedin, Meteor and Twitter accounts.
Pro Understands markdown better than Slack does.
Links work properly, for instance, with square brackets followed by parentheses.
Pro Very active and helpful community
Pro Video conferencing support
Rocket.Chat supports video calls.
Pro Helps keep track of different conversations
Instead of rooms or channels Zulip is built around topics. This allows you to have multiple conversations at the same time without conversations interfering with each another. It also allows you to reference conversations without clutter.
Pro Free and open source software
Zulip is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
Pro Easy asynchronous conversations
Its threaded model helps people working in different timezone's communicate effectively.
Pro Apps for every platform
Pro Hosted or on-premise
With data export tools so you can migrate.
Pro Intuitive interface
I struggled with Slack, never finding the settings I like to adjust. With Zulip never had such issues.
Cons
Con Developer support is non-existent
Can't even create a clean Ubuntu VM with a working developer install. Unresolved dependencies; fails to build. Docs are terrible; actual devs don't respond to questions; error messages are near-opaque. DO NOT RECOMMEND.
Con Web client loses images
In chat rooms with images, before very long, images start to become empty boxes. Useless to pass around visual information
Con No theme customization
Con No chat audit for enterprise
Con Poor security implementations / protocols
Con Centralized
Con iOS app is poorly made
The iOS application is not native, being just a browser container. This means that the UX is quite poor, slow, buttons unresponsive. At this moment they do not provide a decent experience.
Con Android app is poorly made
The Android application is just a badly wrapped web-view which does not perform well and has no form of offline caching whatsoever.
Con Privacy settings are absent
Privacy settings for the server are absent, for instance, you don't have the ability to disable registrations, there's no way to control access to the chat.
Con Features not available out of the box
Con No web browser support
Con Email required for registration
Con No way to block new registrations
Without the ability to disable registrations, there's no way to control access to the chat.
Con No End-to-End Encryption
Not even for private one-to-one messages, let along group chats.
Con Takes some getting used to
As most chat software uses the concept of channels or rooms, getting in the habit of splitting each topic off in a separate category can require some getting used to and discipline.
