Discord vs Zulip
Discord and Zulip are both team chat software. Discord is a commercial product from Discord Inc. Zulip is open source under Apache-2.0, with 26k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Discord when
- You run a public or semi-public community, such as gamers, an open-source project or a creator audience.
- Pick Zulip when
- Your team finds Slack threads chaotic and wants organised, asynchronous conversations, self-hosted or hosted.
Side by side
Voice, video and text chat organised into servers and channels, built for gaming groups and online communities.
A team chat server and web app built around topic-based threads within channels, with desktop and mobile clients.
Not built for business use: no proper data retention or compliance controls, and content is hard to search from outside.
The topic model takes adjustment, and self-hosted push notifications go through Zulip's paid service for larger teams.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Self-hosted server, cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Not published
Python, Django, TypeScript, PostgreSQL and Redis
Closed source, sold by Discord Inc.
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
42k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
26k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release 12.3.
Other comparisons
More team chat apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.