We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 11.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes: message reminders, support for channels without topics, channel folders, and so much more! Over 3,300 new commits have been merged across the project since the 10.0 release in March.

Zulip is an organized team chat application ideal for both live and asynchronous communication.

Over the past few months, Slack imposed new restrictions on accessing your own communications, while Discord’s founder stepped down as CEO, to be replaced by an executive from Activision Blizzard in preparation for an IPO.

Zulip offers an alternative vision: owning your communications, not ceding control to a megacorporation. It’s 100% open-source software, with easy migration between cloud hosting and self-hosting, plus a powerful API for working with your data.

Zulip is developed in the open, in collaboration with our community. A total of 76 people contributed commits to Zulip since the 10.0 release, bringing the project to over 1,500 code contributors. Zulip is remarkable for its number of major contributors, with 98 people who’ve contributed 100+ commits.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s contributed to Zulip over the last several months, whether by writing code and documentation, reporting bugs, suggesting features, translating, supporting us financially, participating in discussions in the Zulip development community, or just sharing ideas! We could not do this without the hundreds of people who help the project.

Project highlights

Today marks a release of the Zulip server and web application. We’d also like to share news and updates for the project as a whole since the 10.0 release in March:

Mobile app

In June, we launched Zulip’s next-generation app for Android and iOS, powered by Flutter! It offers a sleek new design and a faster, smoother experience than the old app built on React Native. If you’ve installed or updated the Zulip app since the launch in the usual ways, the version you have is the new app.

We launched the new app before implementing 100% of the features in the old app, because the new app was already much better than the old for most Zulip users. Since the launch, we’ve heard your feedback about which features are most missed, and we’ve been hard at work building those. In 5 releases over the 8 weeks since launch, we’ve added search; status; availability; read receipts; sharing to Zulip from other apps; seeing who left emoji reactions; autocomplete for mentioning user groups; and much broader support for TeX math, along with smaller improvements.

In the coming months, we’ll be splitting our time between building long-requested new features — like encrypting push notifications end-to-end from your Zulip server to your device — and filling in some remaining features from the old app. If there’s a feature still missing that’s important to you, please let us know!

Learning about Zulip

• A new case study showcases how Zulip supports worldwide operations and AI development at WindBorne.

  “All our digital communication flows through Zulip… We have three deep learning channels, each with twenty active topics a day. No other chat system could support that.”

  — John Dean, co-founder and CEO of WindBorne

• Zulip was recognized as a GetApp 2025 category leader for collaboration. Thanks to our amazing user community for sharing your experience with Zulip!

• To learn how we’ve built a thriving open-source community around Zulip, listen to an interview with Zulip’s head of product on the Business of Open Source podcast.

Mentorship

2025 is the 10th consecutive year that Zulip is participating in Google Summer of Code. Our 14 GSoC 2025 participants contributed to many of the features described in this post!

“Contributing to Zulip has been an incredible learning experience, thanks to Zulip’s well-structured codebase, open discussions, and a welcoming, supportive community.”

— Kunal Sharma, Google Summer of Code 2025 participant

Sponsorships

We proudly sponsor free Zulip Cloud Standard hosting for more than 2,000 open-source projects, non-profits, educational institutions, academic research groups, and other communities. All eligible organizations are encouraged to join this program, or sign up for the Community plan for self-hosted organizations.

“Zulip makes all my Slack and Discord communities feel tedious by comparison.”

— AJ Kerrigan, Changelog community member

Release highlights

This section gives an overview of the major features and improvements in Zulip Server 11.0.

We believe that getting the little details right makes a big difference in a product that’s so central to people’s daily work. To make Zulip a joy to use, we relentlessly fine-tune the user experience, and consider it a priority to investigate and fix even minor bugs. This release contains hundreds of refinements beyond those described here.

Message reminders

You can now schedule a personal reminder for a message you want to come back to at a later time, with an optional note. It’s a great alternative to starring a message or marking it as unread when you plan to follow up at a later time.

Channels without topics (!!)

Zulip’s users tell us they love how it helps them keep conversations organized with topics. But you don’t always need organization by topic — in some social channels, for instance, or ones with a narrow purpose. You can now create Zulip channels without topics, for a simplified experience. Zulip Cloud organizations that started using this feature generally enable it for one or two channels.

Channel folders

Organizations can now sort channels into folders to keep them organized, for example putting each team’s channels into a dedicated folder. Channels are grouped by folder in the Inbox view, and everyone can decide whether to group channels by folder in the left sidebar.

Future releases will make it possible to manage channel permissions by folder. In the meantime, we’d love to hear how your organization is using channel folders, and how we can make them better!

Improved reading experience

• You can now view a list of recent topics in any channel, to get an overview of ongoing conversations. You decide whether channel links in the left sidebar go to the list of topics, the channel feed, the top topic, or the top unread topic.

• Thumbnails of images and videos now have a cleaner, more efficient layout. They are larger than before, while remaining secondary to text in the message feed.

Improved experience for composing messages

• Zulip lets you compose messages to a different conversation from the one you’re viewing — handy when sending a DM about some topic under discussion, for instance. To avoid distraction, the destination for your message is now deemphasized in the more common scenario of composing a message to the conversation you’re viewing.

• When pasting a large amount of text, you can now convert it to an uploaded text file.

Left sidebar improvements

• A new filter at the top of the left sidebar makes it easy to find direct message conversations, channels you’re subscribed to, and more.
• You can now configure whether Zulip displays an unread count summary on your home view.
• You can now filter topics in the left sidebar by whether or not they are resolved.

Improved management of unread messages

• In addition to being able to mark all messages as read, you can now bulk mark as read just messages in muted topics or topics you don’t follow.
• You can now configure Zulip to automatically mark as read notices indicating that someone resolved or unresolved a topic, or to do so just for topics you don’t follow.
• You can now conveniently manage all your channel-specific notification settings from the personal notification settings panel. Configure custom notifications for any channel you’re subscribed to, or reset channels to your default configuration.

Design improvements

• Buttons and banners throughout the settings UI have been updated with a more minimal, clean, and consistent look.
• Search suggestions are now shown with the same pills as the search input itself, making it easier to spot the suggestion you want.

Improved channel and group management

• Permissions to move messages, delete messages and resolve topics can now be assigned to any combination of groups, roles, and individual users for each channel.
• You can now configure whether or not topics are required on a channel-by-channel basis.
• You can now unarchive archived channels, and reactivate deactivated groups.

Improved onboarding experience

You can now configure a custom welcome message to be sent to new users. For example, you can describe the purpose of important channels, and link to your guidelines for using Zulip.

Improved security & privacy settings

Zulip 11.0 adds server support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) of mobile push notifications. Mobile app support for the new protocol is expected in the coming weeks. In the meantime, there’s a new setting to require end-to-end encryption for push notification content. If enabled, clients that don’t support E2EE will receive notifications without message content.

Integrations

• The LDAP integration now supports automatically handling changes in user email addresses upon login.
• Zulip’s SAML and SCIM integrations now support syncing the membership of Zulip groups from the identity provider.
• We’ve added integrations with OpenProject and OpenSearch, and improved the GitHub, GitLab, and Jotform integrations.

Internationalization

• Keyboard shortcuts now work regardless of what language your keyboard is configured to use.
• Our community translators have been hard at work keeping up with the product as it evolves. This release features translations that cover the majority of non-error strings in 25 languages.
• Zulip now uses Weblate for managing translations. If you’d like to help translate Zulip into your language, please sign up! All existing translations have been moved over from Transifex.

Upgrading

We highly recommend upgrading to Zulip Server 11.0 to take advantage of the hundreds of improvements in this release. We work hard to make sure that the upgrade process Just Works. If you have any questions or problems with your upgrade process, best-effort community support is available in the Zulip development community. For professional support, upgrade to Zulip Business, or reach out to sales@zulip.com. Zulip Cloud is always up to date with the latest Zulip improvements.

Release plans

We plan to continue the cadence of shipping two major releases a year, with the next release expected in early 2026.

We use project boards to publicly track goals for major server and mobile releases. These boards are updated on an ongoing basis as priorities evolve, and many community improvements integrated into Zulip are never specifically tracked as release goals.

Are there workflow improvements or feature gaps that matter to you? This is a great time to let us know, as we work to solidify the roadmap for Zulip 12.0.

Community

Thanks again to the amazing global Zulip development community for making this possible! If you appreciate Zulip, please recommend it to someone you know, for work or any other collaborative endeavor. If they say that Zulip won’t work for them, let us know why! Your feedback is a vital part of how we design and prioritize improvements to Zulip.

— Tim Abbott, Zulip project leader

P.S. We’re hiring! If you know an awesome go-to-market leader with startup experience or an amazing designer, please send them our way.

Non-code contributions

We would like to thank the following folks for their non-code contributions. Please fill out this form if you’d like your name to be added, and keep an eye out for future announcements to get listed next time.

• Lev Shereshevsky (Russian translation)

Code contributions

What follows is a summary of the commits contributed to Zulip during the 11.0 release cycle.

$ ./tools/total-contributions 10.0 11.0
297	Greg Price
250	Chris Bobbe
216	Karl Stolley
214	Aman Agrawal
195	Anders Kaseorg
191	Lauryn Menard
186	Shubham Padia
165	Alex Vandiver
141	Evy Kassirer
141	Sahil Batra
119	Tim Abbott
119	Rajesh Malviya
116	Sayam Samal
85	Prakhar Pratyush
79	Alya Abbott
77	Mateusz Mandera
77	Niloth P
74	Apoorva Pendse
64	Zixuan James Li
59	Maneesh Shukla
58	Kunal Sharma
43	Sayed Mahmood Sayedi
42	PieterCK
41	Kislay Verma
38	Pratik Chanda
24	Aman Vishwakarma
24	Saubhagya Patel
19	Aditya Kumar Kasaudhan
18	neiljp (Neil Pilgrim)
17	Harsh Meena
15	Kumar Aniket
12	Rohan Gudimetla
10	Bedo Khaled
10	Mohammad Reza Kianifar
8	Varun-Kolanu
4	Kartikay Sambher
4	kash2104
3	Aditya Chaudhary
3	Ritwik Patnaik
3	theofficialvedantjoshi
3	ubaidrmn
3	Brynly Mitchell
3	Tomlin7
2	Daniel Krol
2	Elsa Kihlberg Gawell
2	Jitendra Kumar
2	Swastik
2	Chinmay Ajith
2	Lakshya Goel
2	Emmanuel Ferdman
2	Sashank Ravipati
1	Akash Vishwakarma
1	Amaan-pathan
1	Ethan Mayer
1	ImDooMLorD
1	Ines Falcato
1	KIRTAN AGARWAL
1	Niklas Fiekas
1	Rakshit
1	Ryan W. West
1	Sanchit Sharma
1	Sumit Bhanushali
1	Sérgio Glórias
1	akshatdalton
1	amcdowell226
1	ben
1	ducnb
1	kumbhar-sarthak
1	nirved.mishra.eee23@itbhu.ac.in
1	okGus
1	yatinsharmaa12
1	Ahmed Tarek
1	Komyyy
1	Qun Cheng
1	Guspan Tanadi
1	TSTECH
Commit range 10.0..main corresponds to 2025-03-20 to 2025-08-13
2440 commits from zulip/zulip: 10.0..main
785 commits from zulip/zulip-flutter: e3b274af142f..8c3cd767ae7e
14 commits from zulip/zulip-mobile: 4d9d46d7f852..eb8505c4a0cc
32 commits from zulip/zulip-desktop: 15902e51f6ce..0c7ce62ce1bb
30 commits from zulip/python-zulip-api: 8c273311de70..3a2c96e64619
17 commits from zulip/zulip-terminal: 23a773c387ed..8e5c0357c874
7 commits from zulip/docker-zulip: 3677a238d3c6..a043d68b2de7
2 commits from zulip/zulint: 9be0a32bf75a..448e36a1e50e
1 commits from zulip/zulipbot: 3655e1f31e69..7dc7e37bc679
Excluded 17 commits authored by bots.
3311 total commits by 76 contributors between 10.0 and main.