We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 13.0, containing numerous new features and bug fixes. Almost 2,200 new commits have been merged across the project since the 12.0 release in April 2026.

Our team put significant focus on improving navigation between conversations, and searching for topics and messages in 13.0. Other notable improvements to Zulip include hiding link previews, autosaving drafts as you compose messages, enlarged emoji previews, and per-channel mobile-notification defaults for new channel subscribers.

We’re also thrilled about new integrations, such as the addition of Google Meet as a video call provider. There are also visual improvements across the app, including redesigned buttons in modals, underlined links in messages, updated icons, and a slimmer loading indicator at the top of the message feed.

Zulip is developed in collaboration with our community, under the stewardship of the non-profit Zulip Foundation. A total of 91 people contributed commits to Zulip since the 12.0 release, bringing the project to 1,743 code contributors. Zulip is remarkable for its number of major contributors, with 99 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 the first major release of the Zulip server and web application since the establishment of the Zulip Foundation. Kim shared the latest news from the non-profit Zulip Foundation and how the Zulip project has continued to move forward. Apoorva also highlighted the contributions and experiences of this summer’s Zulip Google Summer of Code cohort.

Mobile app

In three mobile releases since the 12.0 release, we’ve made the mobile app faster and more reliable. It loads about 20% faster in large organizations, and with Zulip Server 12.0 or later, it’s usually ready to go right away when you open it after a few hours away. The app reconnects sooner when you come back to it or your network changes, and recovers on its own when a connection stalls.

In the 12.0 release announcement, we said that making notifications on iOS more helpful was next on our mobile agenda. Notifications on iOS are now grouped by conversation, with a separate stack for each topic and direct message conversation (with Zulip Server 12.0 or later, where notifications are end-to-end encrypted). And tapping a notification now takes you to the message it’s about, not just the conversation. If you’re @-mentioned partway through a long conversation you haven’t been following, you’ll land right on the mention.

You can now hide link previews on a message, a new feature in Zulip Server 13.0. Previews you hide stay hidden for you everywhere, so hiding one on the web also hides it on your phone. You can also report a message to your organization’s moderators (with Zulip Server 12.0 or later). On iOS 18 and later, the app respects the system setting for auto-playing animated images. We’ve fixed many other bugs along the way.

The mobile app now requires Zulip Server 9.0 or later, and shows a warning when connected to a server older than Zulip Server 10.0, in line with our policy of supporting server releases from the previous 18 months. To get all these improvements, along with important security fixes, be sure to leave automatic updates enabled for the Zulip mobile app, or update promptly when a new version comes out.

Finally, if you appreciate the Zulip mobile app, we would welcome a review from you in the app store of your choice.

Release highlights

This section gives an overview of the major features and improvements in Zulip Server 13.0. 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.

View linked conversations

As conversations grow in depth and context in your organization, you can now quickly view how they connect to each other by viewing conversations that the current topic you’re reading links to alongside other conversations that link back to it.

Improved left-sidebar topic search

It’s now easier to search a channel’s topics in the left sidebar, using a new “Search topics” button next to the name of the channel you’re viewing.

Or use the filter at the top of the left sidebar to search for recent topics in all your subscribed channels by prefixing your search with topic: or selecting the “Search all topics for…” option that appears once you’ve started typing.

Focusing search results by date

Building on the scroll to date feature in the message feed that was introduced in Zulip 12.0, you can now add a date filter when searching for messages if you know more or less when the message you’re looking for was sent.

Improved navigation to unread conversations

Keyboard users have long had the ability to easily read through conversations with unread messages by using the N and P `keyboard shortcuts. Now mouse and tablet users can enjoy the same reading experience via the new “Go to next unread…” button that appears in the message feed once you’ve reached the end of the current conversation.

Hide link previews

In organizations that enable link previews, it’s now possible to hide link previews you encounter as a reader on a per-message basis.

Design and UX improvements

We continue to make subtle visual improvements across the app, including redesigned buttons in modals, underlined links in messages, updated icons, and a slimmer loading indicator at the top of the message feed. Additionally:

• Administrators can enable mobile notification defaults on a per-channel basis for new channel subscribers.
• Drafts of the message you’re composing now autosave as you’re typing.
• Hovering over an emoji in a message or a user’s status reveals a tooltip with an enlarged preview of the emoji, along with the emoji’s name.

Integrations

• Self-hosted Zulip installations can now configure Google Meet as their video call provider, in addition to BigBlueButton, Constructor Groups, Jitsi (the default), Nextcloud Talk, Webex, and Zoom.
• We’re happy to share Zulip MCP with you, written by the Zulip superusers at WindBorne. Self-hosted Zulip installations can run AI agents in Zulip as @-mentionable bots, or wire into any MCP client.

Data imports

• Slack import tool: The first message of each Slack thread now stays in the channel’s main topic, with a link to the topic holding the rest of the thread. Thread topic names are also cleaner.
• Mattermost import tool: Fixed a bug where text resembling an HTML tag, like </rant> or <username>, was silently removed from imported messages. Mattermost messages are Markdown, but the tool was converting them as if they were HTML. Dropping that conversion also makes imports much faster: ~350k messages now convert in about 55 seconds on a 4-core machine, rather than hours.
• MS Teams import tool: Now converts “hosted content” such as images or code snippets hosted in a Teams message (as opposed to attachments stored in SharePoint or OneDrive).
• Zulip data exports: Improved performance and disk usage when exporting very large realms, reducing the downtime required to migrate to a new server.

Upgrading

We work hard to make sure that the upgrade process Just Works, and highly recommend upgrading to Zulip Server 13.0 to take advantage of the hundreds of improvements in this release. Zulip Cloud is always up to date with the latest Zulip improvements.

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.

Release plans

We plan to continue the cadence of shipping two major releases a year, with the next release expected in Spring 2027.

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 14.0.

Community

Thanks again to the amazing global Zulip development community for making this possible! Your feedback is a vital part of how we design and prioritize improvements to Zulip.

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! Eligible organizations are encouraged to join our sponsorship program, or sign up for the Community plan for self-hosted organizations.

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.

• Dario Caroprese (German translation)
• Raphaël Hertzog (French translation; bug reporter)
• Lev Shereshevsky (Russian translation)

Code contributions

What follows is a summary of the commits contributed to Zulip during the 13.0 release cycle.

$ ./tools/total-contributions 12.0 13.0
345	Anders Kaseorg
221	Aman Agrawal
198	Chris Bobbe
177	Evy Kassirer
168	Alex Vandiver
88	Sahil Batra
77	Shubham Padia
73	Mateusz Mandera
73	Rajesh Malviya
62	PieterCK
52	Yogesh Shivaji
47	Lauryn Menard
47	Pratik Chanda
39	Ruhaan
32	Aadyot Nandan
31	Prakhar Pratyush
29	Alya Abbott
29	Karl Stolley
29	Sathwik Shetty
29	Tim Abbott
28	Agnish Bauri
27	Apoorva Pendse
27	Sayed Mahmood Sayedi
25	Niloth P
20	Sairam Bisoyi
18	Bedo Khaled
15	Pritesh Shetty
15	neiljp (Neil Pilgrim)
14	The Dance
11	Dhruv Shetty
9	Amit Patil
7	bhuvan-somisetty
5	Jaimin2687
5	Rakshit Chauhan
5	Sarthak Kumbhar
8	Benjamin Prew
4	Danish
3	Ahmed Tabish
3	Aman Vishwakarma
3	Ishan Kumar
3	chungwwei
2	Aaditya1273
2	Aditya A
2	KasarapuRajeev
2	Luke W Faraone
2	Tanaya Pawar
2	Tuan Dinh
2	Ujjwal Verma
2	faithlee
2	pyaroslav
1	Aditya-XR
1	Ali Raza
1	Arun Kushwaha
1	Ayan Alam
1	Ayush Solanki
1	CerealNotFound
1	David Edelstein
1	Dhruva Kumar
2	Emily Sutherlin
1	Gajendra Malviya
1	Gary Pendergast
1	Greg Price
1	Hari20032005
1	Harsh kumar jadon
1	Hendrik Wolff
1	Henrik Schönemann
1	James Renken
1	JoeJoeflyn
1	John Seekins
1	Josh Bartlett
1	Moustafa Mohamed Elsayed
1	Pinank Shah
1	Prateek Lohiya
1	Rohith Gurram
1	Santhosh Kumar
1	Sarvesh-ml
1	Steve Howell
1	Tanuj Kinkar
1	Vidip123
1	Yash Raj Talreja
1	harshita-singh12
1	lniebuhr
1	sdivyanshu90
1	vighneshbhat9945
1	yashmatrix
1	sharayuwadghule
1	Mohsin Hirani
1	Swarnim
1	clado
1	harrish243
1	PascalEgn
Commit range 12.0..13.0 corresponds to 2026-04-27 to 2026-11-12
1545 commits from zulip/zulip: 12.0..13.0
1 commits from zulip/zulip-mobile: eb8505c4a0cc..d7cf6da79b4b
340 commits from zulip/zulip-flutter: cd05627cd7ca..7e3005e747c5
89 commits from zulip/zulip-desktop: 7da12bac401e..308ea3b248ba
81 commits from zulip/docker-zulip: 872b92a99641..458fdf168b52
2 commits from zulip/python-zulip-api: 7bb8f4eb0def..b172347594a4
19 commits from zulip/zulip-terminal: 6a799870eccc..dedc62d6b96a
26 commits from zulip/github-actions-zulip: d49c9ccdadd8..f675f2b4eb2a
73 commits from zulip/zulipbot: 2f78211a6f96..2e42a6b2f334
Excluded 15 commits authored by bots.
2161 total commits by 91 contributors between 12.0 and 13.0.