Setting up your organization

Welcome to Zulip! This page will guide you through trying out Zulip, migrating your organization from other team chat tools (if needed), getting everything set up, and inviting others to join.

If you are joining an existing organization, we recommend checking out our guide to Getting started with Zulip.

If you encounter any problems as you're getting started, please drop by our friendly development community and let us know!

Trying out Zulip

You can start by reading about how Zulip’s unique topic-based threading combines the best of email and chat to make remote work productive and delightful.

We also highly recommend trying Zulip for yourself! You can:

Create a Zulip Cloud organization for free with just a few clicks.
Join the Zulip development community to see Zulip in action. Feel free to introduce yourself and ask questions!

Choosing between Zulip Cloud and self-hosting

Whether signing up for Zulip Cloud or self-hosting Zulip is the right choice for you depends on the needs of your organization.

If you aren’t sure what you need, our high quality export and import tools (cloud, self-hosted) ensure you can always move from our hosting to yours (and back).

Advantages of Zulip Cloud

Simple managed solution, with no setup or maintenance overhead. Sign up with just a few clicks.
Always updated to the latest version of Zulip.
Anyone can start with Zulip Cloud Free. Free or heavily discounted Zulip Cloud Standard pricing is available for most non-business uses.

Advantages of self-hosting Zulip

Zulip is 100% open-source software, with no "open core" catch. When you self-host Zulip, you get the same software as Zulip Cloud Standard customers.
Retain full control over your data and simplify compliance by self-hosting Zulip behind your firewall.
We work hard to make it easy to install, back up, and maintain a self-hosted Zulip server. Self host Zulip directly on Ubuntu or Debian Linux, in Docker, or with prebuilt images for Digital Ocean and Render.
Customize Zulip for all your needs. It's easy to develop and maintain custom integrations and features.

Migrating from other chat tools

We have tools for importing your data from other chat tools, including users, channels, messages, and more.

Note that importing data from another chat app creates a new Zulip organization containing only imported data.

Create your organization profile

The information in your organization profile is displayed on the registration and login page for your organization, and in the Zulip app.

Edit organization profile

The organization description supports full Markdown syntax, including bold/italic, links, lists, and more.

Instructions for all platforms

Go to Organization profile.
Edit your organization name, description, and profile picture.
Click Save changes.

Add a wide logo

This feature is only available to Zulip Cloud Standard and self-hosted organizations.

You can customize the logo users see in the upper left corner of the Zulip app. For best results make sure your logo has a transparent background, and trim any bordering whitespace. To upload a logo:

Instructions for all platforms

Go to Organization profile.
Under Organization logo, upload a new logo.

Make sure to test the logo in both light theme and dark theme.

Customize organization settings

Review the settings for your organization to set everything up how you want it to be.

Instructions for all platforms

Click on the gear () icon in the upper right corner of the web or desktop app.
Select Manage organization.
Click on "Organization settings" and "Organization permissions" tabs, and any others that are of interest.

A few settings to highlight:

Decide who can invite new users, or whether anyone can join without an invitation.
Set visibility for users' email addresses.
If your organization uses a programming language, set the default language for code blocks. Also consider setting up code playgrounds.
If your organization uses code repositories, set up linkifiers to make it easy to link to issues (e.g. just by typing #1234 for issue 1234).
Add custom emoji, including your organization's logo.

For many other settings, e.g. message and topic editing permissions, you can experience how Zulip works for your organization before deciding what settings are best for you.

Create streams

In Zulip, streams determine who gets a message. They are similar to channels in IRC/Slack/Discord, chat rooms, and email lists.

We recommend setting up some streams before inviting other users to join Zulip, so that you can automatically subscribe everyone to the right set of streams.

If you later create additional streams, no worries! You can always add a group of users or all the members of another stream to a new stream.

Add clear descriptions to your streams, especially public streams.

How to create a stream

Instructions for all platforms

Go to All streams.
Click Create stream on the right.
Fill out the requested info, and click Create.

For more details about stream settings, see Create a stream.

Tips for creating streams

It's often best to start with just a few streams, and add more as needed. For small teams, you can start with the default streams and go from there.
For large organizations, we recommend using a consistent naming scheme, like #marketing/<name> or #mk/<name> for all streams pertaining to the marketing team, #help/<team name> for <team name>'s internal support stream, etc.
A #zulip help stream can be useful for providing internal Zulip support and answering questions about Zulip.
For open source projects or other volunteer organizations, consider adding default streams like #announce for announcements, #new members for new members to introduce themselves and be welcomed, and #help so that there's a clear place users stopping by with just a single question can post.

Customize settings for new users

Customize settings for new users to get them off to a great start.

Add custom profile fields.
Configure default new user settings.
Set default streams for new users.
Set the default language for new users, if it should be something other than US English.

Invite users to join

Before inviting users, you may want to delete any test messages or topics.

How to invite users to join

Require invitations
Allow anyone to join

Configure allowed authentication methods. By default, Zulip allows logging in via email/password as well as various social authentication providers like Google, GitHub, GitLab, and Apple. Users can log in with any allowed authentication method, regardless of how they signed up.
Invite users by sending email invitations or sharing a reusable invite link.

Allow users to join without an invitation.
Configure the appropriate email domain restrictions for your organization.
Share a link to your registration page, which is https://your-domain.zulipchat.com for Zulip Cloud organizations.

To get everyone off to a good start, you may wish to share the guide to Getting started with Zulip.

You can link to your Zulip organization with a nice badge.

Create user groups

User groups allow you to mention multiple users at once, notifying them about a message. For example, you may choose to create user groups for teams in your organization.

How to create a user group

Instructions for all platforms

Go to User groups.
Under Add a new user group, enter a Name and Description.
Click Save.
Find the group in the list below, and add members. Zulip will notify everyone who is added.

Set up integrations

Zulip integrates directly with dozens of products, and with hundreds more through Zapier and IFTTT. Popular Zulip integrations include GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, Sentry and Twitter.

The integrations page has instructions for integrating with each product.
If you don't see an integration you need, you can request it.
You can also create custom integrations using our API.
Want to learn more? Read about Zulip bots and integrations.

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