When it was introduced Teams was pretty bad but these days it works just fine. I don't see that it being a decider really more than just historical preference.
We have Teams and Slack and I don’t ever see anyone push for a chat in teams. Most channels are a ghost town. To me, teams would be “fine” if it’s all we had, but when you see it next to Slack it’s a no-brainer for me. Teams UI is just baaaaad
A few years ago I worked at a company that actually used Telegram and Telegram Desktop. It was great. Available on mobile and desktop, all platforms, supports all the features we needed, new users get full history.
The best I've used, and I say this in all sincerity, is actually Facebook's work platform (but it's not a chat-first experience, obviously, and that's probably what made it better).
My company uses both outlook and slack. Teams is also used for scheduled meetings but never touched for chat. I personally don’t find teams to be significantly worse than zoom but I’d rather never use either.
Why? It's much better than Teams, if for no other reason than Teams just got deprecated on MacOS Monterey and that's really annoying. Or rather not for just that reason, but for the reason that Teams is Microsoft's 10th biggest priority, whereas video calling is Zoom's only priority, so they make a better product.
I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the same happened with Slack, I would dislike it, but I guess it is at least usable. Still garbage, but not as much garbage, as MS Teams.
What do you do to make Zulip better than Slack? A vanilla installation is not better, and scales worse with more users, more devices per user more mobile users and more integration sources. But, I’ve never been in a situation where I was forced to make Zulip an attractive communication tool to an organization; there must be a lot that is possible. Getting away from a Salesforce product is a good goal.
What I would do if hosting Zulip for a company, is:
(1) host an up to date Zulip version
(2) setup or rent a Jitsi Meet or other open source / free software voice + video chat solution. Jitsi Meet might be a bit difficult to properly set up, compared to Zulip, because of extra things needed, like TURN server and in general the complexities of web RTC. Maybe renting that for some < 10 EUR is fine for a company.
(3) Configure Zulip to have for example `/jitsi` or `/meeting` for creating meetings right out of Zulip.
(4) Setup other integrations, that exist for Zulip.
(5) Setup backups for the Zulip database. It is just a postgres database. One can dump it and move the dump to a backup store.
If this is too much, for example because the company doesn't have the knowledge in their employees to manage this, then one can also rent Zulip hosted solutions.
Getting away from Salesforce alone is in my opinion already worth it.
I’ve never touched a scaling issue with Zulip, how many devices are we talking about here? Maybe I’ve just never touched the walls of scaling it. The architecture seems fine to scale if you self host though.
The only issues I’ve found with Zulip is how it looks and training people to use it right. I’ve had a lot of comments that Zulip has ruined people because they realised how good it is only after they stopped using it, and can tell that everything is so much worse, but the whole time they used it- they hated it.
The other issue, if we can call it as such, is that there’s not that many native third party integrations, we had to write our own bots for some pretty basic things. But writing bots is so much easier in Zulip than Slack (and for Teams its a lesson in genuine masochism) so I give them a pass.
