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:
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
Advantages of self-hosting Zulip
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
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:
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.
Invite users to join
How to invite users to join
- Require invitations
- Allow anyone to join
-
Allow anyone to join without an invitation.
-
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.
Further reading