After Telegram and WhatsApp: time for work chats to move to Zulip

Not long ago, work communication in most Russian companies lived in Telegram and WhatsApp. Today both messengers are blocked in Russia: client chats, agreements and files accumulated over years became unreachable in a single day. Companies without a platform of their own lost the communication channel and the negotiation archive at once. The lesson is harsh but simple: work conversations must not depend on a service you don't control.

The blocks also exposed an older problem: even while the messengers worked, conversations lived in employees' personal accounts. A manager quit — the history left with them; a phone got lost — corporate information ended up who-knows-where. Add the eternal chaos of a busy group chat, where an important decision drowns within an hour between memes and is unfindable a month later.

Zulip closes all of this at once. First, it is your server inside Russia: nobody outside can block it, conversations are stored in the company, and when someone leaves you disable one account — especially with login through Keycloak. Second, Zulip has a unique conversation model: every message belongs not just to a channel but to a specific topic within it. The discussion "choosing the renovation contractor" opens whole a month later, separate from the rest of the stream — like a forum thread, at chat speed.

And Zulip concedes nothing to the usual messengers: mobile and desktop apps, reactions, mentions, full-history search, integrations with GitLab and monitoring systems. Open code means the product cannot be "switched off" for Russia — it evolves independently of anyone's sanctions or pricing.

We deploy Zulip on your premises, wire up single sign-on, configure backups and help move your teams over from the old chats. Write to us via the contact page for a live demo.