Chat

I want to share with you two great chat application I tried.

Zulip

Zulip chat is an open source project with a paid version. It was open sourced by Dropbox about 10 years ago. They ask money to support push notifications on mobile, and it is a good deal even if it is a per user billing so you need to do your homeworks to be sure to fit in your business model.

The docker installer is good, and the thing that I like is the ability to create “threaded” discussions. Also, newcomers get an introduction email, so you can install the product and start using it in 0 time.

Zulip requires redis, rabbitmq and postgresql to work. It take a bit of time to boot, and seems a bit heavy but overall it is a complete product.

Once Campfire

Once Campfire was open sourced by 37Signals around 15 August 2025, so it is brand new.

I was impressed by the application for a bunch of reasons:

1. It supports user-wanted functionality like attachments, message post-editing, rich message text and search.
2. It consumes very little resources (half a gigabytes of RAM, very little compared to Zulip)
3. It supports VAPID Keys to enable push notifications.
4. It supports a BotsAPI
5. Its design (based on mobile-friendly svg images) is pretty neat.

Campfire is english-based, so no multi-language support so far.

Conclusion

As you know I like minimalistic implementation. So my preferred tool so far is Once Campfire, but Zulip deserve to be advertised because it be a good alternative for who is searching a more price-friendly alternative of the big names out of there.