Kandra Labs, Inc.
Kandra Labs stewards, hosts, supports, and improves Zulip, an open-source organized team-chat platform that combines real-time conversation with email-style topic threading. Its stated mission is to develop the best possible team-chat experience, with particular focus on public-interest organizations and communities.
At a Glance
- Businesses and distributed/hybrid teams
- Open-source projects
- Academic research groups and universities
- Education organizations
- +4 more
AI Tools by Kandra Labs, Inc.
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Zulip
Open Source Threaded Team Chat
Discussions
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Latest News
Announcing the Zulip Foundation: the company was donated to a new independent nonprofit foundation, which now fully owns Kandra Labs.
Zulip Server 11.0 released with message reminders, channels without topics, channel folders, and more than 3,300 commits since 10.0.
Next-generation Flutter mobile app released as the official Android and iOS app.
Zulip 10.0 released with hundreds of features and bug fixes; the project also announced its new flexible permissions-management system.
Products & Services
Managed, always-up-to-date hosted Zulip service, with Free, Standard, and Plus plans, commercial support, integrations, permissions, search, and organization administration.
100% open-source team-chat server that organizations can install on their own Ubuntu or Debian infrastructure, with Free, Basic, Business, and Enterprise support/service options.
Official Android and iOS clients; the current next-generation mobile app is built with Flutter.
Open-source desktop clients for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
Market Position
Zulip positions itself as an open-source alternative to Slack, Microsoft Teams, HipChat, and IRC. Its differentiators are durable topic-based threading for organized asynchronous discussion, full self-hosting and data ownership, a single open-source codebase across cloud and self-hosted deployments, and broad integrations; it competes especially for distributed teams, technical communities, and organizations that prioritize transparency and control over collaboration data.
Leadership
Founders
Tim Abbott
MIT alumnus and former Ksplice developer; he led the Zulip open-source project on nights and weekends after Dropbox released it, then founded Kandra Labs in April 2016 to provide dedicated, mission-driven stewardship and financial sustainability for Zulip.
Board of Directors
Founding Story
Zulip began as a Cambridge startup founded in August 2012 by MIT alumni who had previously created Ksplice, inspired by MIT's BarnOwl/Zephyr messaging culture. Dropbox acquired Zulip in early 2014 and open-sourced the product in 2015. As the open-source community grew, Tim Abbott founded Kandra Labs in April 2016 so a dedicated team could guide development, support contributors, and sustain the project.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Recurring subscriptions for managed Zulip Cloud hosting and paid self-hosted support/service plans, plus enterprise support, implementation consulting, custom feature development, and advanced deployment services. The software itself remains open source and can be self-hosted for free.
Pricing Tiers
10,000 messages of search history, up to 5 GB total file storage, complete team chat, integrations, roles/permissions, and guest accounts.
Unlimited search history, up to 5 GB per-user storage, flexible permissions, retention policies, branding, and priority commercial support.
10-user minimum; Standard features plus up to 25 GB per-user storage, SAML SSO, SCIM, custom domain, and guest access controls.
All Zulip features; intended for eligible communities, open-source projects, research, education, nonprofits, and personal organizations.
Unlimited mobile notifications and support for Zulip's open-source development; discounted pricing is available for non-workplace users.
25-user minimum; support, SSO, AD/LDAP sync, guest controls, exports, and retention policies.
Support by email, chat, and phone; OpenID Connect, group sync, SCIM, implementation consulting, custom feature development, and advanced deployment options.
Target Markets
- Businesses and distributed/hybrid teams
- Open-source projects
- Academic research groups and universities
- Education organizations
- Nonprofits and public-interest organizations
- Communities, clubs, and volunteer groups
- Distributed and hybrid business teams
- Open-source software projects and developer communities
- Academic research and education
- Nonprofits, public-interest organizations, and grassroots communities
- Events and conferences
- Engineering, DevOps, customer support, project management, and cross-functional collaboration
- Recurse Center
- Lean Community
- Rust project
- Asciidoctor