Shift vs Zephyr for Zulip

Shift is the ultimate time-tracking app for freelancers, contractors, and multi-job workers. Whether you’re managing gigs, juggling clients, or just need a simple way to log hours, Shift keeps it effortless and private—no ads, no sign-in required. Now you can track time for 1 client for free. Need more? Upgrade to Shift Unlimited and track unlimited clients. • Simple & Intuitive – No clutter. No confusion. Just fast, efficient time tracking. • Track by Job or Client – Start and stop timers for different jobs, clients, or projects. • Seamless Switching – Change between clients or tasks without losing your session. • Export & Share – Download clean PDF reports for invoices, records, or taxes. • Edit Time Entries – Forgot to clock in or out? No problem—adjust manually. Perfect for freelancers, contractors, consultants, and anyone tracking time across multiple jobs or clients.

Zephyr is a Zulip client for Apple devices. Zulip is a discussion system where conversations are organized by topics. You'll need a Zulip server to use this app. This does things that are hard with non-native apps. It supports multiple windows on iPad — open a conversation in its own window, put a different server in each one. Also supports drag and drop in and out of the app. Most of Zulip is here: topics and channels, reactions, polls and to-do lists, message editing and moving, starred messages, reminders that resurface a message when you want it, drafts that sync across devices, muting and following, channel administration, and full-text search with Zulip's search operators. Plus the things a native app should add — a share extension, unread-count widgets, Shortcuts support, and previews rendered by your server so what you send is exactly what they see. Zephyr keeps a local archive of your messages and reads it first. Open the app on a plane and your conversations are there; search runs against the local index; anything you send queues and goes out when the network returns (not when you realize you need to press a retry button). When the connection is flaky, views render instantly from the archive instead of waiting on a timeout. Add as many Zulip servers as you like — work, open source projects, communities. They stay connected concurrently: notifications arrive from all of them, unread counts aggregate across them, and on the Mac each window can show a different server side by side. You can drive from the keyboard, if one is connected: jump anywhere with Open Quickly, walk messages and the sidebar with the arrow keys, reply, react, star, and search without touching the pointer. On iPad, hardware keyboards get the same treatment. If you find missing keyboard from the official app, open an issue on GitHub.