Ask HN: Looking for an Alternative to Jira

+1 on Trello. I'm a Scrum Master and we use it in our current team (~10 devs). I miss the reporting JIRA has tbh, but we get along just fine using workarounds (estimating in cards, etc).

Good luck!

https://restya.com/board is open source Trello alternative

> massive preḿium

That massive premium bothers me too. I don't mind paying for those premium features, but as a small company (less than 20 employees) the cost is not justifiable.

We already use GitLab's community edition as a self-hosted package combined with MatterMost, and we love it. We are not using its issue tracker, only the git repository hosting and integration with MatterMost.

However, having to go to enterprise tier just to get epics is not an option for us. I really wish GitLab would price their tiers more appropriately for small businesses.

Also, what on earth are you doing with that acute accent on that poor m?

It's prettier, but painfully slow (even slower than the old version).

Atlassian has a major flaw in their understanding of how a lot of developers work and it is evident by all heir "new" versions of stuff. They've made simple editing harder (WYSIWYG only, which often makes bad assumptions), made drastic changes to the UI, broken workflows, removed keyboard shortcuts and made it impossible to open an issue full page by clicking a linkbun the web app without first loadingbit as an overlay. They are, hands down, the worst offender of "if it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is" that I've ever seen. I'm constantly advocating for anything else in every org I work with. An issue tracker doesn't need to be full of sugar, it needs to be simple and consistent. Atlassian fails magnificently at both of those.

I actually tried to get Phabricator up and running not long ago -- the main issue I have with it is that it seems to need a server (at least a database server) all to itself. It's probably a resolvable issue using some kind of container, but it scared me off a little bit.

For me, Clubhouse has the best UX ratio of personalization, features and simplicity... Hopefully it will continue to be only improved and not extended

I absolutely love Youtrack from a feature perspective but it still has the same dealbreaker problem as JIRA -- it's Java-based and needs a fair amount of CPU/RAM resources.

Sadly that's one of the big reasons we're moving away from Jira. The full set is:

* We don't have the money for a 10+ licence * It's slow (our VPS is underpowered and we don't have the money for a faster one) * Too many features are now part of pay-for licences, which pushes the aggregate cost over our self-imposed "how easy is this to justify to our attendees?" limit.

In the end, it boils down to the aggregate cost to get what we want.

We are using YouTrack cloud and while it does the job, it's not really satisfying to use. We would like to see more and better integrations. My current frustration is the Git integration; it only works with commits (not PRs) and is not 100% reliable. There is also a Confluence plugin that someone wrote for their hosted version 6 years ago, but the company won't enable it for the cloud version.

On the plus side, I've had pretty good interactions with their support team and they seem pretty responsive. Given that they are located in Eastern Europe, the team communicates very well and I generally don't have any trouble getting them to understand what's going on.

+1 for Redmine, as it can be self-hosted and doesn't need to hand out your information to SaaS ones like Trello or Taiga

+1 for GitHub Issues as it is closely integrated with code.

If you are using GitLab, then GitLab also has its equivalent called Issues.

I absolutely love Github Issues, and if I could get the budget I'd get us a Teams subscription and run with it.

The problem is that the main projects I work on are for non-profit volunteer groups, so anything without a direct attendee benefit is an extremely hard sell. :(

Any issue tracking system is only as good as your ability to act on the information in it. Github issues' apparent simplicity is to your advantage here so I'd stay away from trying to recreate Jira with it.

Kanban boards are a great visualisation tool but the lack of screen real estate limits their effectiveness - more than two screen of information and you end up not being able to see the forest for all the trees in the way. Github projects help a lot with this as you can usually break a project down by structure (modules) or time (milestones). On a given Github board you can easily move cards between projects so the system becomes quite scaleable - within reason.

Kanban boards (if you can keep them manageable) are also a great customer-facing tool. The structure is simple enough to comprehend easily and the customer, product manager, etc. can visualise progress much more easily. They are a great communication tool as they deliver a certain amount of empowerment to the customer.

Checklists are infinitely better for subtasks for similar reasons as the boards - all information and all progress is forced to be on one card - that means it has to be readable and understandable by everyone.

The only limitation I have found with Github issues is that the screen real-estate in the editor is relatively limited. If they had a more complex editor along the lines of Google Docs then it would be possible to achieve the Holy Grail of Issue Tracking where all tickets were well written and had all the information in one place.

Lack of issue deps and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart are the biggest annoyances.

Yes indeed it is highly customizable application in Perl.

In my old company it was used for many things.

1. Customer service

2. Incident Management

3. Task management

4. ITIR style ITIL incident Management integrated with configuration management.

5 Integrated bug tracking with SVN.

It's open source nature and highly customizable architecture made it very easy to work with it.

Subsequently my teams moved to other platform but I still like it.

I spent two years using and then administering two RT servers.

I arrived with effectively no real PERL knowledge but a high level of Linux sysadmin competency

I hugely enjoyed working with the system. It was productive, flexible, and never gave me unexplained errors.

Even scripting on the perl api was an excellent experience.

Moreover the devs were extremely helpful in their irc channel (circa 2014-2016 at least) and walked me through a manual upgrade caused by the previous admin customizing the database schema in an unsafe way

Would highly recommend

+1. Phabricator is great and such an underrated software!

It's much more similar to Gitlab than Jira, though, so you might want something more specific. That said, I quite like the way Phabricator handles Tasks and Projects.

yeah i did, its quite cool, JS heavy UI though, and you may end tired of so many tables but has a lot of nice features!

How do you work with bug triage in Clubhouse? So far I've found categorising a bit difficult, especially for long-term tracking of issues.

We had that in my previous workplace and it worked like a charm for us.

I've noticed a lot of people mentioning Taiga in the comments, and it looks like it's got everything we'd need.

I'll have a dig and see if there's a Docker script to run up a test/eval installation. I might have tried to install it before, but the separate "backend" and "frontend" made it look quite complex to install.

Python is a big plus, I know how to make that decently performant on our VPS (half our tech stack is Python based).

The free version of GitLab has very limited support for issues, though. Things like 'related issues' are only available in the paid offerings.

DevOps has a horribly confusing and slow interface, IMO.

Would say the same... thought it's constantly adding/changing features which is a mixed bag, I really like it. IIRC it's free for up to 5 users in a team.