Aside from Trello and friends, Azure boards is actually also pretty OK, if you disregard their very confusing naming and weird menus. It's fast and easy to use in the board view.
Linear is gorgeous and satisfying to use, very aesthetically pleasing.
It includes Jiras killer feature, links between issues, across projects.
But...
It can't sync issues with github, it must fully be the source of truth for everything. This made it a non starter for us, we tried but it just can't work when not every piece of work by everyone is in linear. Even Jira allows sync.
It also didn't allow enough detail. For lightweight task management it was great, but when you have big discussions it was weak.
Github is great, but is missing issue links and better lightweight planning like tasks lists that auto update when linked issues update.
It’s been several years since I’ve used Jira so can’t give an honest head to head comparison, but my experience with Linear has been fantastic. Looks nice, has all the functionality I look for, enough customizability.
If you’re looking for something you can configure every little bit of for a very large team (like Jira) it may not meet your needs, but otherwise I highly recommend.
There are none, because Jira does a million different things, not necessarily all that well though.
Jira can be a task manager, a bug tracker, a service desk ticketing system, a project planner (regardless of methodology applied), a Kanban board, a knowledge database and so much more if you know how to configure it. That's also why sucks in many cases. You end up in these weird situations where you have a service desk ticket marked as an Epic, or on person on the team uses a kanban board, while the rest are just going by a different priority. Sometimes priorities migrate from you service desk to a SCRUM project and things make no sense.
You can work pretty well with Jira, if you can stick to one set of feature and keep the entire organisation locked to one type of projects. There are some things it's not good for, I don't see it as being a good project planing tool, regardless of how you try to use it. As a service desk tool it's pretty good.
I will say Jira is much better something like Phabricator or Bugzilla. Neither of those are alternatives, Phabricator is the closet, but it still doesn't do all the things Jira does.
I agree that for bugs a simple list may be the most valuable or at least offer a good overview, but bugs are a world different from what is needed for feature planning / epics / sprints and so on.
There are various command line clients and you can build your own tools with the REST API.
I wrote a simple command line script that outputs my time tracking on JIRA issues because our time tracking tool (that read the data from JIRA) is even worse than JIRA itself.
- Literally never been a problem for me, but maybe not everyone is always connected to gigabit ethernet
- Just go to the issues browser where you can see and search for literally all the issues?
1. Jira speed is rarely limited by internet bandwidth. It’s a very slow product in many implementations. Your gigabit internet likely has nothing to do with the performance you experienced, but also correct: not everyone is on a gigabit connection. But if you need a gigabit connection to experience Jira properly, that’s unacceptable.
2. Is your experience with a vanilla instance and/or a small ticket volume?
The other thing that seems to commonly happen is the customize-ability of these systems leads to major per-transaction overhead/bloat as custom business logic on its 400th revision is executing with ever more db-impacting logic.
I am a consultant and have tried to use Jira as a tool for managing the work of my team. I find if you have more than 10-15 tasks, I just loose the visibility. It’s easier just to create a simple Word document with structured bullet points (first indentation level is the topic, second level is the outcome, third level is the task). One weekly plan, one A4 in Word. When a task is done, I cross it out. When I need to prioritise, I tag each task as p1, p2, p3. It works SO MUCH better because of its simplicity and flexibility. In addition, I can also easily convey to the managing partner / VP what the team is working on without needing to click around 15 different cards and sub cards.
I’ve used a word document for team organization before and I think the depressing thing is that as inefficient as it is, it’s not really all that much less efficient than anything else. The more structured and fancy something is like Jira, the more it insists upon itself.
Github loads fast and is usable. It might have less/other features, but why would having more filtering options and more fields in each "issue" make load times 30x slower?
Same with confluence, I don't mind if the editor takes a minute to start up, but why reading the page takes like 10sec?
I swear Confluence was designed by somebody who woke up from a coma or cryogenic sleep and brought cutting edge 1996 functions to the web. It was so sad to see people like it. Oh you poor pitiful souls…
Bitbucket server was actually getting good when they cancelled it. They upped the prices of data center to dissuade people.
Their Bitbucket cloud is a travesty, once a promising place, offering private repos before GitHub... But they squandered their lead by letting it languish.
What I find shocking about this, as with many other examples from Meta, Alphabet, Amazon etc. is that many of the complaints are things that small companies justify as "yes, but small team". In other words, our 3 developers don't have the time to refactor this API heavy interface because we are struggling with company growth.
When you have the size and money of Atlassian, that excuse is pathetic. Yeah we have 3000 Developers (or whatever) and we don't have the resources to do good UI design, refactoring away from poor performance etc. I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps", but it seems like function over everything and even the functionality is poorly implemented in some cases.
How can anyone think that a simple app that downloads 24MB over 900 connections is OK. What the heck?
I think you're hitting on something there. I think most of those big companies are struggling to provide meaningful changes because they are too big and there is no trust. Trust and actually knowing your sub-ordinates is replaced by tools and metrics. Those tools and metrics then drive exactly the opposite of the behaviour that you would want.
Large companies incentivise behaviour that overall make products worse and customers angry while showing super awesome metrics internally. While I'm sure such metrics are going to be causing some of the right people to get PIP'd and managed out they also disillusion the good people that were trying to do the right thing (or actually did do the right thing) but which didn't show up as the correct number on some dashboard that was used by the CTO and HR to fire the "underperformers".
> I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps"
No. These companies were the first to get a critical mass in their respective markets or product categories. then they used that position to smother or buy out competitors and ensure their survival.
There is nothing mythical or extraordinary about what those companies did, just some mediocre people who were in the right place at the right time.
I get that some ui issues are hard to solve given that Jira is heavily customizable and backwards compatibility is a real issue. But for ui performance there is really no good excuse.
Sheesh, is this really what we're voting to the top of HN?
Don't get me wrong, I can be as frustrated by Jira as the next person, but this is simply a rant fuelled by the writer's anger at internal processes as much as the software itself.
Additionally, the numbers on data usage and network requests do not align with what I see.
It's just a couple of fair points surrounded by populist "yucky Jira" fluff.
I would be happy if Jira died in a fire, but the fact is that if that happened, middle management would simply find some other software to use to micro-track their pseudo-agile detailed upfront plan.
The issue isn't Jira; it's the question: Does Jira work for you, or do you work for Jira?
JIRA sucks indeed, but I have seen worse. My pet peeve with Atlassian is that they purchased Trello, and I was really rooting for Trello to refresh the landscape....
I have been promoted to Team Lead recently and while I saw Jira as a burden while being a dev, I now totally rely on it to keep on overview.
We're currently looking into outphasing Jira and going to GitLab, but as I see, you can't nest tickets there. Can you? This is absolutely crucial to me. I'm happy for recommendations that allow ticket nesting (Epic, Issue, Subissue) and interface nicely with GitLab.
Everything Atlasian sucks so bad. You can force the products to get the job done at times, but the customer service and support is abysmal. Insulting to put it mildly.
Author is part of the problem. If his job of status'ing the stuffing
out of everything didn't exist (and it largely didn't until 2010),
there'd be no Jira and a lot more front-line workers.
85 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadFWIW, I went ahead and removed it on the blog post pages.
(Disclaimer: It may be harder to justify hiring people full-time to manage these alternatives.)
It includes Jiras killer feature, links between issues, across projects.
But...
It can't sync issues with github, it must fully be the source of truth for everything. This made it a non starter for us, we tried but it just can't work when not every piece of work by everyone is in linear. Even Jira allows sync.
It also didn't allow enough detail. For lightweight task management it was great, but when you have big discussions it was weak.
Github is great, but is missing issue links and better lightweight planning like tasks lists that auto update when linked issues update.
If you’re looking for something you can configure every little bit of for a very large team (like Jira) it may not meet your needs, but otherwise I highly recommend.
EDIT: fixed typo
Jira can be a task manager, a bug tracker, a service desk ticketing system, a project planner (regardless of methodology applied), a Kanban board, a knowledge database and so much more if you know how to configure it. That's also why sucks in many cases. You end up in these weird situations where you have a service desk ticket marked as an Epic, or on person on the team uses a kanban board, while the rest are just going by a different priority. Sometimes priorities migrate from you service desk to a SCRUM project and things make no sense.
You can work pretty well with Jira, if you can stick to one set of feature and keep the entire organisation locked to one type of projects. There are some things it's not good for, I don't see it as being a good project planing tool, regardless of how you try to use it. As a service desk tool it's pretty good.
I will say Jira is much better something like Phabricator or Bugzilla. Neither of those are alternatives, Phabricator is the closet, but it still doesn't do all the things Jira does.
A simple list is a pretty good solution IMO.
We do all of our issues in gitlab, and PM deals with jira, which is required by corp.
Kind of like in the olden days when corp required clearcase, so we did our work in git and used rsync to put stuff in clearcase once in a while.
I wrote a simple command line script that outputs my time tracking on JIRA issues because our time tracking tool (that read the data from JIRA) is even worse than JIRA itself.
* Waiting for it to load.
* Trying to find issues, mostly due to the crap, unintuitive UI and the slowness of said UI.
2. Is your experience with a vanilla instance and/or a small ticket volume?
Now that I think about it, perhaps money buys performance here.
The other thing that seems to commonly happen is the customize-ability of these systems leads to major per-transaction overhead/bloat as custom business logic on its 400th revision is executing with ever more db-impacting logic.
Apparently you can only get "loads fast" or "is usable" and not both. But when in doubt, I'll choose usable.
Same with confluence, I don't mind if the editor takes a minute to start up, but why reading the page takes like 10sec?
For the same reason, managers often love it so they can model their workflow to the point.
Since they acquired Trello I’ve watched them slowly but surely overcomplicate the interface making the product less intuitive.
Atlassian market cap: 52 billion USD
> a small fortune
> small
What.
English isn't my first language, so thanks for the hint!
As both a user and both as a Product or Project manager, it's worse in almost every metric.
Atlassians products sick but they're strides better than their competitors which says more about the industry than anything else.
That ecosystem has gotten drastically better in the past half decade.
Their Bitbucket cloud is a travesty, once a promising place, offering private repos before GitHub... But they squandered their lead by letting it languish.
When you have the size and money of Atlassian, that excuse is pathetic. Yeah we have 3000 Developers (or whatever) and we don't have the resources to do good UI design, refactoring away from poor performance etc. I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps", but it seems like function over everything and even the functionality is poorly implemented in some cases.
How can anyone think that a simple app that downloads 24MB over 900 connections is OK. What the heck?
Large companies incentivise behaviour that overall make products worse and customers angry while showing super awesome metrics internally. While I'm sure such metrics are going to be causing some of the right people to get PIP'd and managed out they also disillusion the good people that were trying to do the right thing (or actually did do the right thing) but which didn't show up as the correct number on some dashboard that was used by the CTO and HR to fire the "underperformers".
No. These companies were the first to get a critical mass in their respective markets or product categories. then they used that position to smother or buy out competitors and ensure their survival.
There is nothing mythical or extraordinary about what those companies did, just some mediocre people who were in the right place at the right time.
I was initially trying to figure out if someone was DDoS'ing my website, but it seems as though the post just made it to HN. :P
It's such a fantastic lesson: it's a glorified to-do list. They got rich off a to-do list app.
Focusing on the simple things that everyone needs, rather than the complex esoteric problems that engineers enjoy, is where it's at.
Don't get me wrong, I can be as frustrated by Jira as the next person, but this is simply a rant fuelled by the writer's anger at internal processes as much as the software itself.
Additionally, the numbers on data usage and network requests do not align with what I see.
It's just a couple of fair points surrounded by populist "yucky Jira" fluff.
The issue isn't Jira; it's the question: Does Jira work for you, or do you work for Jira?
Huge machines capable of doing everything.
As a result, unable to do anything particularly well.
Bloated, expensive and only still in business because decision makers know the names and the vendor lock-in is huge.
We're currently looking into outphasing Jira and going to GitLab, but as I see, you can't nest tickets there. Can you? This is absolutely crucial to me. I'm happy for recommendations that allow ticket nesting (Epic, Issue, Subissue) and interface nicely with GitLab.
Thanks!