JIRA is terrible in my opinion but has evolved and many (most?) small, medium and big software houses use it.

There are more alternatives than I can count did you look elsewhere? For some reason people continue using JIRA and investing time and money on it. JIRA has an awful interface, is unnecessarily complicated, has a learning curve (when it shouldn't) and you actually need to know SQL in order to create helpful views for trivial things (e.g. have a proper view of hours/projects worked per week).