I appreciate that you're not trying to advertise for their competitor, so I'll be that guy... What did you switch to?

I'm not the GP, but we went through a similar journey here, and after ditching Asana, we went to Todoist, which is nice in its simplicity (and fast). Sooner or later, the simplicity became too simple, so we switched to Clubhouse, where we are now. It is serving us well.

Presumably, one day, we will outgrow that, and need to go to JIRA (with all of its power and complexity), but it would be nice to delay that inevitable as long as possible.

Clubhouse is pretty sweet, I feel like it's basically Pivotal Tracker done right. Fast enough to not get in the way but flexible enough for most workflows. We're a pretty small company though, I don't know if something like JIRA becomes more necessary as the company scales.

We never used Asana, but moved from Trello to Clubhouse as well after we outgrew Trello's simplicity. Clubhouse has been awesome so far, and generally loads quickly

We moved to JIRA. Lost the simplicity but its a lot snappier and I believe there was some organizational benefits as the company grew.

I am happy that I can click a JIRA link and see a page within a second.

Thats probably dependent on the hardware and size and complexity of workflows and DB size. Our JIRA install is one of the slowest webapps i've seen in a while. Can't wait to move on to something else.

Would you mind sharing the approximate number of issues and active users in your JIRA install?

It varies widely. We have ~300 users, 30 projects, probably on the order of ~20k tickets. Performance has been up and down, occasionally things slow way down and we have to file a ticket and then they come back with some excuse about re-indexing or relocating the instance. Normally it's pretty acceptable, but it feels like there are a ton of a variables that go into its performance day-to-day and minute-to-minute.

I'm at a medium/large company, but without access to real numbers i'd say off the top of my head its probably >500 users across 100+ projects and 10s of thousands of issues.

That seems bananas to me, because JIRA is literally the most painfully slow application I've ever used in my entire career. We use their hosted version, though.

Do you host your own JIRA instance and have somebody in charge of running/tweaking it?

I have used JIRA only many years ago so I can't compare performance with current Asana. When you say JIRA is slow, is it in comparison with Asana?

For me the slowness of JIRA means I loathe going into it. It feels soooo clunky, so 90s in performance and UX. I’m moving to JIRA from trello and it’s night and day. Even something as basic as having a notification inbox with read markers is a paid plugin for JIRA, and everything else seems to require many many clicks (each with their own several second load time). It’s horrible.

Is this self hosted or cloud?

Cloud

I keep going back to Trello for my todo/issue needs. With stuff like Zapier it goes from being simple yet powerful to goddamn nuclear. But I have to be honest here and say that I've never experienced Asana as slow (it's underlying model just doesn't work for me).

Curious what you do with Trello and Zapier that is so compelling?

For example, create cards based on email sent to gmail or order cards sent to woo commerce. I have barely scratched the surface of what Trello+Zapier can do but I'm pleasantly surprised that there are tons of ready made 'zaps' for all kinds of app combos.

FWIW, we switched from Trello to Restyaboard and very happy with its features and speed.

Disclosure: I have suggested few features for Restyaboard and its developers implemented them.

No affiliation, but even jira is snappier than asana for me.

Burn!

Also not OP, but we've been using dapulse. Terrible name, but it's been working great. It has similar concepts to asana and trello. It loads fast and easy to use.

trello < pivotal tracker (what we use) < jira

Asana was ridiculously simple when we started using it, and I was incredibly happy with it. Then they kept adding, adding and adding irrelevant things, and now I'm pretty put off by it. I wonder if this is a cycle, and a new 'brand-new asana' alternative will spring up soon.