They aren't great, but they are better than the rest.
My Atlassian experience is only with JIRA as a developer. I'm with mml. The user interface drive me nuts. It gets in the way of me communicating with the team.
The dashboard reports things like time changes. "gry changed the Time Spent to '13920' on FOO-1000" I don't care how many seconds someone spent on an issue. If you have to configure a humane interface, something is wrong.
This is a small example. It takes my locus of attention away from doing what I'm paid to do, write software.
I need to communicate with the team and ask questions in order to get more information to complete an issue. I'm still responsible, yet our workflow requires us to assign the issue to someone in order for the question to be answered, then assigned back. It feels like I'm shuffling tickets rather than communicating around a ticket. The emails sent aren't humane. Don't get me going.
Yet, I can't reply to a JIRA ticket via email as a standard install?
The gist is, after using JIRA daily for seven months, I'm struggling. It feels like the user interface reflects the data model and I don't want to learn it. I get it, it's powerful. But why introduce how complex it is right away? There is no carrot. There's a carrot pile and when you're building velocity, it's not fun to jump over.
If you find your workflow requires you to assign an issue for a question to be answered before assigning it back it sounds like a workflow issue, not a problem with the tool.
We use Greenhopper primarily due to having teams located in different states, working on the same project. Having two physical story walls is too hard in this situation and Greenhopper is a nice collaboration tool that solves this problem.
If I want to communicate with a team member and they are not the original reporter or the assigned user they will NEVER see the question posted. There is no good way of notifying a user that they should answer a question on a task without first assigning it to them.
JIRA with greenhopper is absolutely horrible and has caused many hours of frustration in attempting to get the tool to work to our standards and what we need from it.
They also seem like an enjoyable company to work for.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for Atlassian)
For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was never given the respect of a proper feature.
I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging.
¹ http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Cr...
What group membership restrictions do you mean?
(edit: I'm the Product Manager responsible for Crowd).
For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead.
I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves.
And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder
Yes, it's years later than it should have, but we are finally getting our house in order on that front.
In the next month or so, we'll also be starting to work on a better installation/upgrade experience for JIRA and Confluence. Would you be interested in chatting about what drives you nuts in the upgrade process? I want to make sure we sort out as many of the problems as possible. [email protected] if you have the time.
I'm just upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1, I shouldn't need to create a new installation, a whole new database, re-download, install, and configure every plugin I use, disable e-mail access, etc...
I want to be able to run an upgrade script, or drop in a new war and when it starts up it asks if I want to upgrade things. Or an inline upgrade. Look at Wordpress, Gallery, MS Office, any OS, etc... for examples.
My startup uses Crowd, Jira, and Confluence. However, due to the complexity and risk (we've had issues crop up in the past) of upgrading, we tend to run several versions behind, waiting until there's some "must have" new feature or improvement.
And while we do use Crowd (and while I generally really like Atlassian products) the Crowd LDAP support is really lacking, and the complexity of hooking Jira/Confluence into Crowd is a pain (no write support for Fedora 389?). It should be a simple flag, maybe even changable from the admin. Not a bunch of hacking in .properties, .xml, and libs.
JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5 will make it much easier to connect to Crowd. No editing of files required.
We don't have write support for the Posix schema scheduled for Crowd, I'm afraid, so no promises on that front.
We're pulling it out and writing our own - seems to be the only way to get necessary features such as delegated administration which have been on the Crowd roadmap for years now.
Jira, and maybe this is my companies setup, takes way too many clicks to do simple things like reprioritize tickets. This could just be my preference but I like to treat tickets as an ordered list/stack with the most important at the top.
i've only used jira and confluence, along with a few plugins (the notably awful jira "agile" plugin). over the span of a number of years, myself, and everyone else in the vicinity (at multiple companies) hated it with a passion.
your mileage may vary. i fear for bitbucket.
And, while sharepoint is a little more feature rich, and has better Office/IE Integration than Confluence, it also doesn't play particularly well with alternative platforms like firefox - I'd like to hear what your preferred Wiki platform is. I'm kind of a TWiki bigot personally, but if I had to drop a new wiki on a for-profit company tomorrow, it would probably be confluence.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#n...
It's not as big a difference today, though, then it was 6 years ago. But, the thing is, Atlassian almost gives away their software (compared to what other companies charge) - so, to some degree, it's almost like comparing two free software packages with each other.
Confluence's real competition is actually sharepoint, more than it is TWiki.
(I work for Atlassian on JIRA)
On the upside, my account is now cheaper (free).