Not only that, but there's no guarantee that a local ops team would actually be any more successful, on average. I'm begging our IT folks to give up on hosting Jira ourselves because they can't make it work well. Random outages, misbehavior, and at the best of times it is sloooooooow. Just use the hosted version and let someone else scale the infrastructure to support it.

(or better yet, don't use Atlassian, but that argument's a non-starter at my company).

FWIW Jira _is_ slow, I use the hosted version for work (as we will all be doing in future) and it's obnoxiously slow.

Operating it is a mess too, it's close to a full time job, I can't imagine recommending to host it like I do with communication software.

We have internal jira, it's fine. It's Jira sure, I personally don't like the keyboard shortcuts (start typing when I hadn't clicked the box and it "does things"), and I'm sure some people set up horendous workflows, but it's fast and secure, upgrades are telegraphed well in advance, and it's far more reliable than say our SSO system

Give your IT folks some slack. (hah) We use the hosted jira and it is slow and has random misbehaviours too. Altough can’t remember any complete outages.

I've never used the hosted version, my product manager has and he swears it's lightning fast. Maybe that's just perspective, though, since the version we host ourselves often takes 60 seconds to pull up an issue (and at it's best, it's still 10-15 seconds). Even a slow SaaS could be considered lightning quick compared to that.

He probably used a small Jira project with only a few issues and users.

I guess that depends? The company I mentioned in another thread had a single IRC node that basically never died.

For 8 years (the life of the company) that machine sat by and did it's job without problems.

Was it patched? No, and that's annoying, but that cost literally _nothing_ to the company (except a sip of power).

Zulip isn't bad, it definitely doesn't need a whole person to manage it, probably 1hr/mo is good enough.

How much you pay for an hour (or even 10!) a month of engineering time is almost certainly less than you'd be paying for Slack if you're more than 100 people; especially at their single-sign-on provider pricing.

You: “Was it patched? No”

Also you: “but that cost literally _nothing_ to the company.”

Risk is an expense.