Part of the issue with Jira is that it's possible to make it incredibly painful.

Stock Jira is not substantially worse than any other bug tracking system, other than being proprietary.

However, Jira is incredibly customizable, and if your organization adds a dozen mandatory custom fields, Jira can become horrific to use.

Workflow customization is one of Jira's selling points, and also one of its biggest dangers.

There's some value in a system that doesn't allow that level of workflow customization, and instead forces everything into a fairly simple and lightweight issue-tracking framework.

I personally am hopeful about this GitHub feature, but I do think there's a real danger of losing usability here.

I use Jira with 300+ users for both software and non software projects. I don't love it for either but I don't hate it enough to move. Any tool that offered 1:1 feature parity and a full migration, would only need something as simple as slightly cheaper or faster for me to move. IMO the administration is a pain even for simple things.

I've also been on Jira for at least 4 years now and the development is just sad... New UI stuff wasn't "better" just different. Pages are still slow if not slower. Reporting is abysmal; we use the API to pull pretty much all data into a database and report from that. The one tool our team's universally loved was canned– a browser extension that allowed you to screenshot and open ticket with things like browser info and URL already in the ticket. We even tried to modify the extension to put metadata from within our application (didn't work and product was sunset anyway).

My outlook is that developers will move towards something like Jetbrain's issue product or maybe even GitHub issues someday. Support teams will move towards a more dedicated support style system like zendesk or a custom solution around twilio. And for non dev projects, I hope better tools come up... Microsoft project seems to still be a leader in my industry, and also seems to be universally hated amongst my teams.

I am relatively new to this, completed one year at my job a while back. But I find Jira isn’t that bad. My teams have used Kanban boards to track stuff and I find it quite helpful. Sure, I forget to update my tickets every once in a while but it is a good tool IMO. So can you explain what you meant when you said the new UI isn’t better?

A few years back they started moving to a new UI that is visually a bit better but functionally I find slower to get to what i need. I also find the load times to be extremely frustrating, not sure if that’s related to new UI.

compare this experience to trello or github issues and you’ll see the other end of the spectrum. obviously jira does way more enterprise related features than those two.

We used Jira at a small tech company 10 years ago and I actually kind of liked it. At the time, it was the best out of a bunch of mediocre (affordable) options. It offered nice integration with our mercurial BitBucket repos and that code review tool they had (forgot the name). We just used a simple workflow, and it was overkill for what we used it for, but it worked fairly smoothly.

Haven't used it since though.

We tried to self-host initially, and our server with "only" 4G of memory (remember, this was 10 year ago, and was a respectable amount for a small office server) couldn't handle it; it was super-slow even with just a few people. lol? None of us were Java peeps and didn't really know how to tweak the JVM thing. We ended up just using the hosted option, which wasn't that expensive anyway (certainly cheaper than having a dev spend a day on this).

I work at a 2~20 person shop and other than the BigPicture Gantt chart plugin not scaling well, we're all more or less happy with Jira.

There was a lot more complaining during our self-hosted GitLab days but I can't recall a specific reason why.

This aligns with my experience talking to lots of small startups of this size. It amazes me that 2-man shops use Jira, but they do, because they know it from their previous jobs and don't want to bother finding/learning a new thing. We also run across Trello and Asana a lot.