This is something my team is struggling with at the moment. Gitlab issues (and Github issues, and similar) are fine if what you're doing is only software development. The problem is that Jira works really well for tracking all the things, not just 'bugs in our current software', and having something that keeps track of all the work in one place makes life a lot easier.

Right now, my team uses Jira for tracking bugs and features and whatnot in our custom software development. We also use it for tracking issues and work related to our infrastructure, access requests to our various data centers, budget requests from the team, software and change management planning, site audits, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting off the top of my head. And yes, there are likely better products for each of those things individually, but then you wind up in the hell of "oh wait, audits go over here in Freebly, but software releases are over there in FrobniTZr", and if you run those tools it's suddenly fifty-leven more hosts and apps to support and keep patched.

Much like Excel, Jira might not be the best tool for all our use cases, but it's pretty good at several of them and good enough at the rest that having everything in one bucket outweighs the potential benefits of a better tool.

On the other hand, if someone would like to fire up a start-up to develop a similarly flexible on-premises work management product to replace it, you'll absolutely find me in line with my wallet open...

Lack of service desk in other applications has always been what keeps our org on Jira (on premises). Anyone have any suggestions on deeply integrating service desk tickets with engineering tasks?

The reason parent poster can’t replace Jira isn’t that there aren’t alternatives, but because a large part of the corporate world has decided that Jira is the best issue tracker because it has the most bells and whistles; it supports the SCRUM / Kanban / whatnot style workflows.

Also, it is not that great.