I had no issues using YouTrack from JetBrains. It's fairly lightweight w/ a focus on ticketing (MarkDown + images), good search, and Kanban views, if that's your thing.

https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/

> Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile

it is kind ironic, yet pretty typical and very telling, that the slow as hell Jira is tightly associated with Agile

Linear https://linear.app/

It's a joy to use

I like shortcut and use it whenever I have a say in the matter.

https://shortcut.com/

Slightly more than a +1, the team I work on switched to Shortcut and the quality of our tickets went up, more tickets were resolved, and fewer ended up lingering in backlog hell. Why? I'm sure there are many possible reasons, but the results stand on their own.

There was no directive other than "Ok, we're going to use this tool for now". Everything was self-organized within the bounds of the business/stakeholder goals.

I'm sure you can use either Jira or Shortcut in a manner which makes either tedious, but at face value we found significant improvements simply through adopting Shortcut.

Shortcut is pretty stripped down and lacks several features conducive to cross team collaboration. In particular I dislike shortcut's lack of internal comments. It's a much bigger annoyance than anticipated.

I dislike atlassian products in general, but having some discipline with the config/workflows was much better than shortcut.

> lack of internal comments

What do you mean by this? There's a section to comment in each card/epic/milestone and you can ping team members. Comments also sync with slack so you can get notifications there if you'd like. I don't have a ton of JIRA knowledge, so there's a chance I'm missing something.

In Jira you have the concept of internal comments, which aren't visible to people outside the team.

They are useful for putting triage and debugging information in. Or even as a play by play with specifics so your team mates or manager can follow along with your progress.

Shameless plug for Constructor[1], we're early (new website on the way) but have a bunch of happy customers, many of whom came from Jira, the rest mostly from Trello (to which we're most often and justifiably compared, we keep it simple!)

1. https://constructor.dev

We switched to Quire (https://quire.io) - it has a generous free plan, it's simple yet very flexible, and, most importantly for us, quick enough to not be a chore to update (Jira was horrible). Some small UI bugs here and there, but inconsequential.

Backlog by Nulab is pretty much all the good features of Jira distilled down into a simple product. I've used it and been very happy with it. https://nulab.com/products/backlog/

If self hosted is your thing I like taiga for kanban integrated with gogs for the issue tracking/VCS integration side of things. Didn't take me more than a day to get working and everyone signed up on it, isn't a lot of maintenance, just works, costs nothing.

PivotalTracker, GitLab has pretty great project tracking and ticket management if you’re on them. These are the two I can think of off the top of my head. Personally I really like Pivotal.

Pivotal Tracker is only good if you buy into the way that it works and are willing to lose all knowledge that your tickets represent.

Pivotal is really only good at a particular type of project tracking (mostly building greenfield features and projects), and absolutely godawful at issue tracking.

I’ll use JIRA over Pivotal any day.

Pivotal was just a normal board based tracker when I used it. Better than Trello and less complex than Jira which is all I really want, I’ve never been in an organization that has any more context attached to a ticket than what the work is and who’s working on it.

I think I can count on my hand the number of times anyone has actually had a conversation on a Jira ticket for me.

It also helps that right now I don’t have tickets for my work, I’ve been lucky enough to work on exploratory/skunkworks work for my team at my current org.

For more lightweight task and project management with an notes editor and outliner feel, try Taskade [0]

----

[0] - https://taskade.com/

For something less task-focused and more customer-oriented, we built https://www.kitemaker.co :)

>Agile >resentment

Yup.. at least fake agile... where every "sprint" is the same length and features aren't customer-oriented.

Linear.app

Highly recommend ClickUp

Depending on what you use it for, Gitlab springs to mind