Linear.app is awesome. We switched from Jira and our team's participation on issues went through the roof. It's fast, clean, has keyboard shortcuts and replaces agile terminology with simpler, familiar paradigms. We activated Slack, Sentry and GitLab integrations too. It's a beautiful piece of software to use and part of the reason we chose it was to inspire ourselves to try build something of similar quality in our own domain. Seriously, it's that good.

I've also used Redmine a few years ago. It gets the job done but nowhere near as slick and fun to use.

I hate how the elegant simplicity behind the agile development principles was so thoroughly co-opted by scrum, so now when people think “agile” they actually mean scrum but have no idea that’s what’s happening.

I hate how when people say scrum they really mean something which is not well defined and you end up with some weird system that only some "scrum master" understands and that they seem to be making up as they go along.

Scrum is mostly defined. The problem with scrum is that while agile (in general, not only software dev) is a methodology (a set of practices and tools) to be applied in a particular context, scrum takes those agile methods, packages into a behemoth with a very particular workflow and sells that instead of typical "consulting" - deployment of tools to control the process.

In practice scrum is extremely unagile, because there is one very particular workflow to be used and actual workflows have to be adapted to suit scrum. Sometimes it leads to increased agility, but more often than not it does not.

Probably the central piece of scrum are sprints. Nothing wrong with sprints in general, but sprints rely on feature sizes being sprint-sized. Sprints only work when you actually finish planned stuff over the course of a sprint. Naturally, feature and especially release sizes vary. By focusing on milestones one can actually plan and schedule work and releases. This is agile - you can shuffle stuff around. Instead scrum tries to sell fixed size sprints to give impression of steady movement forward, but this decouples sprints from milestones and slightly counter-intuitively reduces agility - shuffling milestones around sprints merely gives you a bunch of unfinished milestones, but also a bunch of finished sprints. But variable sized sprints based on milestones sound too much waterfall-y when the selling point is departure from waterfall.

Interestingly this attempt to squeeze features into sprint-sized chunks is one of the reasons for technical debt that you then must somehow manage, simply because squeezing features comes at a cost of technical debt. There are more reasons for technical debt, but it is slightly humorous when a tool aimed at managing/reducing technical debt introduces debts of its own.

A bit tangential to scrum, but Facebook's story of Hack/HHVM is well-known story somewhat indicative of this. When you size features according to wall-clock sized release cadence (instead of sizing release cadence according to feature sizes) you inevitably accumulate technical debt - new features should build on top of past features, but deficiencies in past features prevent new features from being built on. There are more or less 3 ways this plays out: 1. actual feature release cadence drops due to increased development weight; 2. release cadence drops due to fixup "features" being released; 3. release cadence drops due to dedicated to fixing. Do not get me wrong, technical debt accumulates and impacts release cadence any way, but with feature sized sprints this does not come out of nowhere.

Over the years teams (usually informally) understood deficiencies of scrum process and started throwing pieces of the process away, shuffling them around and having weird mess of system. This is not due to scrum not being well defined, but rather scrum being a hammer in search of nails.

Agile methodologies generally came out of manufacturing - process based workflow. Scrum takes those practices and packages them as a project management tooling. The whole point of agility in processes is the ability to adapt in the middle of the process. Project management, on the other hand, needs plannability and progress tracking. There are weird intersections between the two and IMO scrum fails to satisfy both - neither it is good at adapting mid cycle (because scrum checkpoints mid-feature), nor is it good at future plannability (because it focuses on short term goals). I have seen scrum get distorted in two major ways: either "sprints" get stretched into months long waterfalls, or sprints mostly reshuffling priorities in "in progress" pile and checkpointing progress.

> Scrum is mostly defined.

Then cite the definition? If you will cite the https://scrumguides.org/ - I have yet to work in any team that uses scrum that follows this even slightly.

The keyboard shortcuts and navigation are super fun and very useful.

There's no self-hosted plan, so for many companies it's a non-starter.

GitLab issues are better for all but very large projects. Jira will win on features, of course, but unless you have 50+ people working on the same thing, multiple dedicated PMs, etc. you’re almost certainly not seeing enough value to be worth the frictional cost and temptation to divert time away from the product to build Potemkin project plans in Jira.

(This is the same failure mode as many Agile-as-practiced projects have: once the incentive structure is decoupled from results, someone will have a full time job moving tickets around in a way which is considered productive even if the project is foundering.)

Oddly enough, if your team is small enough that it doesn’t need a dedicated PM, you generally have no issues with Jira either.

It’s almost as if the PM is the problem instead of the solution.

You have fewer problems with Jira. You’re still paying more for a slower application with a clumsy UI.

I also wouldn’t be so quick to condemn the PM. I’ve seen plenty of developers insist on complex workflows and custom fields because they think they can automate everything, only later to realize they’ve created a second job. The problem is basically the lack of a functioning feedback mechanism to ask “do we need this enough to pay for its care and feeding?”, and I’ve seen people from every role on either side of that, although it’s certainly more common to see business people underestimate the complexity of what they’re asking for.

> it’s certainly more common to see business people underestimate the complexity of what they’re asking for

I think this is a factor of their days being filled with busywork (from my perspective), so naturally the dev should have time enough to do all that during the day as well. The people asking you to fill out all those fields are not the ones actually doing so (or their entire job is filling them out).

> You’re still paying more for a slower application with a clumsy UI.

The Atlassian terms of service make it illegal to discuss Jira’s speed.

It depends on how you define "better". I'd say that anything else I used (github/gitlab issues, asana, trello, even a spreadsheet) works better *for me* - i.e. it is faster and easier to find things in a small team. I only add things or focus on one issue and then remove it. I still don't understand why mid managers love it, but I guess they have different use cases than me...

Trello is also an Atlassian product.

I know, but it was usable when I last used it. (and it was not designed by Atlassian AFAIK... and even if it would, I don't have anything against Atlassian except that they make really terrible software which I was quazi-forced to use)

Trello was founded by Joel Spolsky, the guy who made stackoverflow, and was sold to atlassian

He also made Fogbugz, which apparently still exists although I never hear anyone talk about it.

Its been getting slower and more cumbersome since they bought it.

I used Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) for a while. It was a huge breath of fresh air coming from Jira. But I'm not sure how much of that was that I despised Jira more-so than I loved Clubhouse.

I started using Linear recently and I can never go back to Jira. Linear is that good.

Linear is one of the best software products I have used in the last 5 years. I strongly recommend giving it a try instead of jira.

As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.

My main annoyances with the Atlassian suite are mostly the bugs: for example, they have 3 different parsers for their wiki markup which aren’t fully compatible, and none of them are as good as Markdown. They’ve had years to do QA but…

The only thing I see in Jira as an actual gap is the inexplicable lack of a standard view for showing all of the tickets in a particular sprint. You can make custom queries, of course, but it’s such a common need which everyone else on the market solved in 1.0.

I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).

For us Linear (https://linear.app/) was much much better than all the competition

Two startups I’ve worked for uses Linear as well, but is it really scalable though? Like is there any big company (200+) using Linear?

[I work for Linear] Yes, we have multiple scale-up/enterprise customers with 200+ users

That's a very good point. First time I've used Jira was in a company with 500+ employees, things such as hiring were managed through Jira as well.

Microsoft's project management tool is Azure Dev Ops (used to be called Visual Studio Team Services), I found it pretty comparable to JIRA for the most part.

I used Azure Dev Ops at my last job! I thought it was fine – though I think some aspects of it weren't intuitive (maybe an unsolvable problem for a PM tool). Our team standups occasionally included someone discovering a useful Dev Ops feature that was simply hidden too well.

But the tool felt fairly fast and did it's core job pretty well.

Anyone know why they called it that though? Much of its key functionality has nothing specifically to do with DevOps, and I somewhat doubt it really supports everything DevOps (in an Azure world) requires...

I remember that Jira had a kanban board or something like that. It was almost 10 years ago. If it still exists and you're using it, give a try to Kanbanize. It's something that I almost really liked to use. The team bootstrap was done by a guy that really knew it well and kept managing and coaching for months. No idea what it would look like to start using it from scratch.

The official VSCode Jira extension is much faster than the web UI. Fast to search, see your own issues, create, jql, integrated git. Highly recommend

Wow, I didn't know that there was such extension. Thx.

I’ve never been at a company where users could get the right permissions to use it, unfortunately

Considering the amount of money you pay to have it, "it works" is not even the bare minimum. Lot of things work.

The problem with Jira is the total disregard for UX. Very simple tasks like moving tickets out of a story take way too many steps when it should take one click.

They don't seem to want to improve it because of legacy customer or reasons....

Yeah. I mean it has enough management options for projects and I really don’t have any complaints. Not sure what everyone’s hating about.

The functionality of JIRA is great. It's the UI that feels slow and clunky.

The functionality of Jira is great because it's basically turing complete at this point. A dedicated enough force of middle managers can warp it however they want to.

In the worst case sure. It also lets a small team start easily and modify it as they grow.

In many ways it's like Excel. Everyone says making an Excel killer should be easy because people only use 10 features. Problem is, everyone is using a different 10 features.

As another comment rightly pointed out, Atlassian has some recession "insurance," because JIRA tends to be bought by big, slow companies. Big, slow companies implement JIRA with the same agility and cleverness as they do their AD implementation, which is to say: it tends to be a nightmare of permission complexity caused by internal political machinations. That winds up making the UI slow and clunky, and driving the end users crazy.

Mainly it's slow and the UX makes everything painful.

I'm using Jira, too, and I don't think its slow. It actually works quite well and has loading animations for longer tasks, so it never feels laggy. Sure, it's not vi-levels of navigation speed, but it never bothered me. The UX works for me, too (although it took me a bit to learn it, to be fair).

Linear & Shortcut are both significantly better. Linear isn't even in the same realm as Jira in quality and productivity; its like comparing Excel to Jira, yeah you can make Excel work but you'd be out of your mind to use it for something like project management. Similarly, with the advent of Linear; you'd be out of your mind to greenfield on Jira. Why not spin up OracleSQL and write your app in C++ while you're at it?

Gitlab & Github issues is also pretty solid. Lightweight, but it works for what it does.

Asana is another decent competitor, though I don't tend to recommend them for project management. Its there though.

I've organized some small software teams using Notion. Its surprisingly functional. The big downside is the lack of universal structure or a decent API to even build your own analytics against; great for the ICs, but not great for managers.

There are lots of alternatives out there looking for marksetshare. I've not personally used ClickUp but it looks fantastic just from their screenshots: https://clickup.com/features

https://clickup.com/blog/jira-alternatives/

ClickUp is a confusing mess. It tries to be the centre of your universe without doing anything particularly well. It copies features verbatim from other software and then slams it in as a new "view". The coding doesn't seem to be up to scratch either, e.g., updating a value won't always update it everywhere it's displayed. It's very hit-and-miss.

I had a look at Asana again for non-software project management after dismissing it 8 years ago when trying to use it, and was pleasantly surprised: it's much more opinionated than it used to be, a lot slicker, and it integrates with everything I use.

I also use Linear for software development, and won't ever look back.

I agree. We used ClickUp at my old work, and I felt like I was the only person who found it extremely unintuitive and confusing. It was about the 5th project management app they switched to, and the worst for me by far. Unfortunately they stuck with it until I left.

ClickUp is the first piece of software to confuse me before I even used it.

Their intentionally obtuse marketing all over NYC would drive me insane. Then one day I had a natural reason to stumble upon it, it was had literally nothing to do with what the advertising implied, and the interface was so deeply overwhelming that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Like an almost anxiety inducing level of overload from the moment I tried to use it.

Maybe it's great if you live in GANTT Chart Burndown Land, but generally you want something that everyone can use, not just your PMs.

> What are the equivalents for Jira?

Something that gets "close enough", like Mattermost/Rocket.Chat can get to Slack? Probably nothing, given how huge the surface attempt for Jira is.

But for project management and issue tracking in general, there are quite a few alternatives:

  - OpenProject: https://www.openproject.org/ mentioning this first, because it's what I use for my personal needs and feels pretty decent (issue tracking, time tracking, references, comments, files, Wiki, cost reports and so on), though is definitely not nearly as popular
  - Redmine: https://www.redmine.org/ is probably also a really good alternative to mention, while the original UI is dated a while ago there was a project to create something more modern and most of the times when someone is using an alternative to Jira, I've seen it be Redmine in particular
  - Odoo: https://www.odoo.com/ is a more modular system that I haven't really used much personally, but have heard about being talked at the occasional conference in my country, the idea seems nice at least

Also, there are probably a few more lightweight and Trello-like systems for Kanban boards:

  - Nextcloud: also has some apps, like https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/tasks and https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/deck that, while basic, can be really easy to get started with if you already have Nextcloud
  - Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is perhaps the best Kanban board that I have personally used, just because of how snappy and lightweight it is (at the expense of the features it has, admittedly)

I've also heard of projects like Taiga and Wekan, though can't comment on those due to limited familiarity.

Oh, I also probably should mention GitLab, which has lots of project management features built right into it nowadays, as well as stuff as release management and whatnot: https://about.gitlab.com/features/?stage=plan

For Kanban board-like tools, there is also Focalboard [1], from the makers of Mattermost.

[1] https://www.focalboard.com/

We use GitLab internally. It has plenty of project management features these days and just seems to work for us. The team universally dislikes Jira and adopted GitLab instead.

We use Redmine since 2007, and I'm absolutely happy with it. I don't understand all this 'jira is a lock in' vibe.

Tbh, most of big enterprise software UI just plain sucks. I see this as a natural consequence of being too packed with features, to target the widest audience possible.

Best software UX is made by smaller teams that dedicate themselves to solving one problem for a very specific niche. And once they grow, it all inevitably turns to sh*t. C'est la vie..

A company I worked for before used Redmine. It was easy to use, had a great API and was quite fast. Open source as well, unless you wanted to pay for a custom installation, which went by the name of EasyRedmine.

I use Linear these days, and that's great too. But for a small company? I'd recommend Redmine.

Phabricator is quite great, many FLOSS projects rely on it.

Unfortunately Phabricator is no longer actively maintained.

Linear and Asana are far better.

I refuse to work on any project using Jira. It’s the first question I ask in interviews.

Asana is hot garbage. As much as I dislike Jira, Asana could be argued as worse.

As someone who's thinking about moving my company from Clubhouse/Shortcut to Asana, can you tell me why it's bad?

We tried to implement it 3 times and performance was horrid. Bad enough to have us give up and move to a different platform. I have not used Clubhouse or Shortcut.

No ticket numbers in Asana is a deal-breaker. Guessing that's not important to your team?

>What are the equivalents for Jira ?

One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira, I don't know.

There are however a multitude of software that provide some of the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a more opinionated way.

It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit gazillons of different workflows with integration with many other tools or not. If the goal is only to have issues and kanban boards I think there are many alternatives.

Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced jira service desk more focused on tickets while the former can also do that.

> Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced jira service desk more focused on tickets while the former can also do that.

Not quite. Service Desk (aka Service Management today) has a number of capabilities that differ quite significantly from Jira Software. The most obvious is the end-user facing help portal. But how users are managed is quite different, it has SLAs, different reporting, a knowledge base, etc. Just like Jira Software is flexible but tailored to software teams with boards, backlogs and sprints, Jira Service Management is tailored to IT teams and requirements specific to that market.

>What are the equivalents for Jira ?

One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira, I don't know.

There are however a multitude of software that provide some of the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a more opinionated way.

It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit gazillons of different workflows with integration with many other tools or not. If the goal is only to have tickets and kanban boards I think there are many alternatives.

Anything really.

If the issue in your company is tracking software, your company is probably full of anal PMs and a nightmare to work in.

We used to use zenhub, nowadays we use github projects

This. Github projects or a tool like linear.app should be more than enough for most teams.

Why does a competitor need to be open source? ClickUp, Asana, and Shortcut/Clubhouse are all competing in this space. I consider Jira to be far and away the worst one of that bunch, but beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.

My personal preference is ClickUp or Asana as they offer flexibility to bolt on routine task management in a much more flexible way.

A competitor probably shouldn't be. The only people who need a competitor to Jira are large companies who have a budget. There are lots of small companies and open source companies, but they have no need for the complexities of Jira and should avoid it.

Recently found out about ClickUp. It's not quite as feature-rich as JIRA, but nowhere near as simplistic as Trello, and its fairly jank-free so I'm a fan.

>> Are any of them any better?

Not in my experience, at least not enough of an impact to make me really care. Azure DevOps was far worse in my experience, and many of the ones SW Devs promote can't roll up to the portfolio level which is where the strategic and purchasing decisions are made.

Anybody uses youtrack? Seems quite nice and has self hosted option, which is sadly rare trait.

Featurewise, Taiga is the closest competitor. The only missing bit is mobile apps and real-time notification. Other than that, there's almost nothing that Taiga doesn't do.

Pivotal Tracker.

ClickUp