I like Clickup's way of allowing arbitrarily nested subtasks and easily promoting/demoting a task across levels, without having this hard distinction that Jira has between levels. I understand that some coporate managers like the rigidity, but in practice, it's just very hard to know the scope of a story early on, and I found this flexibility really valuable.

Have you tried nothing at all? Had great success with this on a 150+ dev team. Much preferred to jira. Admittedly does require a different approach to work than a jira-centric team is going to be familiar with.

I 100%, sincerely agree that "nothing at all" is really a great option compared to Jira. I actually hired a whole person onto my project to make them responsible for ticket tracking, telling them they could use whatever they wanted so long as I never had to look at Jira again. They used Jira for a while because it's what other people were pressuring them to use, but ultimately they started using MS Planner. MS Planner! I mean, Planner is garbage too, but at least it's not Jira.

Where do you put the story points????

According to this survey, Linear: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-eng...

Excel spreadsheets, because that's what every project manager ends up using to actually get work done.

Linear is pretty nice IMO otoh have not experienced it at megacorp scale.

I don't know if it's "popular", but I use Clickup at work and I think it's generally fine. At least when I have used it it's less laggy and horrible than Jira.

Linear

What do you need out of Jira? Most any firm I’ve worked for could replace it with Trello or any Kanban style tool in a heartbeat.

It's worth pointing out that Trello has been owned by Atlassian since 2017.

They own Trello.

Linear is great

Thanks. Checking them out now https://linear.app.

Second this. Funnily, their AI is pretty good... recently I accidentally created a dupe ticket; linear AI realized that, labeled it as a dupe instantly after I created an issue. Fuck JIRA and confluence to hell.

Mantis is awesome

Notion is nice

Until you try to leave with your data.

I'm interested in OSS alternatives, even if not as popular.

Redmine comes to mind? Or if you use jira for helpdesk then Request tracker

Also possibly OpenProject, which is an "open core" fork of Redmine

Too late to edit the above, but for anyone curious, here's a year old exchange about a Jira -> OpenProject migration tool:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931780

Thanks for the mention. Just to clarify: OpenProject is a fork of Redmine and fully open source, so not open core.

Thanks, but just to confirm, there is a free tier of OpenProject as well as a paid tier with more features. This is often referred to as "open core."

I'm not complaining, as the free tier seems feature rich by itself. Just wanted others to know, especially if this has a chance of changing over time once people have committed to using it.

Request Tracker(rt): https://github.com/bestpractical/rt

Linear is great if you fit into its workflow. It's very dev orientated.

I work on Aha! Develop https://www.aha.io/develop/overview which I obviously think is a great tool, especially if you're a team with a product manager.

What do you mean by fit into it's work flow?

That was the wrong word. Something about the UI for it feels quite constraining, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing once you're used to it, but at the start of using it I struggled to get what I felt was a broader view of how a project was going.

I've only used it on a side project though because I really wanted to get to know it. I know plenty of teams really love it.

I used ClubHouse years ago. https://todo.vu/ is pretty good too.

I prefer GitLab issues

A pad of Post-It notes.

I do not understand why Jetbrains Youtrack is not more widely used. It's affordable, supports markdown, has a better vcs integration, fast & easy API...

I'll say this is the first time I've heard of YouTrack.

Smart move from JetBrains - many companies will already be paying them for their IDEs.

The problem is "no one was ever fired for choosing Jira" (or Confluence). I can't imagine there is a single company that would keep using those products the moment some alternative exists that managers dare to switch to without the slightest risk of having to explain to their managers why they didn't just go with the "industry standards".

I bailed out of the interview process last summer when the company told me they use Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket for their source code.

Sure maybe nobody got fired for choosing them, but it certainly killed my enthusiasm for the potential position.