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Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

movingfulcrum.com

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Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#3

There's an interesting discussion happening on Reddit involving ex-employees of both companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fog...

An interesting point from that, since everyone likes to bash Wasabi:

> "If we hadn't done Wasabi, then we'd have had to rewrite all of FogBugz, and that would've killed the company. Wasabi also gave us stuff that developers are only now rediscovering, like code that executes on both client and server (e.g. via server-side/client-side React), that even gave us a development edge. I've written about this at length (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133) and won't revisit it, but while I think that Wasabi targeting .NET may have been a mistake, Wasabi itself was not a mistake."

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#6
Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio.

Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hurt them. It feels dumb bringing up "FogBugz yeah with a z". As silly as a reason that is, I think it carries some weight.

Content marketing may have helped them with SEO, no? Not that it SEO alone would close large enterprise deals.

Oh and the plugins on FogBugz did suck. I remember setting up a hosted account, and wanted to plugin to Github. Support sorta mentioned being able to custom hack something up, but IIRC, didn't actually give us any simple way to achieve it. (This was several years ago so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.)

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#8
Also Atlassian products are multi platform. Whereas fogbugz is windows only for the server side. That is a deal breaker for many.Additionally unlike Fogbugz Atlassian products are DB agnostic.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#9

Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio. Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hu…

I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use.

The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields.

I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.

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