I fucking hate Jira

This is an inane take. Almost every system we use in a business requires support, and management to be used effectively. You wouldn't fire the people responsible for maintaining your other services.

You can either have something incredibly powerful, like Jira, with a lot of sharp edges, or you can use something incredibly similar. The latter would be more like 'no-code' since it's going to be drastically limited in terms of adapting to how your business does work, versus Jira which can be transformed into just about anything.

That 'just about anything' is the root of the problem, since over years a business will let dozens of people alter configurations and do special little bespoke things on their projects until it's unsustainable.

Ok, it's slow, and navigation sucks, and lots of other things. Workflows are easy to get out of hand, but as long as you keep your workflows lean/tame/flexible, it's mostly "good enough". I suspect a sizable portion of the "Jira sucks" crowd are under the thumb of a maniacal administrator creating intense workflows.

That said, which competitor has a visual workflow editor, to which I can add custom statuses/transitions, which are applied based on various conditions/validations? And custom screen/field configurations? And custom resolutions? And time tracking? And apply security/permission schemes across all these things?

I get it, Jira sucks, I agree, but what's the go-to competitor?

Jira has JQL (Jira Query Language) https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/jql-the-most-fl... you can search for a lot of different things, it is possible to construct queries for items you have touched in the past.

on edit: once you have a query you like save it as a personal filter and it will show up somewhere in the UI, because Jira sucks who knows where (changes all the time), but you can of course also make personalized dashboards and place the filters you have made on to that dashboard with a widget that runs the filter.

on second edit: evidently I earned someone's downvote by not being adequately anti-jira despite having put in that Jira sucks, but really the comment to which I'm replying ends with:

" I'd also like to add that as a developer, once I finish my ticket I assign it to a QA. Then I can never get back to the ticket. I'd like a really easy way to see all of the tickets I've ever completed. But completed tickets aren't assigned to me, they're assigned to QA. "

which, using JQL, is real easy.

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next.

I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now).

The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy", but never with an appreciation with some of the complexity that Jira needs to solve for other users at your company, never mind other companies.

Obviously some of the complaints (speed, stability) are very valid, but here's a question I think is just as valid: why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Certainly tons of them have tried, and while many have their supporters, they are almost equally likely to have their detractors.

The fact is, building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem. In my old age as a programmer I feel like Jira is kind of like our form of government: "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others".

I totally disagree with you, but I upvoted you for making me think about it differently.