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Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

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Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#52
Worth noting - I am not sure how the legalities of it all map out but although it is Apache licensed, it appears to depend on MinIO which is AGPL for self-hosting. That may be just a swappable back end S3 layer but if you want to self host this you may need to be comfortable with AGPL (for those in environments that are allergic to AGPL ...)

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#54

I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that…

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together.

If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizable via plugins. Heck, you can even do it with Excel, I don't recommend it, but it gets the work done at many places. I mean, it is just a shared TODO list.

But then you want people to get notified by email, and the boss want a colorful dashboard with progress graphs, and QA wants a documented process, and developers want to attach tickets to their commits, project managers want time estimates, customers want to report bugs, sales want to send invoices, etc... That's how you get monsters like Jira, because the organization itself is a monster.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#55
post #54

I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that…

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

Having used Jira for only a modest 12 years, I have had multiple stages of feelings about it. I agree with the parent that “everybody” hates Jira because “it’s too complicated” — yet when developers try to use a lean, simple tool like Pivotal or Trello, inevitably other stakeholders demand something better for business users, these simpler tools can’t deliver that, and the replacement ends up being Jira 99% of the time. I’ve started tech orgs on multiple issue trackers and this plays out every time.

Also, I hated Jira before learning a lot of its features and how to use them, getting frustrated that everything is not just a setting, but something meta where you need to adjust a “scheme” and understand how it works with the other data objects in the system. Eventually I learned it, just in time for Atlassian to put a lot of effort into a candy-coated, “simplified” set of defaults that hides 99% of the system’s power and abilities.

The main thing I actually don’t like about Jira is that: its insistence on setting up all new projects with infantile, Trello-like schemes, which then encourage sloppy setup when you start customizing unless you’re very seasoned with Jira. I think they should consider training an AI to “do what I mean” and help users to build out their setups —because transitioning from the “out of box experience” which I call “Expensive Trello” into a sophisticated workflow which actually models the business processes correctly and protects you against breaking your agreements, while making it easy to understand what to do next, is very difficult. In all but the biggest orgs, i don’t think it ever really happens.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#57
post #54

I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that…

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

> Is Jira that bad?

As someone who had to admin an on-prem installation of various Atlassian products, upgrades were always a nightmare: you could try multiple dry-runs to make sure data tables were updated, and plug-in upgrades were good, but invariably there would still be a good chance that something would still go wrong when you tried it with production.

The workflow we settled on was basically leave the old version alone, rsync over all the data to a completely new app and DB servers, and do the upgrades on the new systems. Any attempt at in-place upgrades was just asking for trouble.

Anyone who was prime on the software was very happy when The New Guy on the team arrived due to personnel churn and they got handed the baton for dealing with it.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#59
post #54

I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that…

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

Linear and Height are not monsters but they do all those things, if I not mistaken.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#60
post #40

Just about any ticketing system (including the established open-source ones) could be described as an "alternative to JIRA", even if bare-bones, so you might be better off describing the unique capabilities or UX that makes this one special. (And if mentioning JIRA at all, say what you offer to people converting -- $dayjob would probably be interested in one that seamlessly imports tickets with extra custom attribute…

You reminded me of Jira's most hilarious feature; if you type JIRA in a ticket, it auto-corrects it to "Jira". This one better do that or, uh, it's one less checkmark on the comparison chart!
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