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Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

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61–70 of 178 posts

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#61
Congrats on the launch.

However, what is it with these sites today. With a default content blocker you hamburger menu does not work on mobile (Safari on iOS with Firefox Content Blocker).

So I can‘t tell, but do you offer an on-premise solution?

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#62
post #54

sorry if obvious: if you're going to compare with Jira, then my first question is "but does it scale?" Everybody hates Jira, but it scales to 100,000+ issues across dozens of teams. Even tiny teams (heh, any team that's live and/or has a PM) quickly generate 1000s of issues and JQL is *godlike* in sifting through this stuff. Engineers tell me about Trello and I say, "great place to start" knowing they'll come to the…

Jira scales...poorly. It’s slow and it’s easy to misconfigure into a state that essentially requires a restart or creating a new project/team/similar.

You might also be the first person I’ve seen use “godlike” to describe any feature of Jira.

Basically you and I clearly have much different experiences with that tool.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#63

You're selling yourself as a fast alternative to Jira. There's already an established company doing that ( https://clubhouse.io/ ). They also offer a free plan for teams of up to 10 users. You're obviously in business to make money, so good that you're focused on selling your product, but why would someone pay for Kitemaker rather than use Clubhouse for free? Edit: Yes, Kitemaker has a free plan, but it looks quite l…

There are plenty of companies doing that though. ClickUp is the best one I’ve tried to this point, but I’m interested to explore Kitemaker.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#64

Congratulations on the launch. How does this compare with https://linear.app ?

CEO of Linear here. Happy to answer questions.

We have quite bunch of startups and larger growth companies using us, anything from 3 to 500 engineers, with 100 or 20,000 issues. Linear is modeled around our experiences building software at Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb etc, from early to late stage and what we see is a modern way to develop software.

We have support for roadmaps, projects, cycles (sprints), custom views, multiple teams, backlogs, list/kanban, and robust search and filtering. Lot more about the features here: https://docs.linear.app/

Linear is also offline first app so all the interactions are instant, which especially key for keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#65
post #42

Congratulations on the launch. How does this compare with https://linear.app ?

For one it doesn't lag when I scroll through their landing page unlike linear.app 2015 MacBook Pro with Firefox

Thanks! Seems like Firefox unfortunately not that good a supporting animations as Safari or Chrome. Need to take in to account when make updates on the homepage

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#66

Phabricator is (IMHO) in a class of its own as a code review tool but the tasks stuff is nothing to write home about. If you folks end up doing an integration my group would be excited to give it a try. Good luck with the venture!

> Phabricator is (IMHO) in a class of its own as a code review Yeah I'm gonna have to heavily disagree with this. Arc is hot garbage, by default decimates your local history, treats everything as mutable. Phabricator leaves so so much to be desired, I could rant for days. Gerrit is a much nicer review tool. Even Review Board is better.

I agree that open-source Arcanist is the weak link, but it’s mostly down to commands like ‘arc diff’ and ‘arc land’ having the wrong default flags. It’s an unforced error and hurts adoption, but the right incantations aren’t hard to alias.

I’d be very interested in how Gerrit is better than Phabricator on the review side, I’ve used it a bit and formed the opposite opinion, but because I’m a Phabricator power user and a Gerrit novice it’s likely I formed a biased opinion.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#67
post #8

Phabricator is (IMHO) in a class of its own as a code review tool but the tasks stuff is nothing to write home about. If you folks end up doing an integration my group would be excited to give it a try. Good luck with the venture!

Very cool! We tried Phabricator years and years ago but haven't had much experience since then. GitLab is next on our list, but then we'll see what comes after that. We've gotten a few BitBucket requests. Any idea how popular Phabricator is these days?

Phabricator is used by a few big names like FB and Uber, and at startups that splintered off from those places, so a good number of teams but nowhere in the GitHub PR range.

It’s pretty opinionated around things like fewer bigger repos, rebase-by-default, trunk-only: basically the stuff that big shops use (because anything else is an NP-hard pain in the ass, literally, once you’re dealing with feature flags or A/B testing or bandits or any of the stuff that you need if you’ve got a consumer-facing product with a lot of users).

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#68

Congrats on the launch! Some feedback from a potential customer: The first thing I read on your homepage is: "A faster and more engaging way to empower your team." This means absolutely nothing to me - I have no idea what your product does. Something like "Faster issue tracking for remote teams." would be better. Hope this helps!

I've seen 2 different opinions from people when it comes to the copy. 1st is to tell what value you provide to your customers (Mario analogy https://twitter.com/GorvGoyl/status/1334116488349827072). or 2nd is to tell what exactly your product does (your audience will figure out value on their own).

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#69
post #54

sorry if obvious: if you're going to compare with Jira, then my first question is "but does it scale?" Everybody hates Jira, but it scales to 100,000+ issues across dozens of teams. Even tiny teams (heh, any team that's live and/or has a PM) quickly generate 1000s of issues and JQL is *godlike* in sifting through this stuff. Engineers tell me about Trello and I say, "great place to start" knowing they'll come to the…

"Everybody hates Jira" - that's not fair.. there's a lot of people that haven't used it yet.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#70
post #3

Are there plans for self-hosted versions? That's pretty much the "if I will use it or not" question for me. Atlassian's killing of their self-hosted solutions for smaller companies is just really a shame.

It's a damn shame the ticketing / collaboration world is still moving to the cloud. 100% don't want my company's data on someone else's server. I also 100% don't want to have to use Remedy ever again
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