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Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option f

Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.

biehl 10y ago
This is also my experience. I like JIRAs search, and writing experience better. And the integration with Github & Bitbucket is lovely also.
slantyyz 10y ago
Fogbugz (also created by Fog Creek) is actually a pretty good alternative to JIRA.
- problems 10y ago
  Fogbugz seems to really be pushing their cloud stuff though, so I basically ruled it out instantly when I was researching options - it's unacceptable to have to host our code and tracker off-premises on hardware we don't control. Whereas even a small team can run JIRA or GitLab on their own hardware for a very reasonable price.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    They still offer an on-premises version though. IIRC, their on-prem version price was fairly reasonable (that was almost 10y ago though)
    - anildash 10y ago
      (I'm the CEO at Fog Creek.) We've updated the on-premise version of FogBugz to be completely in sync with the hosted version, so all the latest features are on both now.
      - problems 10y ago
        If you're willing to talk publicly, what's the pricing like for a very small, self-hosted group? I'm talking 3 normal users, might scale up to 5 or so. We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.
        anildash 10y ago
        Our pricing is here, you can check it out for yourself: http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate, add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_ happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't want to be too spammy here.
        problems 10y ago
        Just want to confirm - those prices hold for the self-hosted "On Site" version too, where you don't have to provide any management of the data and hosting?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Unless there are regulatory constraints (can't expect logic there...), I don't understand this attitude. Are all your dev boxes air-gapped? If so, how do the devs use google, stack overflow, etc.? If not, how is your on-prem setup so very different than one that used SaaS?
    - problems 10y ago
      The attitude is simple - don't give your code, and especially don't give access to your devops repositories to 3rd party companies who simply don't need it. If a security vulnerability happens on the public Fogzbugs instance, we'd be bitten by it badly in this sort of situation. In our setup, we protect against that by exposing the JIRA webserver and git servers only inside of our private network. It's not about perfect security, but it does greatly reduce the attack surface when the server isn't even accessible via the internet. I can't prevent anyone who wants to from signing up for the free trial of Fogzbugs and exploiting their publicly running system - even logged-in-only exploits are possible in such a case. Not to mention the issues with downtime on these cloud providers. My provider has had 1 sizeable, noticeable outage in the last 5 years. It spanned about 20 minutes. Look at a big, popular cloud service like GitHub - they've had several in the past year alone, spanning hours at times. I find these sorts of compromises where I'm offering my code and server configurations to a 3rd party company (where basically any admin there is free to read it, or anyone who can compromise their admins) to be rather poor. I'd rather keep the blame within my own company and be in control of our data fully rather than having to worry about whether Fogzbugs operations follows proper security precautions, I only have to worry about whether we do. Call it paranoid if you want, but I think it's a more than reasonable precaution to not just throw your data around to anyone who asks for it. Especially data which could lead to compromise of servers and customer information. I value my customer's information much more than I value any gains from some easy to use cloud service.
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        Thanks for the detailed reply. The downtime issue is certainly understandable. I hope you're keeping customer data out of DVCS, but it's true that flaws in your code might be more "discoverable" if an attacker had that code. It does introduce another step into the attack, however, to have to hack FogBugz before reading your code and discovering the flaw that hacks your services. You know your threat model better than we do, but I doubt most carders would bother with that...
- pwelch 10y ago
  That's interesting. I've used both and would rather use JIRA over FogBugz any day.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > NOTE: We no longer sell FogBugz for Linux to new customers. Ehh...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
problems 10y ago
Yeah, I agree. I've worked with many alternatives but JIRA shines compared to the competition, especially at managing agile workflows.
seanalltogether 10y ago
I agree, we abandoned Trello because of how poorly it handled a team of mixed users. It seemed like all the solutions for our problems had to come from browser plugins, which is just a bad proposition when you need a mix of users of various technical capability.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
> Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size. If anyone here has ever been confused by the expression "damning with faint praise", I hope this is an illustrative example.
- TillE 10y ago
  No it's really not. "Damning with faint praise" is when, say, you've just effusively praised something else, and then say that the alternative is pretty good. The "least-worst option" means it's not good, but all the alternatives are terrible. That's not damning.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Googling around, the definition that comes up is: > Damning with faint praise is an English idiom for words that effectively condemn by seeming to offer praise which is too moderate or marginal to be considered praise at all. Which seems about right to me. It's like writing an employee a letter of reference, and only saying that they're very punctual - meaning that there's nothing else good about them, other than the bare minimum of bothering to show up at work. It seems to me that saying it's only good by comparison to how awful everything else is falls into this.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
      It doesn't apply because calling JIRA the least-worse simply isn't praise at all, it's a criticism of all JIRA alternatives.
    - dsacco 10y ago
      No. If someone asked you to recommend two employees, and you absolutely gushed about one, but then said the other is "always on time" and "reliable worker", etc. that would be damning with faint praise. Saying that one employee is the least worst employee you have when someone calls you for a reference means they are the best employee. It also means you aren't particularly happy with any of them, but that's just adding a flavor to the sentiment that this employee is your best. Now, if I asked you to recommend a bunch of project management/issue tracking software suites, and you absolutely floored me with praise for one, but said good but forgettable things about JIRA, that would be be damning with praise. Coming full circle, saying that JIRA is the least-worst option means it's the best option and you just have an ideal in your head that isn't being met. They're utterly different things, really.
shadowmint 10y ago
To be fair, the two-pizza team stuff is generally speaking quite a good guideline. If you have more than 5-10 people using each of your task boards, the problems may be more than any productivity tools can really fix.
lostphilosopher 10y ago
As someone who frequently works on teams of 10 or less this is exactly what I'm worried about. Trello is a great tool for our needs. I've been in bigger orgs that used JIRA and understand why that made sense, but I'd resent having to use it on a small team.
- luckydata 10y ago
  I used JIRA in very small teams but took great care to configure it sensibly (it took quite a bit of work, I'll give you that). Everyone was happy and even commented on how it made life a lot easier than github issues or whatever other tool they used before. The biggest problem JIRA has is tons of legacy that nobody needs (like subtasks, a pain in the ass to work with). Configure the tool properly and it's actually quite nice to use, especially in combination with Confluence for specs.
zippergz 10y ago
I don't disagree with this, but very small teams (or sometimes just myself) is exactly what I use Trello for. We use it at home for shared to-do lists, idea boards (way better than Pinterest for us), etc. I realize this doesn't make them much money, but I hope they don't ruin that use case because I haven't found anything I like as well.
- egeozcan 10y ago
  Not everyone wants to maintain their own private server, but if you do have one, give wekan a try. I found it to be a good open-source replacement. https://wekan.io/ https://wekan.io/
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- creativityland 10y ago
  Have you tried https://taskcade.com https://taskcade.com? Good alternative for shared todo lists for my small team.
sethhochberg 10y ago
The road to JIRA is paved with other project management software.
- wwalser 10y ago
  This has been the case for >5 years. Nothing at the enterprise tier is half as good as JIRA (some prefer "least awful") and nothing that's built for small teams gets close to the features needed by large teams.
nilkn 10y ago
My experience with Jira is that it depends very much on the managers and executive team who set it up and create the precedents on how to use it. Jira is so customizable and has so many features that it can be made into a sort of bureaucratic prison that's actively counter-productive for everyone except higher-level managers who just use it to generate countless reports. In the worst case, Jira can be used to institutionalize mistrust in employees/developers. On the other hand, a minimal setup with kanban boards can feel a lot like Trello integrated into a bug database, which can work and scale quite well. I will say that even a minimal installation of Jira can be overly complex for small teams of 2-5. This is where Trello can really shine.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  True. I had to setup Jira for our team and must say it was an awful experience. Too many options, hidden in unintuitive places, awful (too verbose) documentation... Everything is just so difficult. Horrible UX. But it was still the best on-premise solution I could find. Trello on the other side is a delight to both setup and use. I think buying Trello was great move for Atlassian. No way could Jira compete with them in the long run. And now they are even safe(r) from new Trello-like competitors. Brilliant move for Atlassian. Too bad for us users... :(
  - jbi 10y ago
    Had to do the same thing but had a different experience. It was hard to dive in and took some time but now I understand and appreciate the core concepts. There are many abstraction layers ("[...] schemes") and IMO that is a good thing. When you customize workflows etc. you can do that without leaving supported areas. Creating and changing a workflow is very easy. Plus, JIRA has a good pricing. With ~350 employees and many mixed teams using only Trello would be chaos. In key areas we need fixed workflows (-> JIRA). Right now we are planning to add Wekan (FOSS trello clone) to our toolchain for workflows which are more dynamic (less "C follows B follow A" + smaller teams - e.g. innovation and some planning).
- omouse 10y ago
  JIRA is so customizable that it brings out the personality of a micro-manager, even in people who are usually not micro-managers. It's interesting to see how a tool used every day can shape thinking and behaviour patterns.
jobu 10y ago
> I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size. This my experience as well. What are people using that works so much better than JIRA? JIRA has problems, but it's far better than any other project tracking/management tool I've tried. Managing projects (especially ones with large or multiple teams) is impossible without tools like this, and I haven't seen anything that makes the process painless.
Hernanpm 10y ago
trello can be used to any kind of project you have in mind, I have my reading list there for example which would be hard to replicate in jira. there are cases were you can use trello and jira for the same puporse and I agreed that in those cases jira wins

Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.

biehl 10y ago

This is also my experience. I like JIRAs search, and writing experience better. And the integration with Github & Bitbucket is lovely also.

slantyyz 10y ago

Fogbugz (also created by Fog Creek) is actually a pretty good alternative to JIRA.

problems 10y ago
Fogbugz seems to really be pushing their cloud stuff though, so I basically ruled it out instantly when I was researching options - it's unacceptable to have to host our code and tracker off-premises on hardware we don't control. Whereas even a small team can run JIRA or GitLab on their own hardware for a very reasonable price.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  They still offer an on-premises version though. IIRC, their on-prem version price was fairly reasonable (that was almost 10y ago though)
  - anildash 10y ago
    (I'm the CEO at Fog Creek.) We've updated the on-premise version of FogBugz to be completely in sync with the hosted version, so all the latest features are on both now.
    - problems 10y ago
      If you're willing to talk publicly, what's the pricing like for a very small, self-hosted group? I'm talking 3 normal users, might scale up to 5 or so. We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.
      - anildash 10y ago
        Our pricing is here, you can check it out for yourself: http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate, add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_ happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't want to be too spammy here.
        problems 10y ago
        Just want to confirm - those prices hold for the self-hosted "On Site" version too, where you don't have to provide any management of the data and hosting?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Unless there are regulatory constraints (can't expect logic there...), I don't understand this attitude. Are all your dev boxes air-gapped? If so, how do the devs use google, stack overflow, etc.? If not, how is your on-prem setup so very different than one that used SaaS?
  - problems 10y ago
    The attitude is simple - don't give your code, and especially don't give access to your devops repositories to 3rd party companies who simply don't need it. If a security vulnerability happens on the public Fogzbugs instance, we'd be bitten by it badly in this sort of situation. In our setup, we protect against that by exposing the JIRA webserver and git servers only inside of our private network. It's not about perfect security, but it does greatly reduce the attack surface when the server isn't even accessible via the internet. I can't prevent anyone who wants to from signing up for the free trial of Fogzbugs and exploiting their publicly running system - even logged-in-only exploits are possible in such a case. Not to mention the issues with downtime on these cloud providers. My provider has had 1 sizeable, noticeable outage in the last 5 years. It spanned about 20 minutes. Look at a big, popular cloud service like GitHub - they've had several in the past year alone, spanning hours at times. I find these sorts of compromises where I'm offering my code and server configurations to a 3rd party company (where basically any admin there is free to read it, or anyone who can compromise their admins) to be rather poor. I'd rather keep the blame within my own company and be in control of our data fully rather than having to worry about whether Fogzbugs operations follows proper security precautions, I only have to worry about whether we do. Call it paranoid if you want, but I think it's a more than reasonable precaution to not just throw your data around to anyone who asks for it. Especially data which could lead to compromise of servers and customer information. I value my customer's information much more than I value any gains from some easy to use cloud service.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      Thanks for the detailed reply. The downtime issue is certainly understandable. I hope you're keeping customer data out of DVCS, but it's true that flaws in your code might be more "discoverable" if an attacker had that code. It does introduce another step into the attack, however, to have to hack FogBugz before reading your code and discovering the flaw that hacks your services. You know your threat model better than we do, but I doubt most carders would bother with that...
pwelch 10y ago
That's interesting. I've used both and would rather use JIRA over FogBugz any day.
Nullabillity 10y ago
> NOTE: We no longer sell FogBugz for Linux to new customers. Ehh...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

problems 10y ago

Yeah, I agree. I've worked with many alternatives but JIRA shines compared to the competition, especially at managing agile workflows.

seanalltogether 10y ago

I agree, we abandoned Trello because of how poorly it handled a team of mixed users. It seemed like all the solutions for our problems had to come from browser plugins, which is just a bad proposition when you need a mix of users of various technical capability.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

> Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size. If anyone here has ever been confused by the expression "damning with faint praise", I hope this is an illustrative example.

TillE 10y ago
No it's really not. "Damning with faint praise" is when, say, you've just effusively praised something else, and then say that the alternative is pretty good. The "least-worst option" means it's not good, but all the alternatives are terrible. That's not damning.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Googling around, the definition that comes up is: > Damning with faint praise is an English idiom for words that effectively condemn by seeming to offer praise which is too moderate or marginal to be considered praise at all. Which seems about right to me. It's like writing an employee a letter of reference, and only saying that they're very punctual - meaning that there's nothing else good about them, other than the bare minimum of bothering to show up at work. It seems to me that saying it's only good by comparison to how awful everything else is falls into this.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    It doesn't apply because calling JIRA the least-worse simply isn't praise at all, it's a criticism of all JIRA alternatives.
  - dsacco 10y ago
    No. If someone asked you to recommend two employees, and you absolutely gushed about one, but then said the other is "always on time" and "reliable worker", etc. that would be damning with faint praise. Saying that one employee is the least worst employee you have when someone calls you for a reference means they are the best employee. It also means you aren't particularly happy with any of them, but that's just adding a flavor to the sentiment that this employee is your best. Now, if I asked you to recommend a bunch of project management/issue tracking software suites, and you absolutely floored me with praise for one, but said good but forgettable things about JIRA, that would be be damning with praise. Coming full circle, saying that JIRA is the least-worst option means it's the best option and you just have an ideal in your head that isn't being met. They're utterly different things, really.

shadowmint 10y ago

To be fair, the two-pizza team stuff is generally speaking quite a good guideline. If you have more than 5-10 people using each of your task boards, the problems may be more than any productivity tools can really fix.

lostphilosopher 10y ago

As someone who frequently works on teams of 10 or less this is exactly what I'm worried about. Trello is a great tool for our needs. I've been in bigger orgs that used JIRA and understand why that made sense, but I'd resent having to use it on a small team.

luckydata 10y ago
I used JIRA in very small teams but took great care to configure it sensibly (it took quite a bit of work, I'll give you that). Everyone was happy and even commented on how it made life a lot easier than github issues or whatever other tool they used before. The biggest problem JIRA has is tons of legacy that nobody needs (like subtasks, a pain in the ass to work with). Configure the tool properly and it's actually quite nice to use, especially in combination with Confluence for specs.

zippergz 10y ago

I don't disagree with this, but very small teams (or sometimes just myself) is exactly what I use Trello for. We use it at home for shared to-do lists, idea boards (way better than Pinterest for us), etc. I realize this doesn't make them much money, but I hope they don't ruin that use case because I haven't found anything I like as well.

egeozcan 10y ago
Not everyone wants to maintain their own private server, but if you do have one, give wekan a try. I found it to be a good open-source replacement. https://wekan.io/ https://wekan.io/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
creativityland 10y ago
Have you tried https://taskcade.com https://taskcade.com? Good alternative for shared todo lists for my small team.

sethhochberg 10y ago

The road to JIRA is paved with other project management software.

wwalser 10y ago
This has been the case for >5 years. Nothing at the enterprise tier is half as good as JIRA (some prefer "least awful") and nothing that's built for small teams gets close to the features needed by large teams.

nilkn 10y ago

My experience with Jira is that it depends very much on the managers and executive team who set it up and create the precedents on how to use it. Jira is so customizable and has so many features that it can be made into a sort of bureaucratic prison that's actively counter-productive for everyone except higher-level managers who just use it to generate countless reports. In the worst case, Jira can be used to institutionalize mistrust in employees/developers. On the other hand, a minimal setup with kanban boards can feel a lot like Trello integrated into a bug database, which can work and scale quite well. I will say that even a minimal installation of Jira can be overly complex for small teams of 2-5. This is where Trello can really shine.

Drdrdrq 10y ago
True. I had to setup Jira for our team and must say it was an awful experience. Too many options, hidden in unintuitive places, awful (too verbose) documentation... Everything is just so difficult. Horrible UX. But it was still the best on-premise solution I could find. Trello on the other side is a delight to both setup and use. I think buying Trello was great move for Atlassian. No way could Jira compete with them in the long run. And now they are even safe(r) from new Trello-like competitors. Brilliant move for Atlassian. Too bad for us users... :(
- jbi 10y ago
  Had to do the same thing but had a different experience. It was hard to dive in and took some time but now I understand and appreciate the core concepts. There are many abstraction layers ("[...] schemes") and IMO that is a good thing. When you customize workflows etc. you can do that without leaving supported areas. Creating and changing a workflow is very easy. Plus, JIRA has a good pricing. With ~350 employees and many mixed teams using only Trello would be chaos. In key areas we need fixed workflows (-> JIRA). Right now we are planning to add Wekan (FOSS trello clone) to our toolchain for workflows which are more dynamic (less "C follows B follow A" + smaller teams - e.g. innovation and some planning).
omouse 10y ago
JIRA is so customizable that it brings out the personality of a micro-manager, even in people who are usually not micro-managers. It's interesting to see how a tool used every day can shape thinking and behaviour patterns.

jobu 10y ago

> I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size. This my experience as well. What are people using that works so much better than JIRA? JIRA has problems, but it's far better than any other project tracking/management tool I've tried. Managing projects (especially ones with large or multiple teams) is impossible without tools like this, and I haven't seen anything that makes the process painless.

Hernanpm 10y ago

trello can be used to any kind of project you have in mind, I have my reading list there for example which would be hard to replicate in jira. there are cases were you can use trello and jira for the same puporse and I agreed that in those cases jira wins