5 ms·

Like what? (Disclaimer: I used to work for Atlassian)

mml 16y ago
ok, mea culpa. i've only used jira and confluence, along with a few plugins (the notably awful jira "agile" plugin). over the span of a number of years, myself, and everyone else in the vicinity (at multiple companies) hated it with a passion. your mileage may vary. i fear for bitbucket.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Hated Jira and Confluence? Compared to what? Given that I find Jira to be perhaps the finest issue tracker I've ever worked with (compared to Remedy, Vantive, Scopus, RT, bugzilla and FogBugz), I would genuinely love to hear what tool you think is better than Jira? Particularly now that they can do advanced searching with JQL (Circa 4.x), I don't know of any tool that compares, particularly out of the box. And, while sharepoint is a little more feature rich, and has better Office/IE Integration than Confluence, it also doesn't play particularly well with alternative platforms like firefox - I'd like to hear what your preferred Wiki platform is. I'm kind of a TWiki bigot personally, but if I had to drop a new wiki on a for-profit company tomorrow, it would probably be confluence.
  - pufuwozu 16y ago
    You only mentioned "for-profit" companies. If money is the problem, Confluence is free for non-profits: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#nonprofit http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#n...
    - ghshephard 16y ago
      Right, thanks for pointing that out. I was actually coming at it from a different angle - Atlassian's support, and the ecosystem (at least in the valley) around confluence, make it (in my opinion, I'm sure others might differ) a better fit for companies that are willing to pay money than a tool like TWiki. It's not as big a difference today, though, then it was 6 years ago. But, the thing is, Atlassian almost gives away their software (compared to what other companies charge) - so, to some degree, it's almost like comparing two free software packages with each other. Confluence's real competition is actually sharepoint, more than it is TWiki.
jshen 16y ago
The search in confluence is absolutely horrible. What use is a wiki for a 1000+ people company if it's not searchable. Jira, and maybe this is my companies setup, takes way too many clicks to do simple things like reprioritize tickets. This could just be my preference but I like to treat tickets as an ordered list/stack with the most important at the top.
brandon 16y ago
I'm a fan of Confluence and JIRA from a user perspective, but oh man, they are terrible products to install and administer. For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was never given the respect of a proper feature. I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging. ¹ http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Cr...
- daveoflynn 16y ago
  Yup, the JIRA-Crowd integration experience sucks. It'll be fixed in JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5. What group membership restrictions do you mean? (edit: I'm the Product Manager responsible for Crowd).
  - leftcoaster 16y ago
    Crowd never should have happened. For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead. I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves. And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder
    - 16y ago

mml 16y ago

ok, mea culpa. i've only used jira and confluence, along with a few plugins (the notably awful jira "agile" plugin). over the span of a number of years, myself, and everyone else in the vicinity (at multiple companies) hated it with a passion. your mileage may vary. i fear for bitbucket.

ghshephard 16y ago
Hated Jira and Confluence? Compared to what? Given that I find Jira to be perhaps the finest issue tracker I've ever worked with (compared to Remedy, Vantive, Scopus, RT, bugzilla and FogBugz), I would genuinely love to hear what tool you think is better than Jira? Particularly now that they can do advanced searching with JQL (Circa 4.x), I don't know of any tool that compares, particularly out of the box. And, while sharepoint is a little more feature rich, and has better Office/IE Integration than Confluence, it also doesn't play particularly well with alternative platforms like firefox - I'd like to hear what your preferred Wiki platform is. I'm kind of a TWiki bigot personally, but if I had to drop a new wiki on a for-profit company tomorrow, it would probably be confluence.
- pufuwozu 16y ago
  You only mentioned "for-profit" companies. If money is the problem, Confluence is free for non-profits: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#nonprofit http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#n...
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    Right, thanks for pointing that out. I was actually coming at it from a different angle - Atlassian's support, and the ecosystem (at least in the valley) around confluence, make it (in my opinion, I'm sure others might differ) a better fit for companies that are willing to pay money than a tool like TWiki. It's not as big a difference today, though, then it was 6 years ago. But, the thing is, Atlassian almost gives away their software (compared to what other companies charge) - so, to some degree, it's almost like comparing two free software packages with each other. Confluence's real competition is actually sharepoint, more than it is TWiki.

jshen 16y ago

The search in confluence is absolutely horrible. What use is a wiki for a 1000+ people company if it's not searchable. Jira, and maybe this is my companies setup, takes way too many clicks to do simple things like reprioritize tickets. This could just be my preference but I like to treat tickets as an ordered list/stack with the most important at the top.

brandon 16y ago

I'm a fan of Confluence and JIRA from a user perspective, but oh man, they are terrible products to install and administer. For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was never given the respect of a proper feature. I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging. ¹ http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Cr...

daveoflynn 16y ago
Yup, the JIRA-Crowd integration experience sucks. It'll be fixed in JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5. What group membership restrictions do you mean? (edit: I'm the Product Manager responsible for Crowd).
- leftcoaster 16y ago
  Crowd never should have happened. For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead. I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves. And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder
  - 16y ago