9 ms·

Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

119 points by gauthamshankar 7y ago

kopiblanca 7y ago
OP if you are creator of Zepel ,just wondering why you build something against giant,like Jira?
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  Hi there kopiblanca, One of the founders of Zepel here. We believe JIRA and most other project management tools have evolved from the core use case of issue tracking. While they might be great for tracking issues and ad hoc work items, when it comes to product development, bug tracking is only a part of the equation. We believe 2 key aspects make product/feature development different. - Unlike bug tracking, a feature needs to be conceptualized and the form-based interface of these tools make it ridiculously difficult to spec out the requirements for a feature. - Shipping a feature involves multiple disciplines and rarely follows a single fixed workflow. Our approach to solving these two problems is, - A text editor like interface that lets you specify your features and making it super simple to change or update items. - Multiple boards per project to capture every discipline and the flexibility to move items across these boards as per your use case. We believe its painfully hard for product teams to plan and ship features using JIRA and that's why we have created Zepel.
  - codegladiator 7y ago
    Product teams don't hate JIRA. They love JIRA. Engineers hate JIRA. From your explanation, I still don't understand how this is different from JIRA (apart from the theme).
    - guptaneil 7y ago
      I agree with this. OP, if you have 2 way sync between JIRA working already, then why not let the product folks keep using JIRA as they like and make a new approach that engineers can love and adopt without forcing the entire team to switch? Basically an engineer-driven front-end for JIRA. Focus on viewing/searching, allow the UI to be hackable/customizable on a per-user basis, etc. Currently, you’re not competing against JIRA, but rather Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc for customers. While not rational, a large part of their appeal is they look nothing like JIRA, which can’t be said for you.
    - Tharkun 7y ago
      A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation. It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make it a bit daunting to configure. But you can configure it to suit your needs, instead of having to conform to some harebrained workflow someone else decided was Good Enough. What I really hate is that, even after all these years, it doesn't come with a good planning tool. Portfolio is terrible. I've evaluated several Gantt plugins, which were all terrible. A closely related problem is the missing calendar integration. Atlassian has a calendar plugin for Confluence (wiki), which makes zero sense to me. In my world, issue tracking and planning go hand in hand. And you can't plan shit without a calendar. Surely I'm not the only one who feels that way? Edit: while I'm out praising Jira, have you seen their SDK? You can roll your own Jira plugin in 15 minutes. Bam. Frictionless. Engineers hate it? Those are some weird engineers.
      - rangitatanz 7y ago
        Curious to know if you have seen any project management software with either good calendar or planning support built in? What made it better?
        Tharkun 7y ago
        I wish I had. Been looking for that holy grail for some time.
neal_samson_89 7y ago
JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  It also comes with BitBucket which I'm fine with.
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  Neal, we see Zepel being bought bottom up. We are engineers ourselves and we built a tool that we would be happy using. We also plan on having a data sync with Jira mainly to help teams within larger org switch to Zepel, while the updates still flow back to JIRA without breaking the “managements” view.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
This looks nice and sleek, I hope it improved upon the pain points of Jira and builds upon new strengths. The thing that kills me about Jira is the inconsistency I experience between projects. Everybody sets it up differently, and work based off entirely different views and contexts. It is exhausting and there's always too much friction. Maybe managers love it cause they got more time to waste on tools like Jira than us engineers, but if I have to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out how to progress forward my ticket, you've screwed up. One really awful thing about Jira: If you create a state for a ticket, and then clone it for a new project, and then update the labels of those states, you're now screwing over the original project because all those states will be updated too.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, Jira is poorly used. That said, it's surprisingly powerful software. It's just that nobody takes the time to learn how to use it properly. Think of how shitty your first massive OOP language project was. Think of how different coding schemas and practices are between companies. Now realize that over the years, better and best practices have started to be established. Obviously mastering Jira isn't the same as mastering C++, but it actually is a skill that takes months or even years to develop. So it sounds like what you're really complaining about is that the Jira admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their job. I think it should take approximately 5 seconds for an engineer to progress their tickets. And generally speaking, engineers shouldn't be cloning tickets in Jira without training first (even then I would discourage it, but I don't have enough context). Jira isn't user friendly but neither is C++. Once people experience a well run Jira shop (I think most people have just never seen it because in my experience it's shockingly rare) they realize it's actually useful. The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a much harder problem to fix.
  - ergothus 7y ago
    > Jira isn't user friendly but neither is C++ I can accept this. But I've chosen to be a programmer - project management tools are a necessary evil, not something I enjoy. Expecting me to put in the effort to master it they way I do my primary tools is doomed to frustration. I dont' expect end users to program...and I'm the end user of Jira.
new_here 7y ago
Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA. Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged. If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run projects, and deliver on that, then you'll probably get some decent traction with SMBs and work your way up from that. Make teams feel like they'll be agile by using Zepel. Great work and good luck!
- atonse 7y ago
  That’s funny that people get JIRA to associate themselves with agile methodologies because theirs is one of the worst tools for it (in that the UI is this confusing herrendous mess). Whereas Pivotal Tracker feels a bit too “purist” in the other direction. Maybe this tool will feel somewhere in the middle?
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    Try Taiga [1] [2] truly open source beautiful system supporting both kanban and scrum style development. It's very intuitive with beautiful cards based interface. It also support user story point poker to assign story points. Indeed it can be projected directly on a wall screen to see a kanban board in real-time with customizable details. Also with easy plugin system, it can extend to integrate with other system in company to automate various processes or customize to once liking. [1] https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/ [2] https://github.com/taigaio https://github.com/taigaio
    - e12e 7y ago
      Looks interesting, if a little convoluted to set up for self host? A couple of outdated docker-compose third party projects, and official script that is in alpha and depends on vagrant..? Maybe the most sensible is cloudron - also unsupported?
      - dragonsh 7y ago
rebelrexx858 7y ago
the most important piece of jira for us is the API. How/When do you plan to have an open api that will assist in navigating issues through webhooks? (i didn't see it listed anywhere if you already do)
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  We are actively working on our API's and Webhooks. We should be getting a v1 out in the next couple of weeks.
drcongo 7y ago
As someone who absolutely despises JIRA, this looks so much like JIRA that I'm unlikely to even try it out.
craigharley 7y ago
Is there any way to import tickets (issues and pull requests) from Github?
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  Craig, we only have a Jira, Asana and Trello import for now. We will be releasing our API endpoints soon so you should be able to get your tickets from Github into Zepel using it.
rid 7y ago
Is there any chance this will be possible to self-host in future? That's a deal breaker for us.
- 23andwalnut 7y ago
  I built a self hosted alternative to trello, basecamp, etc - http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com I wonder if it's suitable for your use case? And if not, what I'd need to add for it to be something you'd use
  - cdurth 7y ago
    this is really slick. any plans for an API for other integrations?
    - 23andwalnut 7y ago
      Thanks! Yes, an API is extremely high on my priority list. Zapier as well. Let me know what kinds of endpoints/actions you'd need from the API so I can make sure they are included. What integrations would you like to see?
      - cdurth 7y ago
        API for time tracking and projects/tasks (our specific use case would be for time and billing of projects into an ERP system). GitLab integration could be interesting for the client portals. We have use cases where we are creating GitLab users for clients and somewhat using that as a "portal". Outlook integration would be nice as well. We used a simple jira plugin that would copy contents of email and make a task for a specific project. just read through your license and it looks like buyers will be allowed to hack it to their liking +1
mangatmodi 7y ago
Thank you for challenging JIRA. I was looking for alternatives for so long.
TXV 7y ago
Me and my team have been using Backlog for quite a while now and it's truly refreshing https://nulab.com/products/backlog/ https://nulab.com/products/backlog/
pymanhacks 7y ago
Really like the UI interface and it's a lot faster than JIRA for sure. Feedback: I feel something is off with: Signup for free <b>OR</b> Signup using Google. Do you charge when I signup with Google?
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Maybe I missed it but I hope they allow for IFTTT / Zappier integrations. At the very least webhooks to send events out.
awillen 7y ago
As a PM, I've generally used JIRA because most of the people using the product are engineers, and that's what eng management pushes for. I have generally found that most PM-oriented products like this just require me to duplicate all the stuff that's already in JIRA to the point where the additional effort just isn't worth whatever benefit I get. Given JIRA's ubiquity, I would strongly recommend that you build an integration that allows you to sync tickets from JIRA -> Zepel, so people can get the benefits of the Zepel interface without having to duplicate their work. (Unless this is already there, but I didn't see it on the website).
- eddieh 7y ago
  As an engineer that just created a Zepel account, it looks to me like it would replace JIRA for all users. As an engineer I already love it. JIRA is pure unusable garbage.
- edmundhuber 7y ago
  What are those things that you need to duplicate?
  - awillen 7y ago
    Basically all the user stories/tickets.
marpstar 7y ago
I've been evaluating PM/bug-tracker apps lately. I'm in a unique scenario, maybe an interested party could give me some guidance: I build WP sites for a local design agency (my client) who designs the theme for their client. I have 2-3 subcontractors that I work with to build these sites. Building the site needs to be managed like a "project". Once launched, I want to give my client AND their client the ability to create tickets for any post-launch issues. I need these users to be "siloed" into organizations so that they can't see bug trackers for other clients. I need my subcontractors to be able to see tickets from projects they're approved to see. I want the ability to create tickets via e-mail, sometimes from my client, other times directly from their client. JIRA + Service Desk seems to give me everything I want, but the admin menus for their "classic" templates (i.e. Service Desk) are daunting. Lots of settings that (IMO) should be "global" are instead per-project. The only way to share these settings is to clone an existing project. We've got ~12 sites that we're managing, and to make a "tweak" to one setting means having to go tweak that same setting 11 more times. Is there any system smaller/simpler than JIRA that meets these needs?
- actionscripted 7y ago
  You might give ActiveCollab a shot. I've spent 16 years going through various project/product management systems and it's one of the only ones that springs to mind when you mention sharing client access like that and trying to keep things user-friendly. That said, if you're using the service desk stuff from Jira I might stay with it. I understand the pain of having to administer Jira and how it creates project-specific EVERYTHING on the backend (workflows, et al.) but it's great for end users and it's super flexible.
- 23andwalnut 7y ago
  Duet can definitely do this. It's self hosted though- http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com Let me know what you think (I'm the developer)
  - marpstar 7y ago
    This looks amazing. It appears to have absolutely everything I need. For $150 I'm willing to give it a trial. I'm currently using Pancake (http://pancakeapp.com http://pancakeapp.com) which is also self-hosted, so I'm fine with that. Duet makes me feel bad for Pancake already because if it's as awesome as it looks, I may switch my billing over...provided one thing... Because I work with an agency, I'm typically billing my client, who then bills their client (plus markup). Obviously we don't want their client to see what I charged them. Is it possible to "hide" the billing for certain users?
ken 7y ago
It starts with "Zepel adapts to the way your software product team really works", which sounds great, but I can't tell what this means. This claim doesn't seem to be connected to anything else on the page. The major selling point / complaint of Jira seems to be that it's too customizable. They're all different, and a bad manager can make your particular Jira instance unusable. Is this one as customizable? Or is it inflexible? Or does it automatically "adapt" somehow? Does it assume that all teams work in the same way? I can't figure out what tradeoff it's making here. The "JIRA Alternative" page says: > "Because when you’re just a week away from shipping your feature, you should be tracking your entire feature. Not user stories and tasks." which makes it sound like Zepel just picked a workflow. It "adapts" to you by assuming you already work in exactly the way it was designed.
- eddieh 7y ago
  Maybe create a free account and try it out?
crsv 7y ago
As someone running a software product team, we've made the decision to get as close to the developer process as possible with our product management tools. We've recently started doing everything in Github using Github projects, which honestly is really usable. It's kind of put me in a mindset where I'm not sure why I would ever pay for a separate product management tool as I can do most of my critical things with Github + Markup + our design stack (Figma, etc). Obviously there's a market for this as I think people are still chasing potential efficiency gains in making tools that are easy/fast/effective in organizing work, but as a product leader I don't see anything here that compels me to leave Github.
- otachack 7y ago
  This makes sense, but a risk you take is if GitHub goes down for a time your remote repos are down as well as your management tools. Other than that, I do like your approach to keep it simple/all in one place!
- rpedela 7y ago
  You may like Clubhouse.io then. Clubhouse feels like I am using Github when committing code and automatically updating issues which I love. But it also has the higher level project management tools Github is missing. To Zepel team: I think you are off to a great start. Personally, I would like to see more information about the Github integration on your marketing pages. Since I don't know the Github integration details (or couldn't find them), make it feel like I am using Github Issues when I commit code on the command-line just like Clubhouse has.
bachmeier 7y ago
How does one get their data out? Why should someone put their data inside what appears to be a walled garden that might go bankrupt?
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  We have an export option available. You can download an HTML, text or JSON dump of your data. We will also be releasing our public API's soon, so you can use that to export your data anytime.
  - bachmeier 7y ago
    Okay. I didn't see that in the FAQ.
19ylram49 7y ago
Speaking from experience, JIRA is just horrible (at least for me as a software engineer and entrepreneur). I’ve wasted way too much of my precious time dealing with JIRA, so I’m all for any software company working to improve that experience. I’ll be trying out Zepel once I have a moment!
thrownaway954 7y ago
I'm not finding what the feature difference is between Standard and Small Business. BTW... out of curiosity.... how long did it take you to create this and with how many people?
jrudolph 7y ago
Kudos for a refreshing take on software project management. This hits a nerve with me - taming JIRA is a royal PITA (couldn't help the 4 letter acronyms, sorry). Especially if you don't have time to combing your backlog all day. Nonetheless, we have found that JIRA can scale nicely from simple to more complex workflows if you take the time to set it up/customize the workflows. But a "Feature Oriented" view that allows me to easily track progress on concurrently progressing streams of work (larger than a single epic) is sorely missing. We tried to come by with Portfolio and Structure for JIRA (both are plugins) but they feel somewhat awkward to use as they require tons of clicks for simple things. Zepel looks like a great idea. However, JIRA is already so embedded in our workflow (thanks to bitbucket integration, ticket bots/plugins etc.)... I'd love to have something like "Github Projects" which sits on top of my normal GH issues but allows me to roll them up. Concourse for example is a nice example of using this effectively: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects Anyone have a recommendation for a tool/plugin that can do this?
- seehafer 7y ago
  https://www.zenhub.com/ https://www.zenhub.com/
alkonaut 7y ago
I think it looks promising. Just trying to move to Azure Devops and it has a good product/issue separation I think, but it's way too customizable. I don't want a tool that can be made to suit any process, I want one that supports a reasonable process without hours of configuration and plugin. E.g. i Azure Devops it seems extremely hard to get feature progress and time rollups for features broken into backlog items and further into tasks. Everything seems estimated separately and marking a task as having spent 10h on is never seen as 10h spent on the backlog item or top level feature. It's confusing as hell (I'm probably just not getting it - but that's usually just a sign of poor UX instead of missing or incorrect functionality)
- ticmasta 7y ago
  Nothing made me enjoy Jira like being forced to move to DevOps. By MS's own admission it's way too complicated, so much so that they've now made the "Basic" workflow (which looks a lot like Jira) the default.
slykar 7y ago
I really love when apps like this are free for small teams. Most of the time I work alone or with 1-2 people. We would look for free options anyway. Because it's free, I get hooked up and then I stay with the tool for bigger projects. Looks very appealing. I'll definitely try this for my next project!
graphememes 7y ago
Is there a way to migrate Jira to Zepel, otherwise it's a complete non-starter from the get go.
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  We have an import option while creating a project that will allow you to migrate your data from Jira to Zepel.
yellowapple 7y ago
Looks nice, and I really like how straightforward it is to create and work with subtasks. I'm immediately seeing two pain points, though: 1. A lot of the text fields seem to have a nasty habit of jumping the cursor back to the beginning of the text, thus causing me to accidentally enter things "islike th". This is a sure sign that y'all are probably overthinking/overengineering the text inputs :) Also, not having a visual indicator of whether or not a text field actually saved is absurdly annoying, especially when the text I enter doesn't get saved when I close a given screen... 2. Just because I'm entering something as a work item doesn't mean I'm actually the requestor of that item. Being entirely unable to change the requestor to something arbitrary eradicates one of my prospective use cases for this. I'd assume that if there were multiple users setup in Zepel I'd be able to choose them, but I don't want to have to setup end-users with Zepel logins just so that I can track who's bugging me about a particular feature or bug. Looks promising, though. Certainly a lot more intuitive than JIRA.
somada141 7y ago
First off congrats on launching and thanks for the "small teams eat free" pricing tier!!! I've just tried Zepel out by importing my current project off Trello (loved that this feature was available) so here's some things that threw me off: - I'd like an easy way to move multiple cards from one board list into another cause I can't multi-select or drag-select. Organising a freshly imported project is a hassle without this. - When creating a new feature I couldn't find a way to drag existing tasks/cards into it but as far as I could see I'd have to create new ones. - I would expect tags to auto-complete when adding them to a card but it didn't seem to work. Generally it seems to work well if one is populating a new project from scratch but cleaning up an imported project would require a little more thought and additional features cause the barrier to entry for users of existing products seems rather high. Keep up the good work!
- gauthamshankar 7y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. We are working on the multi-select functionality in boards, alternatively, you can multi-select items inside a list or feature and move them to other boards. We understand it can be a bit hard without it while organizing an imported project and we will add the functionality soon. Regarding the auto-complete its something that should be working. Will take a look at it. Agreed, the post-import experience has a lot of room for improvement and we are constantly iterating on it.
kull 7y ago
It is super hard to switch to the new platform for bugs reporting / tickets. You just do not want to lose all the old tickets and then retrain your team, then there is a big probability the new tool is not that great after all. We switched from JIRA to youTrack[1] and it was one of our best business decisions recently. It is not perfect, but we will switch again, only if a really superior tool arrives and when it is maintained with some larger company that we know will not go away anytime soon. BTW. Zepel looks very sleek. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
xxdesmus 7y ago
The site is broken on iOS Safari with an ad block on. Not a good start. Looks interesting otherwise.

OP if you are creator of Zepel ,just wondering why you build something against giant,like Jira?

gauthamshankar 7y ago
Hi there kopiblanca, One of the founders of Zepel here. We believe JIRA and most other project management tools have evolved from the core use case of issue tracking. While they might be great for tracking issues and ad hoc work items, when it comes to product development, bug tracking is only a part of the equation. We believe 2 key aspects make product/feature development different. - Unlike bug tracking, a feature needs to be conceptualized and the form-based interface of these tools make it ridiculously difficult to spec out the requirements for a feature. - Shipping a feature involves multiple disciplines and rarely follows a single fixed workflow. Our approach to solving these two problems is, - A text editor like interface that lets you specify your features and making it super simple to change or update items. - Multiple boards per project to capture every discipline and the flexibility to move items across these boards as per your use case. We believe its painfully hard for product teams to plan and ship features using JIRA and that's why we have created Zepel.
- codegladiator 7y ago
  Product teams don't hate JIRA. They love JIRA. Engineers hate JIRA. From your explanation, I still don't understand how this is different from JIRA (apart from the theme).
  - guptaneil 7y ago
    I agree with this. OP, if you have 2 way sync between JIRA working already, then why not let the product folks keep using JIRA as they like and make a new approach that engineers can love and adopt without forcing the entire team to switch? Basically an engineer-driven front-end for JIRA. Focus on viewing/searching, allow the UI to be hackable/customizable on a per-user basis, etc. Currently, you’re not competing against JIRA, but rather Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc for customers. While not rational, a large part of their appeal is they look nothing like JIRA, which can’t be said for you.
  - Tharkun 7y ago
    A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation. It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make it a bit daunting to configure. But you can configure it to suit your needs, instead of having to conform to some harebrained workflow someone else decided was Good Enough. What I really hate is that, even after all these years, it doesn't come with a good planning tool. Portfolio is terrible. I've evaluated several Gantt plugins, which were all terrible. A closely related problem is the missing calendar integration. Atlassian has a calendar plugin for Confluence (wiki), which makes zero sense to me. In my world, issue tracking and planning go hand in hand. And you can't plan shit without a calendar. Surely I'm not the only one who feels that way? Edit: while I'm out praising Jira, have you seen their SDK? You can roll your own Jira plugin in 15 minutes. Bam. Frictionless. Engineers hate it? Those are some weird engineers.
    - rangitatanz 7y ago
      Curious to know if you have seen any project management software with either good calendar or planning support built in? What made it better?
      - Tharkun 7y ago
        I wish I had. Been looking for that holy grail for some time.

JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?

giancarlostoro 7y ago
It also comes with BitBucket which I'm fine with.
gauthamshankar 7y ago
Neal, we see Zepel being bought bottom up. We are engineers ourselves and we built a tool that we would be happy using. We also plan on having a data sync with Jira mainly to help teams within larger org switch to Zepel, while the updates still flow back to JIRA without breaking the “managements” view.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

This looks nice and sleek, I hope it improved upon the pain points of Jira and builds upon new strengths. The thing that kills me about Jira is the inconsistency I experience between projects. Everybody sets it up differently, and work based off entirely different views and contexts. It is exhausting and there's always too much friction. Maybe managers love it cause they got more time to waste on tools like Jira than us engineers, but if I have to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out how to progress forward my ticket, you've screwed up. One really awful thing about Jira: If you create a state for a ticket, and then clone it for a new project, and then update the labels of those states, you're now screwing over the original project because all those states will be updated too.

MegaButts 7y ago
I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, Jira is poorly used. That said, it's surprisingly powerful software. It's just that nobody takes the time to learn how to use it properly. Think of how shitty your first massive OOP language project was. Think of how different coding schemas and practices are between companies. Now realize that over the years, better and best practices have started to be established. Obviously mastering Jira isn't the same as mastering C++, but it actually is a skill that takes months or even years to develop. So it sounds like what you're really complaining about is that the Jira admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their job. I think it should take approximately 5 seconds for an engineer to progress their tickets. And generally speaking, engineers shouldn't be cloning tickets in Jira without training first (even then I would discourage it, but I don't have enough context). Jira isn't user friendly but neither is C++. Once people experience a well run Jira shop (I think most people have just never seen it because in my experience it's shockingly rare) they realize it's actually useful. The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a much harder problem to fix.
- ergothus 7y ago
  > Jira isn't user friendly but neither is C++ I can accept this. But I've chosen to be a programmer - project management tools are a necessary evil, not something I enjoy. Expecting me to put in the effort to master it they way I do my primary tools is doomed to frustration. I dont' expect end users to program...and I'm the end user of Jira.

new_here 7y ago

Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA. Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged. If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run projects, and deliver on that, then you'll probably get some decent traction with SMBs and work your way up from that. Make teams feel like they'll be agile by using Zepel. Great work and good luck!

atonse 7y ago
That’s funny that people get JIRA to associate themselves with agile methodologies because theirs is one of the worst tools for it (in that the UI is this confusing herrendous mess). Whereas Pivotal Tracker feels a bit too “purist” in the other direction. Maybe this tool will feel somewhere in the middle?
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Try Taiga [1] [2] truly open source beautiful system supporting both kanban and scrum style development. It's very intuitive with beautiful cards based interface. It also support user story point poker to assign story points. Indeed it can be projected directly on a wall screen to see a kanban board in real-time with customizable details. Also with easy plugin system, it can extend to integrate with other system in company to automate various processes or customize to once liking. [1] https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/ [2] https://github.com/taigaio https://github.com/taigaio
  - e12e 7y ago
    Looks interesting, if a little convoluted to set up for self host? A couple of outdated docker-compose third party projects, and official script that is in alpha and depends on vagrant..? Maybe the most sensible is cloudron - also unsupported?
    - dragonsh 7y ago

rebelrexx858 7y ago

the most important piece of jira for us is the API. How/When do you plan to have an open api that will assist in navigating issues through webhooks? (i didn't see it listed anywhere if you already do)

gauthamshankar 7y ago
We are actively working on our API's and Webhooks. We should be getting a v1 out in the next couple of weeks.

drcongo 7y ago

As someone who absolutely despises JIRA, this looks so much like JIRA that I'm unlikely to even try it out.

craigharley 7y ago

Is there any way to import tickets (issues and pull requests) from Github?

gauthamshankar 7y ago
Craig, we only have a Jira, Asana and Trello import for now. We will be releasing our API endpoints soon so you should be able to get your tickets from Github into Zepel using it.

rid 7y ago

Is there any chance this will be possible to self-host in future? That's a deal breaker for us.

23andwalnut 7y ago
I built a self hosted alternative to trello, basecamp, etc - http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com I wonder if it's suitable for your use case? And if not, what I'd need to add for it to be something you'd use
- cdurth 7y ago
  this is really slick. any plans for an API for other integrations?
  - 23andwalnut 7y ago
    Thanks! Yes, an API is extremely high on my priority list. Zapier as well. Let me know what kinds of endpoints/actions you'd need from the API so I can make sure they are included. What integrations would you like to see?
    - cdurth 7y ago
      API for time tracking and projects/tasks (our specific use case would be for time and billing of projects into an ERP system). GitLab integration could be interesting for the client portals. We have use cases where we are creating GitLab users for clients and somewhat using that as a "portal". Outlook integration would be nice as well. We used a simple jira plugin that would copy contents of email and make a task for a specific project. just read through your license and it looks like buyers will be allowed to hack it to their liking +1

mangatmodi 7y ago

Thank you for challenging JIRA. I was looking for alternatives for so long.

TXV 7y ago

Me and my team have been using Backlog for quite a while now and it's truly refreshing https://nulab.com/products/backlog/ https://nulab.com/products/backlog/

pymanhacks 7y ago

Really like the UI interface and it's a lot faster than JIRA for sure. Feedback: I feel something is off with: Signup for free <b>OR</b> Signup using Google. Do you charge when I signup with Google?

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Maybe I missed it but I hope they allow for IFTTT / Zappier integrations. At the very least webhooks to send events out.

awillen 7y ago

As a PM, I've generally used JIRA because most of the people using the product are engineers, and that's what eng management pushes for. I have generally found that most PM-oriented products like this just require me to duplicate all the stuff that's already in JIRA to the point where the additional effort just isn't worth whatever benefit I get. Given JIRA's ubiquity, I would strongly recommend that you build an integration that allows you to sync tickets from JIRA -> Zepel, so people can get the benefits of the Zepel interface without having to duplicate their work. (Unless this is already there, but I didn't see it on the website).

eddieh 7y ago
As an engineer that just created a Zepel account, it looks to me like it would replace JIRA for all users. As an engineer I already love it. JIRA is pure unusable garbage.
edmundhuber 7y ago
What are those things that you need to duplicate?
- awillen 7y ago
  Basically all the user stories/tickets.

marpstar 7y ago

I've been evaluating PM/bug-tracker apps lately. I'm in a unique scenario, maybe an interested party could give me some guidance: I build WP sites for a local design agency (my client) who designs the theme for their client. I have 2-3 subcontractors that I work with to build these sites. Building the site needs to be managed like a "project". Once launched, I want to give my client AND their client the ability to create tickets for any post-launch issues. I need these users to be "siloed" into organizations so that they can't see bug trackers for other clients. I need my subcontractors to be able to see tickets from projects they're approved to see. I want the ability to create tickets via e-mail, sometimes from my client, other times directly from their client. JIRA + Service Desk seems to give me everything I want, but the admin menus for their "classic" templates (i.e. Service Desk) are daunting. Lots of settings that (IMO) should be "global" are instead per-project. The only way to share these settings is to clone an existing project. We've got ~12 sites that we're managing, and to make a "tweak" to one setting means having to go tweak that same setting 11 more times. Is there any system smaller/simpler than JIRA that meets these needs?

actionscripted 7y ago
You might give ActiveCollab a shot. I've spent 16 years going through various project/product management systems and it's one of the only ones that springs to mind when you mention sharing client access like that and trying to keep things user-friendly. That said, if you're using the service desk stuff from Jira I might stay with it. I understand the pain of having to administer Jira and how it creates project-specific EVERYTHING on the backend (workflows, et al.) but it's great for end users and it's super flexible.
23andwalnut 7y ago
Duet can definitely do this. It's self hosted though- http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com Let me know what you think (I'm the developer)
- marpstar 7y ago
  This looks amazing. It appears to have absolutely everything I need. For $150 I'm willing to give it a trial. I'm currently using Pancake (http://pancakeapp.com http://pancakeapp.com) which is also self-hosted, so I'm fine with that. Duet makes me feel bad for Pancake already because if it's as awesome as it looks, I may switch my billing over...provided one thing... Because I work with an agency, I'm typically billing my client, who then bills their client (plus markup). Obviously we don't want their client to see what I charged them. Is it possible to "hide" the billing for certain users?

ken 7y ago

It starts with "Zepel adapts to the way your software product team really works", which sounds great, but I can't tell what this means. This claim doesn't seem to be connected to anything else on the page. The major selling point / complaint of Jira seems to be that it's too customizable. They're all different, and a bad manager can make your particular Jira instance unusable. Is this one as customizable? Or is it inflexible? Or does it automatically "adapt" somehow? Does it assume that all teams work in the same way? I can't figure out what tradeoff it's making here. The "JIRA Alternative" page says: > "Because when you’re just a week away from shipping your feature, you should be tracking your entire feature. Not user stories and tasks." which makes it sound like Zepel just picked a workflow. It "adapts" to you by assuming you already work in exactly the way it was designed.

eddieh 7y ago
Maybe create a free account and try it out?

crsv 7y ago

As someone running a software product team, we've made the decision to get as close to the developer process as possible with our product management tools. We've recently started doing everything in Github using Github projects, which honestly is really usable. It's kind of put me in a mindset where I'm not sure why I would ever pay for a separate product management tool as I can do most of my critical things with Github + Markup + our design stack (Figma, etc). Obviously there's a market for this as I think people are still chasing potential efficiency gains in making tools that are easy/fast/effective in organizing work, but as a product leader I don't see anything here that compels me to leave Github.

otachack 7y ago
This makes sense, but a risk you take is if GitHub goes down for a time your remote repos are down as well as your management tools. Other than that, I do like your approach to keep it simple/all in one place!
rpedela 7y ago
You may like Clubhouse.io then. Clubhouse feels like I am using Github when committing code and automatically updating issues which I love. But it also has the higher level project management tools Github is missing. To Zepel team: I think you are off to a great start. Personally, I would like to see more information about the Github integration on your marketing pages. Since I don't know the Github integration details (or couldn't find them), make it feel like I am using Github Issues when I commit code on the command-line just like Clubhouse has.

bachmeier 7y ago

How does one get their data out? Why should someone put their data inside what appears to be a walled garden that might go bankrupt?

gauthamshankar 7y ago
We have an export option available. You can download an HTML, text or JSON dump of your data. We will also be releasing our public API's soon, so you can use that to export your data anytime.
- bachmeier 7y ago
  Okay. I didn't see that in the FAQ.

19ylram49 7y ago

Speaking from experience, JIRA is just horrible (at least for me as a software engineer and entrepreneur). I’ve wasted way too much of my precious time dealing with JIRA, so I’m all for any software company working to improve that experience. I’ll be trying out Zepel once I have a moment!

thrownaway954 7y ago

I'm not finding what the feature difference is between Standard and Small Business. BTW... out of curiosity.... how long did it take you to create this and with how many people?

jrudolph 7y ago

Kudos for a refreshing take on software project management. This hits a nerve with me - taming JIRA is a royal PITA (couldn't help the 4 letter acronyms, sorry). Especially if you don't have time to combing your backlog all day. Nonetheless, we have found that JIRA can scale nicely from simple to more complex workflows if you take the time to set it up/customize the workflows. But a "Feature Oriented" view that allows me to easily track progress on concurrently progressing streams of work (larger than a single epic) is sorely missing. We tried to come by with Portfolio and Structure for JIRA (both are plugins) but they feel somewhat awkward to use as they require tons of clicks for simple things. Zepel looks like a great idea. However, JIRA is already so embedded in our workflow (thanks to bitbucket integration, ticket bots/plugins etc.)... I'd love to have something like "Github Projects" which sits on top of my normal GH issues but allows me to roll them up. Concourse for example is a nice example of using this effectively: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects Anyone have a recommendation for a tool/plugin that can do this?

seehafer 7y ago
https://www.zenhub.com/ https://www.zenhub.com/

alkonaut 7y ago

I think it looks promising. Just trying to move to Azure Devops and it has a good product/issue separation I think, but it's way too customizable. I don't want a tool that can be made to suit any process, I want one that supports a reasonable process without hours of configuration and plugin. E.g. i Azure Devops it seems extremely hard to get feature progress and time rollups for features broken into backlog items and further into tasks. Everything seems estimated separately and marking a task as having spent 10h on is never seen as 10h spent on the backlog item or top level feature. It's confusing as hell (I'm probably just not getting it - but that's usually just a sign of poor UX instead of missing or incorrect functionality)

ticmasta 7y ago
Nothing made me enjoy Jira like being forced to move to DevOps. By MS's own admission it's way too complicated, so much so that they've now made the "Basic" workflow (which looks a lot like Jira) the default.

slykar 7y ago

I really love when apps like this are free for small teams. Most of the time I work alone or with 1-2 people. We would look for free options anyway. Because it's free, I get hooked up and then I stay with the tool for bigger projects. Looks very appealing. I'll definitely try this for my next project!

graphememes 7y ago

Is there a way to migrate Jira to Zepel, otherwise it's a complete non-starter from the get go.

gauthamshankar 7y ago
We have an import option while creating a project that will allow you to migrate your data from Jira to Zepel.

yellowapple 7y ago

Looks nice, and I really like how straightforward it is to create and work with subtasks. I'm immediately seeing two pain points, though: 1. A lot of the text fields seem to have a nasty habit of jumping the cursor back to the beginning of the text, thus causing me to accidentally enter things "islike th". This is a sure sign that y'all are probably overthinking/overengineering the text inputs :) Also, not having a visual indicator of whether or not a text field actually saved is absurdly annoying, especially when the text I enter doesn't get saved when I close a given screen... 2. Just because I'm entering something as a work item doesn't mean I'm actually the requestor of that item. Being entirely unable to change the requestor to something arbitrary eradicates one of my prospective use cases for this. I'd assume that if there were multiple users setup in Zepel I'd be able to choose them, but I don't want to have to setup end-users with Zepel logins just so that I can track who's bugging me about a particular feature or bug. Looks promising, though. Certainly a lot more intuitive than JIRA.

somada141 7y ago

First off congrats on launching and thanks for the "small teams eat free" pricing tier!!! I've just tried Zepel out by importing my current project off Trello (loved that this feature was available) so here's some things that threw me off: - I'd like an easy way to move multiple cards from one board list into another cause I can't multi-select or drag-select. Organising a freshly imported project is a hassle without this. - When creating a new feature I couldn't find a way to drag existing tasks/cards into it but as far as I could see I'd have to create new ones. - I would expect tags to auto-complete when adding them to a card but it didn't seem to work. Generally it seems to work well if one is populating a new project from scratch but cleaning up an imported project would require a little more thought and additional features cause the barrier to entry for users of existing products seems rather high. Keep up the good work!

gauthamshankar 7y ago
Thank you for the feedback. We are working on the multi-select functionality in boards, alternatively, you can multi-select items inside a list or feature and move them to other boards. We understand it can be a bit hard without it while organizing an imported project and we will add the functionality soon. Regarding the auto-complete its something that should be working. Will take a look at it. Agreed, the post-import experience has a lot of room for improvement and we are constantly iterating on it.

kull 7y ago

It is super hard to switch to the new platform for bugs reporting / tickets. You just do not want to lose all the old tickets and then retrain your team, then there is a big probability the new tool is not that great after all. We switched from JIRA to youTrack[1] and it was one of our best business decisions recently. It is not perfect, but we will switch again, only if a really superior tool arrives and when it is maintained with some larger company that we know will not go away anytime soon. BTW. Zepel looks very sleek. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/

xxdesmus 7y ago

The site is broken on iOS Safari with an ad block on. Not a good start. Looks interesting otherwise.