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Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool, free project management platform

257 points by andrewchilds 7y ago

techslave 7y ago
please someone here has used it? i hate jira. every update is worse than the last.
- jdotjdot 7y ago
  We've been using it for years and love it. Our engineering team went from begrudgingly sometimes doing what they're supposed to in Pivotal to actually _loving_ their project tracker. Never seen anything else like it.
- pgib 7y ago
  We've been using Clubhouse for a few years. It's been rock-solid, has a really polished interface, good integrations (Github, Slack), and is not Jira. (shudders)
- cloverich 7y ago
  I used it at my last company before the JIRA brigade took over, and I"m pushing it at my current gig. My typical JIRA cycle goes like: I use a simple PM tool. PM's insist on JIRA, because "features". PM's can't figure out how to do simple things (because JIRA). PM gives me admin rights. I quit. That was my last three companies. Anyways -- Clubhouse is more limited, focused, opinionated. The UI is snappy behaves exactly like I expected as I learned it. It feels a little cluttered at times, but unlike JIRA everything seems to work in the ways I expect. It has some interesting constraints (stories belong to epics belong to milestones, so you can't put a story directly in a milestone) but overall I like it much more than JIRA. My tl;dr for Clubhouse is that (imho) most software shops would be better off using it, or something nearly identical to it, instead of opting for JIRA to turn that one knob they just can't live without. JIRA works well if you need complex workflow management and can hire people to administrate that _as their full time job_.
  - igetspam 7y ago
    Not any more. New JIRA is more opinionated, less functional, slower and generally missing features while also being less intuitive. Your experts are no longer needed because there's nothing you can change. It's way worse than it used to be and the bar was already really low.
  - mortonpe 7y ago
    We had a similar issue with building milestones. IMHO milestones in clubhouse are a way for a PM to interrogate the completeness of high level initiatives which are made up of epics. What was missing was the ability to organize a group of stories than span multiple epics into an iteration that the engineering team could push toward delivery. The iteration is a unit that the dev manager and team can use to track the completeness of their commitments. Recently clubhouse introduced iterations, to assist dev managers in tracking their deliverables. I have never been happier with a tool and am excited to explore their new offering.
- ssalka 7y ago
  I was so pleased w/ Clubhouse at one of my previous jobs that I've gotten my past 2 companies to switch to Clubhouse for project tracking (from Trello, Jira/Asana combo respectively). My current team misses required fields, but other than that, Clubhouse serves our needs very well and their support team is very responsive.
  - alexfromapex 7y ago
    I just tried it and it seems pretty great. I love that it’s free and have always disliked JIRA’s pricing
- fletchowns 7y ago
  What are some of the reasons you hate Jira? I use it all day every day and I don't really have many complaints for it, I find it to be quite a nice tool actually.
  - rpedela 7y ago
    The cloud version is extremely slow. It is buggy. Prior to the recent UI update, it was unintuitive. The new UI is better but still not great. Ironically, their UI update makes Jira more like Clubhouse.
    - fletchowns 7y ago
      I see. We host our own instance of it in AWS and performance has been quite good, it took some tuning to get it right though. I've found the UI to be fairly intuitive, other than some minor things like converting a ticket to another type is under the Move action. To me the new UI shares many similarities with the old one and I don't really have any complaints about either of them.
- bendotero 7y ago
  Been using it for a year after switching from JIRA. Better in every conceivable way. Better UI, quicker loading. Just all around better app.
- rpedela 7y ago
  One of the things I love about Clubhouse, which I believe is unique among PM tools, is that their Github integration makes it feel like I am just using Github Issues when checking in code. Other PM tools have Github integrations too, but I haven't found one that is as seamless.
- sickcodebruh 7y ago
  Been using it for a few years and I love it. I started using it after everyone around me revolted against Pivotal, which they felt was too opinionated about how they should work. Clubhouse, by comparison, fit in a lot better for the people who weren’t developers. I only worked somewhere that used Jira very briefly but I remember finding it extremely over built and enterprisey. Clubhouse is the polar opposite of those things.
- invisiblea 7y ago
  We (a small 5-7 person digital agency juggling multiple active projects) have been using Clubhouse for the last couple of years after outgrowing Trello and finding Jira too complex. It's flexible, fast, good app integration and has a responsive support team. We recommend it. Future wish list would be: - Per Project User access, so we could invite clients into just their project. - Harvest (or similar) time tracking integration, so we can see how long we spent on "stories"
nerdbaggy 7y ago
The market is so ripe for somebody to take over the Confluence market. I need a documentation platform that has the WYSIWYG aspects like Confluence, be overall less terrible, and can support global replication. I can’t find anything like it for toughly the same price point.
- duncan-donuts 7y ago
  What do you mean by global replication? Like if I publish something in New York it should be immediately accessible in Tokyo?
  - nerdbaggy 7y ago
    Doesn’t really matter what consistency level is picked. We have offices in US, South America, and Australia. Right now every single query has to come back to a central point, which isn’t great for latency. It doesn’t even need to be multi master since 99% of our page views are reads only.
    - duncan-donuts 7y ago
      Got it. That’s what I thought you meant but wasn’t sure in this context.
    - spookthesunset 7y ago
      Can’t you just run it through a cdn somehow?
    - davidjgraph 7y ago
      Like https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/use-a-cdn-with-atlassian-data-center-applications-974378840.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/use-a-cdn-w... , for example.
- AlphaSite 7y ago
  I don’t know if it meets all your checkboxes, but Notion is _amazing_.
mmastrac 7y ago
Clubhouse is one of the better kanban/agile-ish tools I've used. It's pretty responsible, generally fast, and overall configurable enough for me to be happy.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thuylun2412 7y ago
good
dragonsh 7y ago
Our startup is one of the happy users of self-hosted Taiga [1] [2], it is much better than a combination of Jira and confluence. It has all the features and much more with both a complete open source and SaaS offering. It supports both "scrum" and kanban style development with card layout which rivals trello. It features many importers, integrations and provides an open API to build new one's easy. Depending on the company's policy it can be deployed in their own environment, cloud of their choice or just sign up for SaaS. It has a beautiful interface with PWA and mobile apps on app store using its API, by other developers. [1] https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/ [2] https://github.com/taigaio https://github.com/taigaio
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  gotta say I found 'taiga' confusing as hell. I eventually found a small pale grey floppy disk image (on white background) as the magic thing to click when typing in comments. That alone cost far more vs any benefit I had using taiga. Perhaps the folks who set it up for me to use chose a weird theme?
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    Yes possible they choose something. We have been using it for quite some time. It also server as an example how to build a nice single page progressive web app for the team. Although we don't use coffeescript, its' nice implemention. Also there design assets [1] are also open source, so indeed if your team wants can change those minor icons or other details. [1] https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-design https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-design
- udkl 7y ago
  dragonsh, are you affiliated with Taiga ? I remember seeing you post a similar comment when I looked at the zepel thread this weekend.... or are you just a satisfied customer ?
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    No I am not an affiliate of Taiga. In our startup we use self-hosted Taiga. We neither subscribed or paid to Taiga. Their system helped us and served as one example of a beautiful API based app. So as my startup don't pay anything to Taiga. I feel this is the least I can do, if my evangelism can help them indirectly. Open source is built on community which works when everyone returns or contribute back in some way. This I thought is one way, I feel better. Although once my startup becomes bigger I would like to contribute code and enhancement to it. But at least this small thing makes me feel bit better, otherwise I will feel like a leecher. Indeed I and my team do the same for other parts we use like kallithea-scm, mercurial, many python, golang libraries, obviously Linux, postgresql and other infrastructure software.
daigoba66 7y ago
Once upon a time I liked Jira, and most of the products shipped by Atlassian. While Jira has large admin overhead, it can be configured to make things simple for users. And I still think most hatred of Jira ought to be directed at management for imposing bureaucracy and control through the tool, instead of the tool itself (I see this first hand as my current gig has grown from “startup” to “enterprise” in a few short years). But Atlassian has made a lot of questionable product decisions over the last many years, mostly in terms of UI/UX. What were once very much developer-centric interfaces are now geared to general enterprise product management. Somehow it’s becoming _less_ functional over time with each major revision.
- foolfoolz 7y ago
  i’ve used jira for nearly a decade and seen it grow over that time. i’ve worked in orgs that embraced it, made it a central part of business process workflows, and therefore paid super close attention to making it usable for the company. i’ve worked at places where it was a simple backlog tracker. i think jira is a best in class tool for the way it is customizable. the ui has changed over the years but not greatly. the rolling and apis have gotten much better. but the way different teams even at the same company can use the same tool is extremely impressive. i think people who say it’s over complicated and bloated are correct, but at a certain size the workaround for that is multiple competing tools. one team on trello. another on pivotal. and that’s a much worse experience.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    I have been on teams where an obscene amount of time was spent discussing Jira. Not "how should we do things?" but "how should we do things on Jira?" where it was abundantly obvious that using Jira compared to literally anything else was worse. We could have hired someone full time and paid quite well to sit on a stool and move post-its around on a wall and it would have been better, faster, and cheaper. Jira is fine when you have whole teams of people whose entire job it is to care about things like Jira who make it good enough for the engineers to be generally disinterested, but it is toxic for small companies, especially those which contain certain personalities or just inexperience. You get sucked in to endless discussions and revisions (which generally make things worse) of your Jira process with this idea that when you make it perfect work will be so much better but the result is a Sisyphean engineering team spending ever more time rolling the Jira rock over the hill. There are a lot of cases where one guy with a pad of paper or some sticky notes on a wall (or literally nothing) are much better than Jira, but Jira is one of those cargo cult things people do because they are supposed to and it doesn't seem to add value unless you ignore any customization and just leave it or you have massive resources to put to developing and maintaining the process.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I don't see why anyone couldn't unseat Atlassian. JIRA and Confluence are moderately difficult problems to solve, but it's not impossible to create a lean competitor with a small team and some funding. Winning the war will be identifying a reason for companies to switch. There has to be something particularly painful enough with existing solution to help facilitate conversion. On the opposing side: maybe it's an easier sell to know a business uses Atlassian tools (from a talent acquisition perspective). If you were hiring engineers and told them you used SVN instead of Git for version control, maybe it just makes the role less marketable. "Another tool I have to learn", one could think.
- ianwalter 7y ago
  It's been my experience that developers care much more about the user/developer experience than having to learn another tool but then again I've spent more time working in startups than I have working for large companies.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    I've accepted the obviously flawed UI for what it is. Instead of being able to move an issue from one backlog to another via the Edit modal (where you can edit virtually every piece of information about the issue), you have to click the "More" dropdown, then "Move". I used JIRA for three years before I knew that. I hope somebody from Atlassian sees this comment.
- Noumenon72 7y ago
  Migrating Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud has taken so much time and support that it would take a strong company to handle migrating out. Of course there are specialists in this migration process, whom I maybe should have hired. As an engineer, I love Confluence, every business I've interviewed with has used it, and I'd be slightly worried about how a company survives without it. I don't care about Jira, except for how it works with Bitbucket.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
sdrothrock 7y ago
@dang (Though I don't know if these @tags even help you search for these kinds of comments?) The original title is "Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool and free version of its project management platform", I'm not sure if it changed or was editorialized here. I thought it was interesting that the HN title ("Jira competitor Clubhouse launches free plan, Confluence competitor") emphasizes Jira (to frame Clubhouse).
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Yeah, the TC headline is still the more neutral version. There was definitely some heavy spin by the poster who, no coincidence, is one of the founders. Unfortunate they chose to come on to the HN scene by violating one of the community guidelines.
- wglb 7y ago
  To get 'dangs attention, check the contact button at the bottom of the page: hn@ycombinator.com
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we've replaced that with a shortened version of the original title. Thanks!
somebodythere 7y ago
It's also free for small teams now, which I think is a great change.
slider_thor 7y ago
I really want to see a Jira competitor succeed, it's healthy to have some competition. But it's hard to find something that competes on the per-user price of Jira Software On-Premise. (Jira Cloud is a different story...too many reports of slowness, too many UI/UX changes, too many powerful add-ons do not work on Cloud). Next, you have to be the system of record for a company. To do that, everyone needs a license. Jira has a foot-hold because it is used for developers and for every other facet of a business (basically all company ticketing). Although Jira sacrificed ease-of-use by offering customization, it's also what allows orgs to skip buying other tools.
rolleiflex 7y ago
The thing I don’t like about these tools is that they all imply a core, unspoken taskmaster in the form of a project manager assigning tasks and then chases people down for it, and their whole paradigm is built around that. The future of workplace collaboration is not in the structured silos like these that are shaped based on project managers’ demands - it arises from the engineers doing the actual work. JIRA, Confluence and its ilk can work for a team where software engineers are replaceable - in fact, one of their main goals is to make them so - but in a startup team, trying to apply this usually leads to people quitting for a better startup. Probably rightfully so. Full disclosure, I work on a tool (https://aether.app https://aether.app) that does a more organic async collaboration between engineers than explicit task-based project management, so I’m biased.
- jadbox 7y ago
  So Aether is basically "Reddit but for teams", as the page implies. Sounds great actually- I'll give it a spin and reply with my thoughts later.
  - rolleiflex 7y ago
    Yes, you got that right. If you’d like to try it, hit me up, happy to answer questions. (email at profile)
    - jadbox 7y ago
      If you don't mind, could you provide your thoughts on how it differs from Zulip? From a 10,000 foot view, they seem similar, but I don't have experience with either yet (but I'll let you know if we have time this week to check it out!)
- prepend 7y ago
  Aether seems nice, but I’ve never had a “credit card necessary for trial” work out. I understand the downsides to the company for trying to collect this info, but I’m not willing to risk credit card hell even if you super pinkie promise not to be a jerk. Too many jerks made similar promises and then were jerks. The pricing seems high for what it is. $10/month is not a lot, but compared to the value derived is quite a bit. Especially since the cost of such a service to operate should be extremely low. This would be cool to bundle into something, but if this is a great tool spending $300/month on top of all our other stuff for medium sized team doesn’t compute. I’ll likely use the existing crappy IM that’s already in place but drastically less cost. I suppose that the value of productivity gained would be worth $300, but the cost of service aspect doesn’t fee right to me. If I buy a book that teaches me a technique that boosts my productivity I don’t want to pay $10/month for the rest of my life. All that being said the tool looks great and the design is very considerate. I will keep an eye out for any improvements or if the software goes OSS or Microsoft buys you and bundles it with some azure thing.
nevster 7y ago
We've just spent a good half hour or so trying this out. It has a snappy interface but in some respects it's very heavy - ie in the number of clicks needed to do anything. The main one for us is estimating. We want to be able to go through a list of stories and edit the estimates. The fact that the table of stories isn't editable means we have to open up the dialog for each story to edit the estimate. As a comparison, we're currently using Airtable for some projects and Notion for others. In both of those, you can do that. Also the ability to add our own fields to stories is something we use quite a bit. Otherwise it's pretty nice.
- woutr_be 7y ago
  One of our frustrations with Jira is that estimates are only editable in your backlog or active sprint. We often open stories in different tabs, and constantly have to switch back to the backlog in order to add/update the estimate. I can't believe why nobody has implemented in both screens.
  - enra 7y ago
    The in the tool we are building (https://linear.app https://linear.app), you can just hit shift+e to estimate in backlog/active/sprint and in the issue view. (https://cl.ly/81b9a29734dd https://cl.ly/81b9a29734dd) You can actually do all actions for the issue just using the keyboard on any list/board view or issue view.
  - flipchart 7y ago
    Have you added the field to the issue screen? By default it's not there, and if there's no points, it won't show unless you click the edit button. But I use Jira and can edit estimates on the issue screen
- andrewchilds 7y ago
  (Co-founder here) Great feedback, thank you! We do have bulk editing (to update many stories at once to the same value) and an ability to update properties in Epics table views, but not Story table views. Your use case makes total sense. We’ll add your feedback to our internal Story for this feature, and if you’d like, we’d be happy to let you know if this ends up being built.
jesterson 7y ago
I have chosen Clubhouse as our main project management platform around 8 months ago and never regretted since then. It was adapted almost flawlessly to out internal processes and procedures. Can't recommend it enough if you're considering PM system
Corrado 7y ago
My team and I was just discussing the Atlassian toolset and how someone should give them some serious competition. Some of the things we are looking for are: markdown support, one place to keep everything (text, xlsx, images, PDFs, etc.), and a shared "whiteboard". We're currently using Confluence and between the lousy support, terrible editing, and the fact that you have to install plugins to get any real functionality it's getting harder and harder to write that check every month. We looked at Clubhouse a couple of months ago, and while we all liked the look of it the project manager decreed that it didn't have enough integrations, specifically ProductBoard, PipeDrive, Confluence. It looks like that Confluence integration isn't needed since Clubhouse will have it's own "wiki". Nice! If we could get ProductBoard and PipeDrive working I think we would switch tomorrow. Especially if there was a shared whiteboard offering. In fact, our remote guys are in the office this week for meetings and the other quarterly things and one of the main discussions was a shared whiteboard. We've tried several in the past, as well as other tools (ie. Lucidcharts) but it never really worked for us. I'm excited to give Clubhouse a try and see if it solves our problem.
cyberferret 7y ago
We've been using (self hosted) Phabricator here for a while on our bootstrapped SaaS project. Been looking at Clubhouse with interest. Anyone here switched from Phabricator to Clubhouse that can give some feedback on the process? I really love Phabricators code review and Git repo management, as well as the secrets management within it. The 'Herald' workflow rules tool is also great, and I am hoping that Clubhouse can duplicate this functionality?
nathan_f77 7y ago
I switched to Clubhouse recently, and it's been great! I still use Trello for personal/founder tasks, but Clubhouse is really great for software development projects.
tomrandle 7y ago
We switched from Trello to Clubhouse 3 years ago - having dabbled with JIRA a few times. We'd outgrown Trello (not enough structure) but didn't want to give up on the speed / ease of moving and updating cards. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-team-moved-from-trello-to-clubhouse-b1422e6a2c60 https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-tea.... This seems like a sensible move to grow usage - interested to see how it helps!
Michielvv 7y ago
I really like Clubhouse, but I'm somewhat skeptical about the free version. (even though it says 'free forever') In the past two years multiple companies that initially had an affordable plan ( 10 dollars a month or less) for small companies had the same strategy: change the affordable plan to a free plan. And then within a year kill 90% of the features on the free plan and have you upgrade to a full plan much more expensive than the plan you were on before everything became free. The product is great though, main feature for me is the ability to plan epics at a milestone level.
- udkl 7y ago
  I don't know why but many project management tools these days do not have a milestone section. Do teams these days not use milestones as a time box for significant feature delivery ?
  - Michielvv 7y ago
    Yes, before we were using clubhouse someone was doing high-level planning in an Excel/Google docs. A few months later and even marketing is starting to use clubhouse and the milestone planning. I think it really helps to not have 30 different unrelated stories to work on but plan them at an epic level so at least the things you are working on are related. Even for things that are not really an epic I now tend to group related features together in an epic to make it easier to keep track and plan. (e.g. grouping 10 minor UX improvements together in one Q3 UX fixes epic)
atemerev 7y ago
For me, the UI looks perfectly right, thank you. I will try running it for a week and see how it goes.
mister_hn 7y ago
I hope they give also a offline installer as well
pbowyer 7y ago
We trialled Clubhouse 6 months ago, but didn't find it a good fit for us. After another 3, we settled on ClickUp https://clickup.com/ https://clickup.com/ and have been very happy. Our clients even use it and they _love_ it. So much so that one has now adopted it internally.
- batesy 7y ago
  I installed ClickUp over the weekend to give it a whirl, but it seems like managing sub-projects is difficult. I have multiple projects on the go for each of my clients, and I couldn't figure out how to go more than one level deep. Any tips? It otherwise looks awesome.
pyritschard 7y ago
This is great news. At Exoscale we are now using Clubhouse but keep tracking product descriptions and design documents + ADRs outside of it. Tying these to the in-flight epics would be a very welcome change. One can only hope it will remain engineer friendly and allow for reviews and good text formats.
dgllghr 7y ago
I put together a custom visualization of our projects in a format that I thought made a lot of sense. My wife, who is a mechanical engineer, took one look at it and said “that’s a Gantt chart.” I have been hooked on Gantt charts ever since, and I wish that software engineering tools would embrace and integrate Gantt charts.
- zild3d 7y ago
  Asana recently added "Timelines" which are gantt charts. Haven't used though, as I'm on the free tier [0] https://luna1.co/3fa273.png https://luna1.co/3fa273.png [1] https://asana.com/product/timeline https://asana.com/product/timeline
bachmeier 7y ago
Nice to see that there's a free plan. I'd be really happy to give it a try if free plans meant something. As if to prove the point, ClickUp just sent an email trying to force an upgrade. The thing about a free plan is that you put all your data into their walled garden, teach everyone else how to use it, and then you have a limited time to move to something else once they decide it's time to squeeze you. They have nothing to lose. If someone doesn't want to pay, it's good to push them away, and if they do pay, the money is just as good whether the customer hates them or not. The ClickUp announcement has all the usual "features": - The free plan will be available forever. - This is necessary for the free plan to be sustainable. - We're happy to give you a short-term discount to make the upgrade less painful. Sorry to say it, but this offer from Clubhouse will be no different. They're in business to make money, and once you start relying on it, they'll pull the rug out from under you the same as pretty much every other company.
somada141 7y ago
First off really glad with the move to allow small teams to really try the software for free until they grow organically. Kudos to Clubhouse. I've been using Trello for my 2-person team but the closer we're getting to an initial launch the more we've been missing the abstractions more complex pieces of software like JIRA offer, e.g., Epics, Milestones, issue-linking, issue-types, etc. I'm not saying Trello can't make up for that with proper usage of labels, lists, and powerups, but having been working with JIRA and Fogbugz for over a decade it's hard to change our way of thinking. So I though I'd give Clubhouse and this free offering was the push I needed. FYI the tool under https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-clubhouse.io https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-clubhouse.io does a pretty job of helping import existing Trello boards/cards but there's not 1-1 mapping so some cleanup will be required after the import.
afarviral 7y ago
Just in the process of trying to convert my team from Trello. Clubhouse addresses many of the issues we have: - Has functional groups (e.g. Reporting, ITSM Admin) while retaining functional stages (e.g. Todo, Delivery etc). – this is a big one for me as we have to use a workaround involving labels in trello - In-depth reporting - Ability to mark a card as officially completed without archiving it - Umbrella projects known as “epics” so you can encapsulate very large projects and have multiple cards (known as stories) for one big piece of work - Ability to assign “tasks” to people within cards, and they can see these tasks in their dashboard - Markdown formatting within tasks within stories, rather than just the description like in trello - “Free forever”, for up to 10 users, with the only limit being no observers – this is similar to Trello. - It doesn’t appear they charge extra for integrations of which there are many

257 points by andrewchilds 7y ago

techslave 7y ago

please someone here has used it? i hate jira. every update is worse than the last.

jdotjdot 7y ago
We've been using it for years and love it. Our engineering team went from begrudgingly sometimes doing what they're supposed to in Pivotal to actually _loving_ their project tracker. Never seen anything else like it.
pgib 7y ago
We've been using Clubhouse for a few years. It's been rock-solid, has a really polished interface, good integrations (Github, Slack), and is not Jira. (shudders)
cloverich 7y ago
I used it at my last company before the JIRA brigade took over, and I"m pushing it at my current gig. My typical JIRA cycle goes like: I use a simple PM tool. PM's insist on JIRA, because "features". PM's can't figure out how to do simple things (because JIRA). PM gives me admin rights. I quit. That was my last three companies. Anyways -- Clubhouse is more limited, focused, opinionated. The UI is snappy behaves exactly like I expected as I learned it. It feels a little cluttered at times, but unlike JIRA everything seems to work in the ways I expect. It has some interesting constraints (stories belong to epics belong to milestones, so you can't put a story directly in a milestone) but overall I like it much more than JIRA. My tl;dr for Clubhouse is that (imho) most software shops would be better off using it, or something nearly identical to it, instead of opting for JIRA to turn that one knob they just can't live without. JIRA works well if you need complex workflow management and can hire people to administrate that _as their full time job_.
- igetspam 7y ago
  Not any more. New JIRA is more opinionated, less functional, slower and generally missing features while also being less intuitive. Your experts are no longer needed because there's nothing you can change. It's way worse than it used to be and the bar was already really low.
- mortonpe 7y ago
  We had a similar issue with building milestones. IMHO milestones in clubhouse are a way for a PM to interrogate the completeness of high level initiatives which are made up of epics. What was missing was the ability to organize a group of stories than span multiple epics into an iteration that the engineering team could push toward delivery. The iteration is a unit that the dev manager and team can use to track the completeness of their commitments. Recently clubhouse introduced iterations, to assist dev managers in tracking their deliverables. I have never been happier with a tool and am excited to explore their new offering.
ssalka 7y ago
I was so pleased w/ Clubhouse at one of my previous jobs that I've gotten my past 2 companies to switch to Clubhouse for project tracking (from Trello, Jira/Asana combo respectively). My current team misses required fields, but other than that, Clubhouse serves our needs very well and their support team is very responsive.
- alexfromapex 7y ago
  I just tried it and it seems pretty great. I love that it’s free and have always disliked JIRA’s pricing
fletchowns 7y ago
What are some of the reasons you hate Jira? I use it all day every day and I don't really have many complaints for it, I find it to be quite a nice tool actually.
- rpedela 7y ago
  The cloud version is extremely slow. It is buggy. Prior to the recent UI update, it was unintuitive. The new UI is better but still not great. Ironically, their UI update makes Jira more like Clubhouse.
  - fletchowns 7y ago
    I see. We host our own instance of it in AWS and performance has been quite good, it took some tuning to get it right though. I've found the UI to be fairly intuitive, other than some minor things like converting a ticket to another type is under the Move action. To me the new UI shares many similarities with the old one and I don't really have any complaints about either of them.
bendotero 7y ago
Been using it for a year after switching from JIRA. Better in every conceivable way. Better UI, quicker loading. Just all around better app.
rpedela 7y ago
One of the things I love about Clubhouse, which I believe is unique among PM tools, is that their Github integration makes it feel like I am just using Github Issues when checking in code. Other PM tools have Github integrations too, but I haven't found one that is as seamless.
sickcodebruh 7y ago
Been using it for a few years and I love it. I started using it after everyone around me revolted against Pivotal, which they felt was too opinionated about how they should work. Clubhouse, by comparison, fit in a lot better for the people who weren’t developers. I only worked somewhere that used Jira very briefly but I remember finding it extremely over built and enterprisey. Clubhouse is the polar opposite of those things.
invisiblea 7y ago
We (a small 5-7 person digital agency juggling multiple active projects) have been using Clubhouse for the last couple of years after outgrowing Trello and finding Jira too complex. It's flexible, fast, good app integration and has a responsive support team. We recommend it. Future wish list would be: - Per Project User access, so we could invite clients into just their project. - Harvest (or similar) time tracking integration, so we can see how long we spent on "stories"

nerdbaggy 7y ago

The market is so ripe for somebody to take over the Confluence market. I need a documentation platform that has the WYSIWYG aspects like Confluence, be overall less terrible, and can support global replication. I can’t find anything like it for toughly the same price point.

duncan-donuts 7y ago
What do you mean by global replication? Like if I publish something in New York it should be immediately accessible in Tokyo?
- nerdbaggy 7y ago
  Doesn’t really matter what consistency level is picked. We have offices in US, South America, and Australia. Right now every single query has to come back to a central point, which isn’t great for latency. It doesn’t even need to be multi master since 99% of our page views are reads only.
  - duncan-donuts 7y ago
    Got it. That’s what I thought you meant but wasn’t sure in this context.
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Can’t you just run it through a cdn somehow?
  - davidjgraph 7y ago
    Like https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/use-a-cdn-with-atlassian-data-center-applications-974378840.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/use-a-cdn-w... , for example.
AlphaSite 7y ago
I don’t know if it meets all your checkboxes, but Notion is _amazing_.

mmastrac 7y ago

Clubhouse is one of the better kanban/agile-ish tools I've used. It's pretty responsible, generally fast, and overall configurable enough for me to be happy.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

thuylun2412 7y ago

good

dragonsh 7y ago

Our startup is one of the happy users of self-hosted Taiga [1] [2], it is much better than a combination of Jira and confluence. It has all the features and much more with both a complete open source and SaaS offering. It supports both "scrum" and kanban style development with card layout which rivals trello. It features many importers, integrations and provides an open API to build new one's easy. Depending on the company's policy it can be deployed in their own environment, cloud of their choice or just sign up for SaaS. It has a beautiful interface with PWA and mobile apps on app store using its API, by other developers. [1] https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/ [2] https://github.com/taigaio https://github.com/taigaio

mgkimsal 7y ago
gotta say I found 'taiga' confusing as hell. I eventually found a small pale grey floppy disk image (on white background) as the magic thing to click when typing in comments. That alone cost far more vs any benefit I had using taiga. Perhaps the folks who set it up for me to use chose a weird theme?
- dragonsh 7y ago
  Yes possible they choose something. We have been using it for quite some time. It also server as an example how to build a nice single page progressive web app for the team. Although we don't use coffeescript, its' nice implemention. Also there design assets [1] are also open source, so indeed if your team wants can change those minor icons or other details. [1] https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-design https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-design
udkl 7y ago
dragonsh, are you affiliated with Taiga ? I remember seeing you post a similar comment when I looked at the zepel thread this weekend.... or are you just a satisfied customer ?
- dragonsh 7y ago
  No I am not an affiliate of Taiga. In our startup we use self-hosted Taiga. We neither subscribed or paid to Taiga. Their system helped us and served as one example of a beautiful API based app. So as my startup don't pay anything to Taiga. I feel this is the least I can do, if my evangelism can help them indirectly. Open source is built on community which works when everyone returns or contribute back in some way. This I thought is one way, I feel better. Although once my startup becomes bigger I would like to contribute code and enhancement to it. But at least this small thing makes me feel bit better, otherwise I will feel like a leecher. Indeed I and my team do the same for other parts we use like kallithea-scm, mercurial, many python, golang libraries, obviously Linux, postgresql and other infrastructure software.

daigoba66 7y ago

Once upon a time I liked Jira, and most of the products shipped by Atlassian. While Jira has large admin overhead, it can be configured to make things simple for users. And I still think most hatred of Jira ought to be directed at management for imposing bureaucracy and control through the tool, instead of the tool itself (I see this first hand as my current gig has grown from “startup” to “enterprise” in a few short years). But Atlassian has made a lot of questionable product decisions over the last many years, mostly in terms of UI/UX. What were once very much developer-centric interfaces are now geared to general enterprise product management. Somehow it’s becoming _less_ functional over time with each major revision.

foolfoolz 7y ago
i’ve used jira for nearly a decade and seen it grow over that time. i’ve worked in orgs that embraced it, made it a central part of business process workflows, and therefore paid super close attention to making it usable for the company. i’ve worked at places where it was a simple backlog tracker. i think jira is a best in class tool for the way it is customizable. the ui has changed over the years but not greatly. the rolling and apis have gotten much better. but the way different teams even at the same company can use the same tool is extremely impressive. i think people who say it’s over complicated and bloated are correct, but at a certain size the workaround for that is multiple competing tools. one team on trello. another on pivotal. and that’s a much worse experience.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  I have been on teams where an obscene amount of time was spent discussing Jira. Not "how should we do things?" but "how should we do things on Jira?" where it was abundantly obvious that using Jira compared to literally anything else was worse. We could have hired someone full time and paid quite well to sit on a stool and move post-its around on a wall and it would have been better, faster, and cheaper. Jira is fine when you have whole teams of people whose entire job it is to care about things like Jira who make it good enough for the engineers to be generally disinterested, but it is toxic for small companies, especially those which contain certain personalities or just inexperience. You get sucked in to endless discussions and revisions (which generally make things worse) of your Jira process with this idea that when you make it perfect work will be so much better but the result is a Sisyphean engineering team spending ever more time rolling the Jira rock over the hill. There are a lot of cases where one guy with a pad of paper or some sticky notes on a wall (or literally nothing) are much better than Jira, but Jira is one of those cargo cult things people do because they are supposed to and it doesn't seem to add value unless you ignore any customization and just leave it or you have massive resources to put to developing and maintaining the process.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

I don't see why anyone couldn't unseat Atlassian. JIRA and Confluence are moderately difficult problems to solve, but it's not impossible to create a lean competitor with a small team and some funding. Winning the war will be identifying a reason for companies to switch. There has to be something particularly painful enough with existing solution to help facilitate conversion. On the opposing side: maybe it's an easier sell to know a business uses Atlassian tools (from a talent acquisition perspective). If you were hiring engineers and told them you used SVN instead of Git for version control, maybe it just makes the role less marketable. "Another tool I have to learn", one could think.

ianwalter 7y ago
It's been my experience that developers care much more about the user/developer experience than having to learn another tool but then again I've spent more time working in startups than I have working for large companies.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I've accepted the obviously flawed UI for what it is. Instead of being able to move an issue from one backlog to another via the Edit modal (where you can edit virtually every piece of information about the issue), you have to click the "More" dropdown, then "Move". I used JIRA for three years before I knew that. I hope somebody from Atlassian sees this comment.
Noumenon72 7y ago
Migrating Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud has taken so much time and support that it would take a strong company to handle migrating out. Of course there are specialists in this migration process, whom I maybe should have hired. As an engineer, I love Confluence, every business I've interviewed with has used it, and I'd be slightly worried about how a company survives without it. I don't care about Jira, except for how it works with Bitbucket.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago

sdrothrock 7y ago

@dang (Though I don't know if these @tags even help you search for these kinds of comments?) The original title is "Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool and free version of its project management platform", I'm not sure if it changed or was editorialized here. I thought it was interesting that the HN title ("Jira competitor Clubhouse launches free plan, Confluence competitor") emphasizes Jira (to frame Clubhouse).

ineedasername 7y ago
Yeah, the TC headline is still the more neutral version. There was definitely some heavy spin by the poster who, no coincidence, is one of the founders. Unfortunate they chose to come on to the HN scene by violating one of the community guidelines.
wglb 7y ago
To get 'dangs attention, check the contact button at the bottom of the page: hn@ycombinator.com
dang 7y ago
Ok, we've replaced that with a shortened version of the original title. Thanks!

somebodythere 7y ago

It's also free for small teams now, which I think is a great change.

slider_thor 7y ago

I really want to see a Jira competitor succeed, it's healthy to have some competition. But it's hard to find something that competes on the per-user price of Jira Software On-Premise. (Jira Cloud is a different story...too many reports of slowness, too many UI/UX changes, too many powerful add-ons do not work on Cloud). Next, you have to be the system of record for a company. To do that, everyone needs a license. Jira has a foot-hold because it is used for developers and for every other facet of a business (basically all company ticketing). Although Jira sacrificed ease-of-use by offering customization, it's also what allows orgs to skip buying other tools.

rolleiflex 7y ago

The thing I don’t like about these tools is that they all imply a core, unspoken taskmaster in the form of a project manager assigning tasks and then chases people down for it, and their whole paradigm is built around that. The future of workplace collaboration is not in the structured silos like these that are shaped based on project managers’ demands - it arises from the engineers doing the actual work. JIRA, Confluence and its ilk can work for a team where software engineers are replaceable - in fact, one of their main goals is to make them so - but in a startup team, trying to apply this usually leads to people quitting for a better startup. Probably rightfully so. Full disclosure, I work on a tool (https://aether.app https://aether.app) that does a more organic async collaboration between engineers than explicit task-based project management, so I’m biased.

jadbox 7y ago
So Aether is basically "Reddit but for teams", as the page implies. Sounds great actually- I'll give it a spin and reply with my thoughts later.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  Yes, you got that right. If you’d like to try it, hit me up, happy to answer questions. (email at profile)
  - jadbox 7y ago
    If you don't mind, could you provide your thoughts on how it differs from Zulip? From a 10,000 foot view, they seem similar, but I don't have experience with either yet (but I'll let you know if we have time this week to check it out!)
prepend 7y ago
Aether seems nice, but I’ve never had a “credit card necessary for trial” work out. I understand the downsides to the company for trying to collect this info, but I’m not willing to risk credit card hell even if you super pinkie promise not to be a jerk. Too many jerks made similar promises and then were jerks. The pricing seems high for what it is. $10/month is not a lot, but compared to the value derived is quite a bit. Especially since the cost of such a service to operate should be extremely low. This would be cool to bundle into something, but if this is a great tool spending $300/month on top of all our other stuff for medium sized team doesn’t compute. I’ll likely use the existing crappy IM that’s already in place but drastically less cost. I suppose that the value of productivity gained would be worth $300, but the cost of service aspect doesn’t fee right to me. If I buy a book that teaches me a technique that boosts my productivity I don’t want to pay $10/month for the rest of my life. All that being said the tool looks great and the design is very considerate. I will keep an eye out for any improvements or if the software goes OSS or Microsoft buys you and bundles it with some azure thing.

nevster 7y ago

We've just spent a good half hour or so trying this out. It has a snappy interface but in some respects it's very heavy - ie in the number of clicks needed to do anything. The main one for us is estimating. We want to be able to go through a list of stories and edit the estimates. The fact that the table of stories isn't editable means we have to open up the dialog for each story to edit the estimate. As a comparison, we're currently using Airtable for some projects and Notion for others. In both of those, you can do that. Also the ability to add our own fields to stories is something we use quite a bit. Otherwise it's pretty nice.

woutr_be 7y ago
One of our frustrations with Jira is that estimates are only editable in your backlog or active sprint. We often open stories in different tabs, and constantly have to switch back to the backlog in order to add/update the estimate. I can't believe why nobody has implemented in both screens.
- enra 7y ago
  The in the tool we are building (https://linear.app https://linear.app), you can just hit shift+e to estimate in backlog/active/sprint and in the issue view. (https://cl.ly/81b9a29734dd https://cl.ly/81b9a29734dd) You can actually do all actions for the issue just using the keyboard on any list/board view or issue view.
- flipchart 7y ago
  Have you added the field to the issue screen? By default it's not there, and if there's no points, it won't show unless you click the edit button. But I use Jira and can edit estimates on the issue screen
andrewchilds 7y ago
(Co-founder here) Great feedback, thank you! We do have bulk editing (to update many stories at once to the same value) and an ability to update properties in Epics table views, but not Story table views. Your use case makes total sense. We’ll add your feedback to our internal Story for this feature, and if you’d like, we’d be happy to let you know if this ends up being built.

jesterson 7y ago

I have chosen Clubhouse as our main project management platform around 8 months ago and never regretted since then. It was adapted almost flawlessly to out internal processes and procedures. Can't recommend it enough if you're considering PM system

Corrado 7y ago

My team and I was just discussing the Atlassian toolset and how someone should give them some serious competition. Some of the things we are looking for are: markdown support, one place to keep everything (text, xlsx, images, PDFs, etc.), and a shared "whiteboard". We're currently using Confluence and between the lousy support, terrible editing, and the fact that you have to install plugins to get any real functionality it's getting harder and harder to write that check every month. We looked at Clubhouse a couple of months ago, and while we all liked the look of it the project manager decreed that it didn't have enough integrations, specifically ProductBoard, PipeDrive, Confluence. It looks like that Confluence integration isn't needed since Clubhouse will have it's own "wiki". Nice! If we could get ProductBoard and PipeDrive working I think we would switch tomorrow. Especially if there was a shared whiteboard offering. In fact, our remote guys are in the office this week for meetings and the other quarterly things and one of the main discussions was a shared whiteboard. We've tried several in the past, as well as other tools (ie. Lucidcharts) but it never really worked for us. I'm excited to give Clubhouse a try and see if it solves our problem.

cyberferret 7y ago

We've been using (self hosted) Phabricator here for a while on our bootstrapped SaaS project. Been looking at Clubhouse with interest. Anyone here switched from Phabricator to Clubhouse that can give some feedback on the process? I really love Phabricators code review and Git repo management, as well as the secrets management within it. The 'Herald' workflow rules tool is also great, and I am hoping that Clubhouse can duplicate this functionality?

nathan_f77 7y ago

I switched to Clubhouse recently, and it's been great! I still use Trello for personal/founder tasks, but Clubhouse is really great for software development projects.

tomrandle 7y ago

We switched from Trello to Clubhouse 3 years ago - having dabbled with JIRA a few times. We'd outgrown Trello (not enough structure) but didn't want to give up on the speed / ease of moving and updating cards. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-team-moved-from-trello-to-clubhouse-b1422e6a2c60 https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-tea.... This seems like a sensible move to grow usage - interested to see how it helps!

Michielvv 7y ago

I really like Clubhouse, but I'm somewhat skeptical about the free version. (even though it says 'free forever') In the past two years multiple companies that initially had an affordable plan ( 10 dollars a month or less) for small companies had the same strategy: change the affordable plan to a free plan. And then within a year kill 90% of the features on the free plan and have you upgrade to a full plan much more expensive than the plan you were on before everything became free. The product is great though, main feature for me is the ability to plan epics at a milestone level.

udkl 7y ago
I don't know why but many project management tools these days do not have a milestone section. Do teams these days not use milestones as a time box for significant feature delivery ?
- Michielvv 7y ago
  Yes, before we were using clubhouse someone was doing high-level planning in an Excel/Google docs. A few months later and even marketing is starting to use clubhouse and the milestone planning. I think it really helps to not have 30 different unrelated stories to work on but plan them at an epic level so at least the things you are working on are related. Even for things that are not really an epic I now tend to group related features together in an epic to make it easier to keep track and plan. (e.g. grouping 10 minor UX improvements together in one Q3 UX fixes epic)

atemerev 7y ago

For me, the UI looks perfectly right, thank you. I will try running it for a week and see how it goes.

mister_hn 7y ago

I hope they give also a offline installer as well

pbowyer 7y ago

We trialled Clubhouse 6 months ago, but didn't find it a good fit for us. After another 3, we settled on ClickUp https://clickup.com/ https://clickup.com/ and have been very happy. Our clients even use it and they _love_ it. So much so that one has now adopted it internally.

batesy 7y ago
I installed ClickUp over the weekend to give it a whirl, but it seems like managing sub-projects is difficult. I have multiple projects on the go for each of my clients, and I couldn't figure out how to go more than one level deep. Any tips? It otherwise looks awesome.

pyritschard 7y ago

This is great news. At Exoscale we are now using Clubhouse but keep tracking product descriptions and design documents + ADRs outside of it. Tying these to the in-flight epics would be a very welcome change. One can only hope it will remain engineer friendly and allow for reviews and good text formats.

dgllghr 7y ago

I put together a custom visualization of our projects in a format that I thought made a lot of sense. My wife, who is a mechanical engineer, took one look at it and said “that’s a Gantt chart.” I have been hooked on Gantt charts ever since, and I wish that software engineering tools would embrace and integrate Gantt charts.

zild3d 7y ago
Asana recently added "Timelines" which are gantt charts. Haven't used though, as I'm on the free tier [0] https://luna1.co/3fa273.png https://luna1.co/3fa273.png [1] https://asana.com/product/timeline https://asana.com/product/timeline

bachmeier 7y ago

Nice to see that there's a free plan. I'd be really happy to give it a try if free plans meant something. As if to prove the point, ClickUp just sent an email trying to force an upgrade. The thing about a free plan is that you put all your data into their walled garden, teach everyone else how to use it, and then you have a limited time to move to something else once they decide it's time to squeeze you. They have nothing to lose. If someone doesn't want to pay, it's good to push them away, and if they do pay, the money is just as good whether the customer hates them or not. The ClickUp announcement has all the usual "features": - The free plan will be available forever. - This is necessary for the free plan to be sustainable. - We're happy to give you a short-term discount to make the upgrade less painful. Sorry to say it, but this offer from Clubhouse will be no different. They're in business to make money, and once you start relying on it, they'll pull the rug out from under you the same as pretty much every other company.

somada141 7y ago

First off really glad with the move to allow small teams to really try the software for free until they grow organically. Kudos to Clubhouse. I've been using Trello for my 2-person team but the closer we're getting to an initial launch the more we've been missing the abstractions more complex pieces of software like JIRA offer, e.g., Epics, Milestones, issue-linking, issue-types, etc. I'm not saying Trello can't make up for that with proper usage of labels, lists, and powerups, but having been working with JIRA and Fogbugz for over a decade it's hard to change our way of thinking. So I though I'd give Clubhouse and this free offering was the push I needed. FYI the tool under https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-clubhouse.io https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-clubhouse.io does a pretty job of helping import existing Trello boards/cards but there's not 1-1 mapping so some cleanup will be required after the import.

afarviral 7y ago

Just in the process of trying to convert my team from Trello. Clubhouse addresses many of the issues we have: - Has functional groups (e.g. Reporting, ITSM Admin) while retaining functional stages (e.g. Todo, Delivery etc). – this is a big one for me as we have to use a workaround involving labels in trello - In-depth reporting - Ability to mark a card as officially completed without archiving it - Umbrella projects known as “epics” so you can encapsulate very large projects and have multiple cards (known as stories) for one big piece of work - Ability to assign “tasks” to people within cards, and they can see these tasks in their dashboard - Markdown formatting within tasks within stories, rather than just the description like in trello - “Free forever”, for up to 10 users, with the only limit being no observers – this is similar to Trello. - It doesn’t appear they charge extra for integrations of which there are many