20 ms·

Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira

406 points by iba99 6y ago

iba99 6y ago
Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lack visibility at the release level. This only gets worse with distributed teams across different time zones, and as teams outside of engineering rely on product to meet customer milestones and release dates. Currently- the tool helps run and manage tasks, requirements and sprints. With team level insights and a smart indicator for sprint planning. This is our open beta. RN Github integration is live for PRs and commits tied to sprints- we're still working on Bitbucket and Gitlab.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure Every project management software will have some reasonable defaults that can get you started in no time. The problem is that every company (and certainly any company with more than a handful of employees), at some point, will want to adjust the tool to their use case and that's where the complexity comes in. If you can't adjust things like statuses and workflows, then you'll have issues with adoption. All the best, this is an incredibly crowded and competitive scene.
  - iba99 6y ago
    This. This is what we think about, constantly. How do we maintain the low to zero config teams ask for flexibility. We are a few apple engineers on the founding team (I'm not), and they really want to follow the approach set by Mac OS. Overall, Tara won't be for everyone, but it's a fine line between balancing the intuitive simple design and use case adjustments/workflows. Could be considered a matrix with several trade-offs.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  I've never worked in a place that had 'release cycles'. Maybe it's just me, but maybe not. So I'm glad that Jira doesn't force its 'release cycle' shenanigans on me. Like with git, not being opinionated is the road to success.
  - k__ 6y ago
    Yes, sounds like something a bored project manager would "invent" to feel in control.
  - slow_donkey 6y ago
    I work at a place with mobile apps. You can't continuously release a new app update every day so a release cycle is useful for structuring when we're going to ship, when qa starts to test, and having deliverable dates in anticipation of app store/play store approvers (couple days)
- cutemonster 6y ago
  It's free and you're hiring people at the same time -- makes me wonder about your business model (or other goals?)
- bhargav 6y ago
  Do you offer tools/services to folks who want to transition off of JIRA? How painful will this be? How long would it take? How many resources will folks require? These are some questions potential buyers will have, specially if they are transitioning from a tool like JIRA and related suite of tools. It might be a good idea to capture this on the homepage.
lidHanteyk 6y ago
Hi. I worry that this sort of tool does not benefit engineering very much; in my experience, Jira and other time-management tools are used to allow product ownership and management to request ever-sillier features, while penalizing engineers who do not make themselves legible with constant status updates. When designing Tara, how did you account for the power differential between the employees who will be using Tara to record their daily work and the managers who will be using Tara to supervise said employees?
- robotron 6y ago
  I hope you've at least read the first page. It doesn't sound "like" Jira at all.
  - lidHanteyk 6y ago
    Could you explain more? Tara sounds extremely like Jira, both in form and function. The original poster (who is pointedly not answering my question, probably because it is painful and embarrassing) used "alternative to Jira" in the original submission. Other top-level comment threads are directly comparing Tara to Jira. How would you distinguish them?
    - iba99 6y ago
      Painful and embarrassing is whenever I try to ride a bike. A few quick thoughts on this: - Jira started out as an issue tracker to monitor issues and tasks - it really wasn't built to handle software projects or the SDLC from the get go. -Setting up insights and reporting can be a pain. And you need to be familiar with all the jargon (epics, stories, burn-down charts). Overall, it's a ton of cognitive overload. -I used to just manage my issues on Github vs spending time configuring Jira. I only used Jira when the corporate overloads demanded it. Here's the take on Tara vs Jira. - We're zero to low config. There are entire 60 minute videos on youtube on how to setup sprints on Jira. On Tara, it's one click. We're really focusing on minimal functionality maximum impact in terms of matrix, and seeing how we can continue to be low config as we make the platform more powerful. - Insights are ready and built- in with no setup. Once your github is connected, you can view commits and PRs by sprints - We shipped our first smart indicator- it basically looks at your past few sprints (x>1 when x is no. of sprints) and tells you if your sprint has been overloaded. We're planning on shipping more smart indicators that make suggestions around effort, etc.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
munkay 6y ago
great tool - congrats on the open beta! it wasn't immediately clear to me that the product is still in beta, and was unable to find any pricing information which threw me off. another question - is there a reason why Github isn't a support authentication method, considering that Github integration is a big part of the product? But the tool looks super interesting - going to try it out and intro it to our team!
- iba99 6y ago
  Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we believe teams shouldn’t have to be limited by user counts when deciding which project management system to use. Most are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free accounts- planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users (much like Gitlab). Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams, full fledged integrations and/or smart features such as automated sprint management. As for Github auth- that's coming!
  - yboris 6y ago
    Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users. I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project. Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.
    - iba99 6y ago
      Good idea! We definitely need a pricing page to highlight the free forever plan.
      - hanniabu 6y ago
        Another recommendation is that I see task states are To Do, Doing, and Done. It'd be nice to have a Review state as well which could be used to say it's ready for either code review or QA. This could also end up being a runaway train so it may be better invest time in allowing the user to specify up to x (3?) amount of additional custom states.
beart 6y ago
Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  Well, we happen to have a world-ending event on deck right now, I assume at least some orgs might be interested in something free with a similar feature set to Jira... (of course, if it wasn't also sadistically hard to use and configure that'd be a plus).
- iba99 6y ago
  Does a pandemic count? JK. Frankly- RN we're more optimized for smaller teams. We lack the admin/user control and SAML functionality that Jira has for larger teams. It should be interesting to see if new teams about to on-board Jira cloud find the heavy config and long load times annoying and consider making the switch. Majority of teams (for now) switch from Notion for sprints, Trello or Asana.
- rexpop 6y ago
  > I work at a large company... it would take a world ending event to move. What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues" and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough political capital to make unilateral changes in the working lives of your underlings? How much does your individual organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are you, rather, content to let all decisions be made by higher-ups for the rest of your career? How do you suppose your peers model change? Is there any semblance of democracy? I am curious because project tracking tools seem representative of a whole class of stable, albeit local-optima that don't seem to change as often as they should, and as a company ages what changes are made seem to come increasingly from decision-makers far removed from the tools' impact on the Individual Contributor. As it's been said, "ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system."[2] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change 1. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ 2. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/
Karishma1234 6y ago
You do not have to convince me that JIRA is bad but once married to that creature it is hard to break that marriage.
siphor 6y ago
why the ai tld?
- iba99 6y ago
  Our first version (which failed miserably) was a prediction-only product with no workflow and a minimal interface. Here's what happened: - Initially our hypothesis was we could build data models that automatically suggested a specification or tasks based on certain criteria the user identified (for e.g. iOS app for video based calling). - The system would suggest programming languages, frameworks and a set of tasks based on the criteria - User would immediately reject the suggestions/predictions outright (even if they were based collectively on data from stack overflow and other platforms). This would be due to a number of reasons: 1) Didn't trust the ML models to make the right predictions 2) The predictions were their first interaction with the platform. As a result- we went back to the drawing board- and realized that to build a true "smart" project management system, we would need to start with intuitive workflows, and pepper in predictions over time based on usage and a team's actual stats. The AI tld stuck, plus we're planning on bringing the ML models to our public version soon. TBD. We also plan on using NLP for automatic task connect to Git repos/PRs/commits and ML for predictions around effort estimates. But - we're still some time away from the open beta on making that a reality. P.S. We recently acquired the tara.com domain which took 2 years of negotiations. A story for another time.
  - adrianmsmith 6y ago
    Do tell us the story of the tara.com domain negotiation some time!
juandazapata 6y ago
I couldn't find the pricing anywhere in the site.
- pc86 6y ago
  It says "free" twice, in colored CTA buttons, in the first ~150px or so.
  - chme 6y ago
    Well it doesn't look like there is a non-profit organization behind it, so someone has to pay for that somehow. Is it support, ads or information?
    - pj_mukh 6y ago
      Saw this earlier[1], looks like they are working on enterprise features for larger teams, which will be paid. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-ai#comment-1029087 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-ai#comment-1029087
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Yeah, and that makes it look like a lead generation button intended to get me to try the thing before I realize that the Free version won't quite suit my needs. I don't really care if it's a "pricing" page or not. The question you need to answer before I try you product is "what am I not getting by using the free version?" If there's an enterprise version in the works, tease me a little and "Coming soon" a bunch of enterprise-y features in a feature table. Just don't make me give you my email address, go through a confirmation flow, try out the product, and then tell me "if you need more than 1 user, click here to give us your CC".
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    There's no such thing as "free" forever, especially if something is not even Free Software/Open source to begin with.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
yoz-y 6y ago
Congrats on shipping the beta. One thing that strikes me is that while you present your product as alternative to Jira, both the name and the logo (bluish form looking like an A) hint at Atlassian and Jira.
cooperadymas 6y ago
How closely is it coupled with Github / Github issues? Would it work as a replacement for something like Zenhub, which is mostly just a facade over Github's own interface? Can you still add replies to issues directly in Github or do you have to do it in Tara? I would love to replace Zenhub, but almost every other tool would require us moving some key functionality out of Github. We still want to keep all of our issues, estimates, labels, and planning in Github's native issues, while also having some advanced planning and sprint features.
- derektwong 6y ago
  Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can import any open GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you update the corresponding the Tara task, the corresponding GitHub issues are also updated, so you can certainly keep using the GitHub issues. The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a much better way of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate any blindspots on PRs getting stale. I'd encourage you to give it a go and try it out to see if it works with your teams workflows.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?
    - puppybits 6y ago
      We still have a lot of rapid development to have self-hosted at this time.
    - xellisx 6y ago
      A link for us lazy folks https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ I've been wanting set this up to play with, but not much free time. We use Kira and Bitbucket cloud at work and they suck.
  - sngz 6y ago
    does it work with gitlab?
pj_mukh 6y ago
We've been using Tara for a while now. As a smaller team, we never had good luck with the hyper-complexities of JIRA, we were stuck with Trello (and/or a simple Notion Kanban board) for a while. But Tara's really worked the best for us. I personally, really like the personal dashboard for every developer on the team, flagging all your main tickets, PR's, and your teammates commits. I'm hoping for awesome things here.
- qznc 6y ago
  That sounds like a more realistic description than "alternative to Jira". Jira is an Enterprise product which means it is designed to tick every feature checkbox any company could ever wish for. It integrates with whatever (Enterprise) ecosystem is around it. Tara sounds like "once you have outgrown Trello".
  - nerdbaggy 6y ago
    I think it’s kinda the opposite. It seems like Jira/Confluence doesn’t really do much on its own. Anything semi complex you need plugins.
- 2pointsomone 6y ago
  We have also been really eager to try Tara at our company. Everyone who tries it says this is wayyy better than Trello, Asana, and Monday. Glad to hear it's worked well for you.
- stinos 6y ago
  the hyper-complexities of JIRA Apparently Atlassian was aware that most customers didn't need all of that so these days they are rolling out 'next gen' projects where one of the incentives was apparently to expose less configuration and make things less complex. The setup of a such a project is now a couple of clicks and the defaults seem pretty sane.
jimbob45 6y ago
As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this industry. We make things far more complicated than they need be. It's all just ticketing software with labels changed and I just want a list of all the tickets for me to manually filter. I'm tired of companies thinking I don't know the best way to see the tickets I want to see.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  I'm personally not a fan of ticket systems in general. They're often abused and simply turn into the worst kind of micromanagement and pressuring tools instead of simply acting as a tool for project management complexity. I'm not against these tools in theory (though Jira is a bit convoluted and overly complex for most simple projects) but I am against how they're widely adopted and abused in practice by businesses to enable terrible internal development cultures or perverse development strategies. These are the types of tools that when abused, lead to swaths of developers working 50, 60, 70+ hour weeks and burning out. I'd say they're more frequently abused than they are used as aides.
- wx196 6y ago
  This is an exact reason why I decided to make another task management tool (recently showed here on HN), where you can simply create tickets, assign tags and get everything filtered. I would highly appreciate feedback if you decide to try it. https://treenga.com/ https://treenga.com/
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I made this for Jira. It just ingests all the issues in the project, and displays them in a big list, sorted by a variety of factors (is it assigned to me? Is it in progress?). It generally allows me to just go down the list of issues until there’s nothing left unfinished. At some point I realized that there’s just no stopping enterprise from going to use Jira, so it’s better to work around it.
  - Jolter 6y ago
    Can you show us what you made?
pritambarhate 6y ago
Does it allow to export all the user entered data in structured format? So that moving out of it is easier if we don't like whatever pricing you guys decide later?
Terretta 6y ago
It’s a nice looking tool, but the marketing feels oh so very Enterprise Agile(tm) in ethos. “Run your weekly sprints on time” — as opposed to them taking two weeks? To achieve predictability, something has to give. It’s usually “learning” which is never on the plan. The next release will be done when the right top priorities are met well enough. When’s that? You decide by prioritizing how many priorities are in the release and your bar on quality. Focus on execution? Why not on building the right thing, and building the thing right? The thing to manage isn’t tasks, requirements, and sprints. The thing to manage is: “Is this team effective, enough to be trusted?” Meanwhile, a week takes a week.
- lifebeyondfife 6y ago
  As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimate for the former is more reliable. Likewise the estimate of what you can achieve is more reliable in a one week sprint than a two week sprint. Being able to break fully deployable commits into smaller chunks (up to three days coding time) is a skill that gets better with practice. But sometimes you just don't know how long something will take because it needs breaking down and investigating. One week sprints are ideal for timeboxing investigations; here the output isn't software but discrete software tasks that fit in a one week sprint. Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability and predictability. Sprint planning tools when used appropriately don't constrain engineers, but rather highlight the truth of how things are going.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    Sorry, teams can't be only devs. That's IT or something, and implies that tech isn't the business. Team has to include 'the business', as in, voice of customer, features lens, in those tradeoff prioritizations along with what do we engineer, and what's the truth of where we are on the field, for delivering what satisfies the customer and our constraints. // Hat tip Rands in Repose. As for "Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability and predictability" that's precisely the characterization I reject. Accountability means you earn your keep by being effective. Predictability, well, milestones come and go, the software gets used forever. That's the predictability needed, which goes right back to effectiveness. You won't magic either of those in a Jira.
m1sta_ 6y ago
On premise option?
- borkyborkbork 6y ago
  This is key for us.
  - iba99 6y ago
    Not yet - we're focusing on delivering other features related to task lifecycle, teams and integrations.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  As long as it’s not on-premise, it’s not a Jira alternative.
cryptos 6y ago
What is the business model?
- macspoofing 6y ago
  What else can it be? Per-user/month subscription. Probably free initially.
mehmehmehmehhem 6y ago
I'm getting double flickers on some pages like https://tara.ai/about/ https://tara.ai/about/. I'd totally switch over if there was a JIRA importer tool. I've used JIRA for years and would love something similar with a faster and less confusing UI.
sideproject 6y ago
I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA". What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is? We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just get on with actual work. But I must be missing something - some market research, some user research where there is a big unmet need or problem that none of these tools are currently solving and not just in "missing a feature" way, but at a fundamental level where it justifies an entrepreneur to jump in and create an entire software from scratch. I'm not in the domain, so I obviously don't have the data. I know lots of people complain about JIRA (including me), but my complaints don't warrant me to move. Maybe these companies are targeting "new" users? New companies, new teams, people who are starting projects anew and looking for project management software?
- Firehawke 6y ago
  My immediate thoughts are "Yeah, it's working well for you, but I imagine there are considerable numbers of people out there who aren't happy with the existing systems and want something different to fit a different workflow" It's like a Git client. Sure, you can do it right from the commandline, but some people want something a little different-- and that's why you get clients like GitKraken with different ways of visualizing things.
- strokirk 6y ago
  I've tried 8+ different task tracking systems (though never Jira), and each has had it's merits, but has always been some critical feature missing for me. Be that custom metrics for sorting, performance, looks or something else. So I'm still shopping around.
- alexmingoia 6y ago
  They keep popping up because ticket/todo-list software is a perfect medium for people to project their aspirations for success. People believe if they use that software they will accomplish their goals.
all_iv 6y ago
congrats on the release! I tried a little bit and this looks nice. I like the focus on agile workflow so that people can quickly evaluate whether this is suitable for them. Liking it so far! although I seem to have a problem searching for task inside my requirement details
- iba99 6y ago
  Sorry to hear! Can you elaborate on the issue?
  - all_iv 6y ago
    creating several tasks -> creating requirement -> go to requirement details -> search task -> no loading progress and/or result visible :)
jowdones 6y ago
>> Tara, a smart [...] alternative to Jira If someone there were smart, they would have named it Tira.
rawoke083600 6y ago
Well done for getting your project out there ! I'm sure its great. I've commented on this in the past. This is what I want from my "ticketing-software": -I don't want 100 ways todo things or configure a ticketing tool... -Sell me the BEST "Software Development PROCESS" with a tool. -Don't give me a "Great Ticketing-System" ! I want to know what is the fastest, best process to develop software and track it. All of "these ticketing software" starts with "track , manage , assign tickets" but leave the process up to you... I want to buy an EXPERT PROCESS not a REALLY GREAT TICKET TOOL with x10 options. I always use the example of the "ultra high-end amplifiers" they don't come with a "Tone-Control" because these companies are THE BEST... my ears can never be better than their in-house "mozart-prodigy-tuning-expert". Why would I soil my ears by thinking I can better adjust the "tone" of the amplifier that cost $500k :/ I'm buy FANTASTIC SOUND... not a great amplifier with 100 ways to get good sound. Sorry rant over.. So... Sell me a GREAT SOFTWARE PROCESS - if it comes with software and a ticketing system... so be it. But make sure the software supports the process and I don't want to configure anything but user accounts :) Sorry for all the caps... don't flame me :)
- devdas 6y ago
  The "best" process is one that fits your business context. The "best" sound system is worthless if the acoustics of the room it is in aren't upto it.
- ragebol 6y ago
  Things is: different teams/products/companies/... require different processes. There is no one size fits all.
- ozim 6y ago
  But that is just you sadly. I am working on SaaS solution in different area. We would LOVE to sell our approach to the problem but then you start getting big customers... Guess what, each one of them wants this changed that different color, "tasks" should be named "todos" or whatever. Then everything has to have customization options because next customer contact changes mind and the other one is leaving company. For now our sales reps do loads of configuration for those big customers, but yeah you have to have big bucks to have sales rep do config tailored for you.
westoque 6y ago
Not sure if it's only me. But there's some funky funky things happening on that frontend. There's a white modal that covers that whole screen that pops out at every page load.
- iba99 6y ago
  Any chance you can share a link to a screenshot and the console log? Appreciate it.
ko3us 6y ago
This looks great! Any plans for Gitlab integration?
- iba99 6y ago
  Next on our roadmap!
egorfine 6y ago
I have just tried it and after planning a small sprint for my team I loved it immediately. I'd absolutely love to give it a go at my company. I want an on-premise version.
- iba99 6y ago
  What would be your biggest hurdle for adoption for a web-based version?
im_dario 6y ago
Kudos for the release! This comment might seem counterintuitive, but I think Tara's adoption would grow a lot if you offer a way to sync or import from JIRA. JIRA sprint planning is painful. In my current company, we use it, and its shortcomings shape our way of working. I.e., not able to link histories' subtasks to a sprint, causing that the backlog is full of long histories, and you need to go looking around to see how the histories are going. If we were able to sync epics and histories (JIRA <-> Tara), we could probably have the better of both worlds. I see Tara very focused on devs, but not all JIRA users are devs. For instance, how would critical bugs - reported by users - be handled in Tara? I imagine this synchronization as bidirectional, where you write the specs as a list in JIRA's issue description, but they are actionable in Tara. So no more subtasks in JIRA and Tara become a complementary tool that, once you are used to it, you can go with entirely standalone. Just writing this quickly, with no deep thought, but it was my very first thought after checking your website. I hope this feedback can be useful to you.
- iba99 6y ago
  Thanks! A few quick thoughts: - We've done exactly this for Github <> Tara. We have a bi-directional sync with Github issues, and active issues are converted into tasks in Tara. Basically, if a user wanted to, they could just use Tara as a Github issue tracker. - We wanted to start with Github, then work our way through more git/source control platforms, and then move to Jira. Interestingly, structuring incoming data from Jira requires a few months of work on data models IF we don't want the user to spend a ton of time labelling. Jira's data structure can be a hot mess to deal with. - If the sync took a day or even a week of configuration, would you find it worth your time to invest and go through that? Or would yo expect the sync to work instantaneously (like Github <> Tara). - What would be your expectations on mapping for histories?
  - im_dario 6y ago
    It makes sense that you started with Github. I agree too that Jira's data structure is a mess. I've managed one instance for years and any update was a whole mess on itself. I think the sync configuration should be quick, something that can be bootstrapped like Trello integration with an export artifact. About mapping for histories, it should be 1-to-1 and each spec to be a list point or a subtask. Nothing fancy nor complex if Tara is the main source of truth, leaving Jira as a way for non-tech users to report issues.
ranguna 6y ago
This is just what I was looking for! But.. How can this be free?
fenk85 6y ago
Sprint? Most of the most productive teams i know use Kanban approach which Jira does support. Any team i have been on tied to sprints has been a right clusterfeck
alkonaut 6y ago
One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never really integrate with the true workflow of developers. Once you have a development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be nice to be able to encode it into the What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on. Every place has a different workflow and they are usually very complex, but these tools (Jira, YouTrack, GitHub issues, Azure DevOps, ...) are complex. They are often configurable, yet they still (as far as I'm aware) fail to integrate the process part of things with the code part of things. At best you have some loose integration between version control and process e.g. "this ticket has these changes" but they don't integrate the two processes so that the state-machine that is a ticket (is it done? why is it not? is it because a PR build failed? Is it because an approval that must be done after merge has failed? is it because the issue has several pull requests associated with it and not all are merged yet?). I absolutely don't mind complexity in these tools. Having an extremely simple post-it process is good. This is the second best. The process complexity in big enterprises and distributed teams will always be there. If I can configure a tool to make it go away I'm glad. The worst situation is when you have a hyper complicated process and no tools to help. That's the situation many businesses are in. "You didn't mark the two fields and change the state to Y and then send the email to the translation person and notify the regional development person about the change! You have to do that".
- petepete 6y ago
  > Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on. This is my biggest peeve. Every place you have other stuff related to a project, whether it's Trello, Jira, Google Drive, O365, Miro, Confluence, Figma, Travis, CodeClimate, etc etc etc, it's just another ever-increasing set of things to try to keep in sync and up to date. It makes onboarding new members way more difficult and make everything slower, more frustrating and more error-prone.
- contravariant 6y ago
  I haven't really used it but with Youtrack you can apply arbitrary commands to your ticket from a github commit. And I can certify that Youtrack is ridiculously configurable. As in "execute arbitrary code when a ticket is updated" configurable. Both of these features are maybe a bit too powerful (especially together), but they do enable any particular workflow you want.
antigirl 6y ago
Performance for me is very poor; the app is very unresponsive - you should consider optimistic UI updates. Im based out in Asia at the moment so its the server latency im assuming?
- iba99 6y ago
  Yep. We still have some server latency- no optimistic loads just yet.
- syed99 6y ago
  It's a mix of both latency and lack of optimistic updates. We're working on improving our front-end at the moment and some of those improvements relate to optimistic loads and improvements on redux that go in every week.
cyrialize 6y ago
I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my decision to make. Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to make me mad. Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts, like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new editor! This new editor has none of the markdown-ish shortcuts the old editor had. Confluence is also changing it's editor and the old wiki pages do not have a 1:1 match to the new wiki pages. This means you have to go through each page, convert it, and edit it to fix the broken things - because depending on what you use, it will be broken. For example, there is no longer a note, warning, or error macro - instead it gets turned into a info macro that you have to go in and edit it to the style you previously had. Code blocks no longer let you pick the color scheme you had, instead they're all generic. There's even more here I'm not listing. Confluence has also just been wonky lately. It's supposed to automatically format a link into something nice (e.g. https://confluence/page-name https://confluence/page-name -> Page Name or https://jira/AAA-1234 https://jira/AAA-1234 -> AAA->1234) and this only happens sometimes. Other times I'm finding the page frozen or slow and the only thing that fixes it is refreshing the page or publishing the page and going back to edit it. Of course with BitBucket I dislike that they're dropping Mercurial. I understand why, but I am really going to miss it. Git is way more powerful but Mercurial is (at least to me) way easier to use and pick up. The infuriating part is that they offer no tool for converting existing repositories whatsoever. Github has a tool that will turn your BitBucket Mercurial repo into a Github repo! For any tool that aims to be an alternative to Jira / Confluence / BitBucket, please don't do what Atlassian does. If you are going to make any transitions or any major change - please make it as easy and seamless as possible for your users.
- gjvc 6y ago
  https://www.phacility.com/ https://www.phacility.com/
  - twalla 6y ago
    Having come from a JIRA/Github/Confluence setup in my previous role to a Phabricator setup in my current role, I can't believe I'm saying this but I'd give anything to have JIRA back.
red_admiral 6y ago
Literal quote from the privacy policy: > With your permission, we will collect location information from your mobile device to [insert purpose]. You may turn off this feature through the location settings on your mobile device. Maybe fix that?
- iba99 6y ago
  On it.
dotjosh 6y ago
Unless you are going open source, you might not want to ship your typescript sourceMaps in production. https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png
- c_e 6y ago
  Shipping source maps allows for better error-reporting instrumentation, and can also be a great help if you need to debug an issue you're not able to reproduce in a local or staging environment.
- maxhille 6y ago
  As long as there is no license attached, you are essentially not allowed to use it anyway.
- syed99 6y ago
  I agree sourceMaps shouldn't be exposed and they also bloat up production code. The reason we have them exposed for the time being is for debugging purposes in open beta and we intend to remove it out of production in our upcoming weekly release.
mahesh_rm 6y ago
Tara looks great, trying it out. Also, I love the clarity of the landing page. I apologize if it is off-topic: what product/tool did you use for creating the main video in landing page? Thank you!
- iba99 6y ago
  Good ol' camtasia from my video editing days! Side hustled as a Udemy instructor in 2012, and camtasia is just as good now as it was back then.
  - mahesh_rm 6y ago
    Thank you!
aarbor989 6y ago
Would love to get off JIRA but the leverage jira has over alternatives is that there are integrations for _everything_. Slack, PagerDuty, Freshdesk, etc. I wonder how long it will take Tara to get up to speed
- iba99 6y ago
  We're releasing about two integrations per month (April was trello import and Github bi-directional sync) so we should get there soon! Our speed of shipping integrations is getting faster with time however.
  - aarbor989 6y ago
    Awesome..is there anywhere I can track the integrations, like a public roadmap or something along those lines?
    - iba99 6y ago
      Ahh that's a cool idea- we really need to work on public sprint boards and actually show our weekly sprints and releases. We typically just discuss them on our twitter and our blog. Here's today's release: https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-may-1/ https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-may-1/
techcofounder 6y ago
Hey Tara team. Ben here from Armory (YC W17). Love that you are tackling this very important problem for product and eng teams. We use JIRA (surprise!) as do all of customers. I've long wished I had the time and energy to think about and maybe even tackle the challenge you are facing - building a JIRA-killer. Go forth and conquer! I would be very happy to help in any way I can!
Giorgi 6y ago
Is this self-hosted? or can custom domain be added?
- iba99 6y ago
  It's web-based.
mkchoi212 6y ago
Congrats the on beta! Just a quick question though. Seems like in the about page, you guys mention that the "platform leverages machine learning". How do Tara leverage ML? From the landing page, it was hard to see any features relevant to ML. Thanks
- iba99 6y ago
  We actually need to update our about page - it still shows copy from our older version which was a predictions only product (I also talk about this below) with ref to a question asked about our .ai TLD. We will be bringing our ML models back into the product for predictions over time. For now, we're really focusing on workflow and design as a platform.
  - mkchoi212 6y ago
    Ah gotcha. Yeah, the same situation for us over at http://getmosaic.io/ http://getmosaic.io/ Initially, we were worried that people would think we're putting "AI/ML" in the name/description just for the hype. But hopefully if the workflow/design is good enough, and the AI/ML features follow, customers should be satisfied.
    - iba99 6y ago
      Mosaic looks cool! Will give it a spin.
sjohn93 6y ago
Cool idea. We would like to feature your startup in our website, submit here: https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-startup https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-startup
solarkraft 6y ago
Oh, "free" means "free to use", not "free software". Would've been a cool feature. It also looks pretty cool otherwise, but ... does it contain "AI"? The TLD and title seem to point towards it.
HelloNurse 6y ago
Your Jira alternative is currently a better replacement for a limited but important part of Jira features: clearly only an initial, promising feature set that will be expanded and improved. But in what direction? The more technical side of software development (e.g. configuration, building and deployment of the releases)? Generic ticket handling and time tracking/accounting to expand the product's usefulness beyond specialized software product development teams? Integration with other software and processes?
- iba99 6y ago
  The key for our platform will always be simplicity. For now, the plan is to head into the technical side of software dev (Gitlab, Bitbucket and integrations with CI/CD tooling), without alienating business teams. One of the biggest issues with existing PM software is that it's purpose built for singular teams, vs providing utility to cross-functional teams (e.g. engineering and growth). And it's usually overly complex with significant configuration required. We're seeing early signs of this with requests from teams/orgs to add in marketing, growth and design teams as they need to be in the loop of releases and the overall SDLC.

406 points by iba99 6y ago

Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lack visibility at the release level. This only gets worse with distributed teams across different time zones, and as teams outside of engineering rely on product to meet customer milestones and release dates. Currently- the tool helps run and manage tasks, requirements and sprints. With team level insights and a smart indicator for sprint planning. This is our open beta. RN Github integration is live for PRs and commits tied to sprints- we're still working on Bitbucket and Gitlab.

macspoofing 6y ago
>most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure Every project management software will have some reasonable defaults that can get you started in no time. The problem is that every company (and certainly any company with more than a handful of employees), at some point, will want to adjust the tool to their use case and that's where the complexity comes in. If you can't adjust things like statuses and workflows, then you'll have issues with adoption. All the best, this is an incredibly crowded and competitive scene.
- iba99 6y ago
  This. This is what we think about, constantly. How do we maintain the low to zero config teams ask for flexibility. We are a few apple engineers on the founding team (I'm not), and they really want to follow the approach set by Mac OS. Overall, Tara won't be for everyone, but it's a fine line between balancing the intuitive simple design and use case adjustments/workflows. Could be considered a matrix with several trade-offs.
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
I've never worked in a place that had 'release cycles'. Maybe it's just me, but maybe not. So I'm glad that Jira doesn't force its 'release cycle' shenanigans on me. Like with git, not being opinionated is the road to success.
- k__ 6y ago
  Yes, sounds like something a bored project manager would "invent" to feel in control.
- slow_donkey 6y ago
  I work at a place with mobile apps. You can't continuously release a new app update every day so a release cycle is useful for structuring when we're going to ship, when qa starts to test, and having deliverable dates in anticipation of app store/play store approvers (couple days)
cutemonster 6y ago
It's free and you're hiring people at the same time -- makes me wonder about your business model (or other goals?)
bhargav 6y ago
Do you offer tools/services to folks who want to transition off of JIRA? How painful will this be? How long would it take? How many resources will folks require? These are some questions potential buyers will have, specially if they are transitioning from a tool like JIRA and related suite of tools. It might be a good idea to capture this on the homepage.

lidHanteyk 6y ago

Hi. I worry that this sort of tool does not benefit engineering very much; in my experience, Jira and other time-management tools are used to allow product ownership and management to request ever-sillier features, while penalizing engineers who do not make themselves legible with constant status updates. When designing Tara, how did you account for the power differential between the employees who will be using Tara to record their daily work and the managers who will be using Tara to supervise said employees?

robotron 6y ago
I hope you've at least read the first page. It doesn't sound "like" Jira at all.
- lidHanteyk 6y ago
  Could you explain more? Tara sounds extremely like Jira, both in form and function. The original poster (who is pointedly not answering my question, probably because it is painful and embarrassing) used "alternative to Jira" in the original submission. Other top-level comment threads are directly comparing Tara to Jira. How would you distinguish them?
  - iba99 6y ago
    Painful and embarrassing is whenever I try to ride a bike. A few quick thoughts on this: - Jira started out as an issue tracker to monitor issues and tasks - it really wasn't built to handle software projects or the SDLC from the get go. -Setting up insights and reporting can be a pain. And you need to be familiar with all the jargon (epics, stories, burn-down charts). Overall, it's a ton of cognitive overload. -I used to just manage my issues on Github vs spending time configuring Jira. I only used Jira when the corporate overloads demanded it. Here's the take on Tara vs Jira. - We're zero to low config. There are entire 60 minute videos on youtube on how to setup sprints on Jira. On Tara, it's one click. We're really focusing on minimal functionality maximum impact in terms of matrix, and seeing how we can continue to be low config as we make the platform more powerful. - Insights are ready and built- in with no setup. Once your github is connected, you can view commits and PRs by sprints - We shipped our first smart indicator- it basically looks at your past few sprints (x>1 when x is no. of sprints) and tells you if your sprint has been overloaded. We're planning on shipping more smart indicators that make suggestions around effort, etc.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

munkay 6y ago

great tool - congrats on the open beta! it wasn't immediately clear to me that the product is still in beta, and was unable to find any pricing information which threw me off. another question - is there a reason why Github isn't a support authentication method, considering that Github integration is a big part of the product? But the tool looks super interesting - going to try it out and intro it to our team!

iba99 6y ago
Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we believe teams shouldn’t have to be limited by user counts when deciding which project management system to use. Most are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free accounts- planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users (much like Gitlab). Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams, full fledged integrations and/or smart features such as automated sprint management. As for Github auth- that's coming!
- yboris 6y ago
  Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users. I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project. Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this won't collapse and be closed in a month.
  - iba99 6y ago
    Good idea! We definitely need a pricing page to highlight the free forever plan.
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Another recommendation is that I see task states are To Do, Doing, and Done. It'd be nice to have a Review state as well which could be used to say it's ready for either code review or QA. This could also end up being a runaway train so it may be better invest time in allowing the user to specify up to x (3?) amount of additional custom states.

beart 6y ago

Looks awesome and I would love to try it out. Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira + other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira, it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a product the alternative is.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Well, we happen to have a world-ending event on deck right now, I assume at least some orgs might be interested in something free with a similar feature set to Jira... (of course, if it wasn't also sadistically hard to use and configure that'd be a plus).
iba99 6y ago
Does a pandemic count? JK. Frankly- RN we're more optimized for smaller teams. We lack the admin/user control and SAML functionality that Jira has for larger teams. It should be interesting to see if new teams about to on-board Jira cloud find the heavy config and long load times annoying and consider making the switch. Majority of teams (for now) switch from Notion for sprints, Trello or Asana.
rexpop 6y ago
> I work at a large company... it would take a world ending event to move. What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues" and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough political capital to make unilateral changes in the working lives of your underlings? How much does your individual organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are you, rather, content to let all decisions be made by higher-ups for the rest of your career? How do you suppose your peers model change? Is there any semblance of democracy? I am curious because project tracking tools seem representative of a whole class of stable, albeit local-optima that don't seem to change as often as they should, and as a company ages what changes are made seem to come increasingly from decision-makers far removed from the tools' impact on the Individual Contributor. As it's been said, "ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system."[2] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change 1. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/ 2. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/

Karishma1234 6y ago

You do not have to convince me that JIRA is bad but once married to that creature it is hard to break that marriage.

siphor 6y ago

why the ai tld?

iba99 6y ago
Our first version (which failed miserably) was a prediction-only product with no workflow and a minimal interface. Here's what happened: - Initially our hypothesis was we could build data models that automatically suggested a specification or tasks based on certain criteria the user identified (for e.g. iOS app for video based calling). - The system would suggest programming languages, frameworks and a set of tasks based on the criteria - User would immediately reject the suggestions/predictions outright (even if they were based collectively on data from stack overflow and other platforms). This would be due to a number of reasons: 1) Didn't trust the ML models to make the right predictions 2) The predictions were their first interaction with the platform. As a result- we went back to the drawing board- and realized that to build a true "smart" project management system, we would need to start with intuitive workflows, and pepper in predictions over time based on usage and a team's actual stats. The AI tld stuck, plus we're planning on bringing the ML models to our public version soon. TBD. We also plan on using NLP for automatic task connect to Git repos/PRs/commits and ML for predictions around effort estimates. But - we're still some time away from the open beta on making that a reality. P.S. We recently acquired the tara.com domain which took 2 years of negotiations. A story for another time.
- adrianmsmith 6y ago
  Do tell us the story of the tara.com domain negotiation some time!

juandazapata 6y ago

I couldn't find the pricing anywhere in the site.

pc86 6y ago
It says "free" twice, in colored CTA buttons, in the first ~150px or so.
- chme 6y ago
  Well it doesn't look like there is a non-profit organization behind it, so someone has to pay for that somehow. Is it support, ads or information?
  - pj_mukh 6y ago
    Saw this earlier[1], looks like they are working on enterprise features for larger teams, which will be paid. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-ai#comment-1029087 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-ai#comment-1029087
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Yeah, and that makes it look like a lead generation button intended to get me to try the thing before I realize that the Free version won't quite suit my needs. I don't really care if it's a "pricing" page or not. The question you need to answer before I try you product is "what am I not getting by using the free version?" If there's an enterprise version in the works, tease me a little and "Coming soon" a bunch of enterprise-y features in a feature table. Just don't make me give you my email address, go through a confirmation flow, try out the product, and then tell me "if you need more than 1 user, click here to give us your CC".
- ekianjo 6y ago
  There's no such thing as "free" forever, especially if something is not even Free Software/Open source to begin with.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

yoz-y 6y ago

Congrats on shipping the beta. One thing that strikes me is that while you present your product as alternative to Jira, both the name and the logo (bluish form looking like an A) hint at Atlassian and Jira.

cooperadymas 6y ago

How closely is it coupled with Github / Github issues? Would it work as a replacement for something like Zenhub, which is mostly just a facade over Github's own interface? Can you still add replies to issues directly in Github or do you have to do it in Tara? I would love to replace Zenhub, but almost every other tool would require us moving some key functionality out of Github. We still want to keep all of our issues, estimates, labels, and planning in Github's native issues, while also having some advanced planning and sprint features.

derektwong 6y ago
Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can import any open GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you update the corresponding the Tara task, the corresponding GitHub issues are also updated, so you can certainly keep using the GitHub issues. The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a much better way of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate any blindspots on PRs getting stale. I'd encourage you to give it a go and try it out to see if it works with your teams workflows.
- techntoke 6y ago
  So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?
  - puppybits 6y ago
    We still have a lot of rapid development to have self-hosted at this time.
  - xellisx 6y ago
    A link for us lazy folks https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ I've been wanting set this up to play with, but not much free time. We use Kira and Bitbucket cloud at work and they suck.
- sngz 6y ago
  does it work with gitlab?

pj_mukh 6y ago

We've been using Tara for a while now. As a smaller team, we never had good luck with the hyper-complexities of JIRA, we were stuck with Trello (and/or a simple Notion Kanban board) for a while. But Tara's really worked the best for us. I personally, really like the personal dashboard for every developer on the team, flagging all your main tickets, PR's, and your teammates commits. I'm hoping for awesome things here.

qznc 6y ago
That sounds like a more realistic description than "alternative to Jira". Jira is an Enterprise product which means it is designed to tick every feature checkbox any company could ever wish for. It integrates with whatever (Enterprise) ecosystem is around it. Tara sounds like "once you have outgrown Trello".
- nerdbaggy 6y ago
  I think it’s kinda the opposite. It seems like Jira/Confluence doesn’t really do much on its own. Anything semi complex you need plugins.
2pointsomone 6y ago
We have also been really eager to try Tara at our company. Everyone who tries it says this is wayyy better than Trello, Asana, and Monday. Glad to hear it's worked well for you.
stinos 6y ago
the hyper-complexities of JIRA Apparently Atlassian was aware that most customers didn't need all of that so these days they are rolling out 'next gen' projects where one of the incentives was apparently to expose less configuration and make things less complex. The setup of a such a project is now a couple of clicks and the defaults seem pretty sane.

jimbob45 6y ago

As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this industry. We make things far more complicated than they need be. It's all just ticketing software with labels changed and I just want a list of all the tickets for me to manually filter. I'm tired of companies thinking I don't know the best way to see the tickets I want to see.

Frost1x 6y ago
I'm personally not a fan of ticket systems in general. They're often abused and simply turn into the worst kind of micromanagement and pressuring tools instead of simply acting as a tool for project management complexity. I'm not against these tools in theory (though Jira is a bit convoluted and overly complex for most simple projects) but I am against how they're widely adopted and abused in practice by businesses to enable terrible internal development cultures or perverse development strategies. These are the types of tools that when abused, lead to swaths of developers working 50, 60, 70+ hour weeks and burning out. I'd say they're more frequently abused than they are used as aides.
wx196 6y ago
This is an exact reason why I decided to make another task management tool (recently showed here on HN), where you can simply create tickets, assign tags and get everything filtered. I would highly appreciate feedback if you decide to try it. https://treenga.com/ https://treenga.com/
Aeolun 6y ago
I made this for Jira. It just ingests all the issues in the project, and displays them in a big list, sorted by a variety of factors (is it assigned to me? Is it in progress?). It generally allows me to just go down the list of issues until there’s nothing left unfinished. At some point I realized that there’s just no stopping enterprise from going to use Jira, so it’s better to work around it.
- Jolter 6y ago
  Can you show us what you made?

pritambarhate 6y ago

Does it allow to export all the user entered data in structured format? So that moving out of it is easier if we don't like whatever pricing you guys decide later?

Terretta 6y ago

It’s a nice looking tool, but the marketing feels oh so very Enterprise Agile(tm) in ethos. “Run your weekly sprints on time” — as opposed to them taking two weeks? To achieve predictability, something has to give. It’s usually “learning” which is never on the plan. The next release will be done when the right top priorities are met well enough. When’s that? You decide by prioritizing how many priorities are in the release and your bar on quality. Focus on execution? Why not on building the right thing, and building the thing right? The thing to manage isn’t tasks, requirements, and sprints. The thing to manage is: “Is this team effective, enough to be trusted?” Meanwhile, a week takes a week.

lifebeyondfife 6y ago
As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a weekly sprint. First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected. Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one day vs one hundred days? The estimate for the former is more reliable. Likewise the estimate of what you can achieve is more reliable in a one week sprint than a two week sprint. Being able to break fully deployable commits into smaller chunks (up to three days coding time) is a skill that gets better with practice. But sometimes you just don't know how long something will take because it needs breaking down and investigating. One week sprints are ideal for timeboxing investigations; here the output isn't software but discrete software tasks that fit in a one week sprint. Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability and predictability. Sprint planning tools when used appropriately don't constrain engineers, but rather highlight the truth of how things are going.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Sorry, teams can't be only devs. That's IT or something, and implies that tech isn't the business. Team has to include 'the business', as in, voice of customer, features lens, in those tradeoff prioritizations along with what do we engineer, and what's the truth of where we are on the field, for delivering what satisfies the customer and our constraints. // Hat tip Rands in Repose. As for "Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability and predictability" that's precisely the characterization I reject. Accountability means you earn your keep by being effective. Predictability, well, milestones come and go, the software gets used forever. That's the predictability needed, which goes right back to effectiveness. You won't magic either of those in a Jira.

m1sta_ 6y ago

On premise option?

borkyborkbork 6y ago
This is key for us.
- iba99 6y ago
  Not yet - we're focusing on delivering other features related to task lifecycle, teams and integrations.
Aeolun 6y ago
As long as it’s not on-premise, it’s not a Jira alternative.

cryptos 6y ago

What is the business model?

macspoofing 6y ago
What else can it be? Per-user/month subscription. Probably free initially.

mehmehmehmehhem 6y ago

I'm getting double flickers on some pages like https://tara.ai/about/ https://tara.ai/about/. I'd totally switch over if there was a JIRA importer tool. I've used JIRA for years and would love something similar with a faster and less confusing UI.

sideproject 6y ago

I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA". What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is? We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just get on with actual work. But I must be missing something - some market research, some user research where there is a big unmet need or problem that none of these tools are currently solving and not just in "missing a feature" way, but at a fundamental level where it justifies an entrepreneur to jump in and create an entire software from scratch. I'm not in the domain, so I obviously don't have the data. I know lots of people complain about JIRA (including me), but my complaints don't warrant me to move. Maybe these companies are targeting "new" users? New companies, new teams, people who are starting projects anew and looking for project management software?

Firehawke 6y ago
My immediate thoughts are "Yeah, it's working well for you, but I imagine there are considerable numbers of people out there who aren't happy with the existing systems and want something different to fit a different workflow" It's like a Git client. Sure, you can do it right from the commandline, but some people want something a little different-- and that's why you get clients like GitKraken with different ways of visualizing things.
strokirk 6y ago
I've tried 8+ different task tracking systems (though never Jira), and each has had it's merits, but has always been some critical feature missing for me. Be that custom metrics for sorting, performance, looks or something else. So I'm still shopping around.
alexmingoia 6y ago
They keep popping up because ticket/todo-list software is a perfect medium for people to project their aspirations for success. People believe if they use that software they will accomplish their goals.

all_iv 6y ago

congrats on the release! I tried a little bit and this looks nice. I like the focus on agile workflow so that people can quickly evaluate whether this is suitable for them. Liking it so far! although I seem to have a problem searching for task inside my requirement details

iba99 6y ago
Sorry to hear! Can you elaborate on the issue?
- all_iv 6y ago
  creating several tasks -> creating requirement -> go to requirement details -> search task -> no loading progress and/or result visible :)

jowdones 6y ago

>> Tara, a smart [...] alternative to Jira If someone there were smart, they would have named it Tira.

rawoke083600 6y ago

Well done for getting your project out there ! I'm sure its great. I've commented on this in the past. This is what I want from my "ticketing-software": -I don't want 100 ways todo things or configure a ticketing tool... -Sell me the BEST "Software Development PROCESS" with a tool. -Don't give me a "Great Ticketing-System" ! I want to know what is the fastest, best process to develop software and track it. All of "these ticketing software" starts with "track , manage , assign tickets" but leave the process up to you... I want to buy an EXPERT PROCESS not a REALLY GREAT TICKET TOOL with x10 options. I always use the example of the "ultra high-end amplifiers" they don't come with a "Tone-Control" because these companies are THE BEST... my ears can never be better than their in-house "mozart-prodigy-tuning-expert". Why would I soil my ears by thinking I can better adjust the "tone" of the amplifier that cost $500k :/ I'm buy FANTASTIC SOUND... not a great amplifier with 100 ways to get good sound. Sorry rant over.. So... Sell me a GREAT SOFTWARE PROCESS - if it comes with software and a ticketing system... so be it. But make sure the software supports the process and I don't want to configure anything but user accounts :) Sorry for all the caps... don't flame me :)

devdas 6y ago
The "best" process is one that fits your business context. The "best" sound system is worthless if the acoustics of the room it is in aren't upto it.
ragebol 6y ago
Things is: different teams/products/companies/... require different processes. There is no one size fits all.
ozim 6y ago
But that is just you sadly. I am working on SaaS solution in different area. We would LOVE to sell our approach to the problem but then you start getting big customers... Guess what, each one of them wants this changed that different color, "tasks" should be named "todos" or whatever. Then everything has to have customization options because next customer contact changes mind and the other one is leaving company. For now our sales reps do loads of configuration for those big customers, but yeah you have to have big bucks to have sales rep do config tailored for you.

westoque 6y ago

Not sure if it's only me. But there's some funky funky things happening on that frontend. There's a white modal that covers that whole screen that pops out at every page load.

iba99 6y ago
Any chance you can share a link to a screenshot and the console log? Appreciate it.

ko3us 6y ago

This looks great! Any plans for Gitlab integration?

iba99 6y ago
Next on our roadmap!

egorfine 6y ago

I have just tried it and after planning a small sprint for my team I loved it immediately. I'd absolutely love to give it a go at my company. I want an on-premise version.

iba99 6y ago
What would be your biggest hurdle for adoption for a web-based version?

im_dario 6y ago

Kudos for the release! This comment might seem counterintuitive, but I think Tara's adoption would grow a lot if you offer a way to sync or import from JIRA. JIRA sprint planning is painful. In my current company, we use it, and its shortcomings shape our way of working. I.e., not able to link histories' subtasks to a sprint, causing that the backlog is full of long histories, and you need to go looking around to see how the histories are going. If we were able to sync epics and histories (JIRA <-> Tara), we could probably have the better of both worlds. I see Tara very focused on devs, but not all JIRA users are devs. For instance, how would critical bugs - reported by users - be handled in Tara? I imagine this synchronization as bidirectional, where you write the specs as a list in JIRA's issue description, but they are actionable in Tara. So no more subtasks in JIRA and Tara become a complementary tool that, once you are used to it, you can go with entirely standalone. Just writing this quickly, with no deep thought, but it was my very first thought after checking your website. I hope this feedback can be useful to you.

iba99 6y ago
Thanks! A few quick thoughts: - We've done exactly this for Github <> Tara. We have a bi-directional sync with Github issues, and active issues are converted into tasks in Tara. Basically, if a user wanted to, they could just use Tara as a Github issue tracker. - We wanted to start with Github, then work our way through more git/source control platforms, and then move to Jira. Interestingly, structuring incoming data from Jira requires a few months of work on data models IF we don't want the user to spend a ton of time labelling. Jira's data structure can be a hot mess to deal with. - If the sync took a day or even a week of configuration, would you find it worth your time to invest and go through that? Or would yo expect the sync to work instantaneously (like Github <> Tara). - What would be your expectations on mapping for histories?
- im_dario 6y ago
  It makes sense that you started with Github. I agree too that Jira's data structure is a mess. I've managed one instance for years and any update was a whole mess on itself. I think the sync configuration should be quick, something that can be bootstrapped like Trello integration with an export artifact. About mapping for histories, it should be 1-to-1 and each spec to be a list point or a subtask. Nothing fancy nor complex if Tara is the main source of truth, leaving Jira as a way for non-tech users to report issues.

ranguna 6y ago

This is just what I was looking for! But.. How can this be free?

fenk85 6y ago

Sprint? Most of the most productive teams i know use Kanban approach which Jira does support. Any team i have been on tied to sprints has been a right clusterfeck

alkonaut 6y ago

One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never really integrate with the true workflow of developers. Once you have a development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be nice to be able to encode it into the What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on. Every place has a different workflow and they are usually very complex, but these tools (Jira, YouTrack, GitHub issues, Azure DevOps, ...) are complex. They are often configurable, yet they still (as far as I'm aware) fail to integrate the process part of things with the code part of things. At best you have some loose integration between version control and process e.g. "this ticket has these changes" but they don't integrate the two processes so that the state-machine that is a ticket (is it done? why is it not? is it because a PR build failed? Is it because an approval that must be done after merge has failed? is it because the issue has several pull requests associated with it and not all are merged yet?). I absolutely don't mind complexity in these tools. Having an extremely simple post-it process is good. This is the second best. The process complexity in big enterprises and distributed teams will always be there. If I can configure a tool to make it go away I'm glad. The worst situation is when you have a hyper complicated process and no tools to help. That's the situation many businesses are in. "You didn't mark the two fields and change the state to Y and then send the email to the translation person and notify the regional development person about the change! You have to do that".

petepete 6y ago
> Why do I need to remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on. This is my biggest peeve. Every place you have other stuff related to a project, whether it's Trello, Jira, Google Drive, O365, Miro, Confluence, Figma, Travis, CodeClimate, etc etc etc, it's just another ever-increasing set of things to try to keep in sync and up to date. It makes onboarding new members way more difficult and make everything slower, more frustrating and more error-prone.
contravariant 6y ago
I haven't really used it but with Youtrack you can apply arbitrary commands to your ticket from a github commit. And I can certify that Youtrack is ridiculously configurable. As in "execute arbitrary code when a ticket is updated" configurable. Both of these features are maybe a bit too powerful (especially together), but they do enable any particular workflow you want.

antigirl 6y ago

Performance for me is very poor; the app is very unresponsive - you should consider optimistic UI updates. Im based out in Asia at the moment so its the server latency im assuming?

iba99 6y ago
Yep. We still have some server latency- no optimistic loads just yet.
syed99 6y ago
It's a mix of both latency and lack of optimistic updates. We're working on improving our front-end at the moment and some of those improvements relate to optimistic loads and improvements on redux that go in every week.

cyrialize 6y ago

I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my decision to make. Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to make me mad. Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts, like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new editor! This new editor has none of the markdown-ish shortcuts the old editor had. Confluence is also changing it's editor and the old wiki pages do not have a 1:1 match to the new wiki pages. This means you have to go through each page, convert it, and edit it to fix the broken things - because depending on what you use, it will be broken. For example, there is no longer a note, warning, or error macro - instead it gets turned into a info macro that you have to go in and edit it to the style you previously had. Code blocks no longer let you pick the color scheme you had, instead they're all generic. There's even more here I'm not listing. Confluence has also just been wonky lately. It's supposed to automatically format a link into something nice (e.g. https://confluence/page-name https://confluence/page-name -> Page Name or https://jira/AAA-1234 https://jira/AAA-1234 -> AAA->1234) and this only happens sometimes. Other times I'm finding the page frozen or slow and the only thing that fixes it is refreshing the page or publishing the page and going back to edit it. Of course with BitBucket I dislike that they're dropping Mercurial. I understand why, but I am really going to miss it. Git is way more powerful but Mercurial is (at least to me) way easier to use and pick up. The infuriating part is that they offer no tool for converting existing repositories whatsoever. Github has a tool that will turn your BitBucket Mercurial repo into a Github repo! For any tool that aims to be an alternative to Jira / Confluence / BitBucket, please don't do what Atlassian does. If you are going to make any transitions or any major change - please make it as easy and seamless as possible for your users.

gjvc 6y ago
https://www.phacility.com/ https://www.phacility.com/
- twalla 6y ago
  Having come from a JIRA/Github/Confluence setup in my previous role to a Phabricator setup in my current role, I can't believe I'm saying this but I'd give anything to have JIRA back.

red_admiral 6y ago

Literal quote from the privacy policy: > With your permission, we will collect location information from your mobile device to [insert purpose]. You may turn off this feature through the location settings on your mobile device. Maybe fix that?

iba99 6y ago
On it.

dotjosh 6y ago

Unless you are going open source, you might not want to ship your typescript sourceMaps in production. https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png

c_e 6y ago
Shipping source maps allows for better error-reporting instrumentation, and can also be a great help if you need to debug an issue you're not able to reproduce in a local or staging environment.
maxhille 6y ago
As long as there is no license attached, you are essentially not allowed to use it anyway.
syed99 6y ago
I agree sourceMaps shouldn't be exposed and they also bloat up production code. The reason we have them exposed for the time being is for debugging purposes in open beta and we intend to remove it out of production in our upcoming weekly release.

mahesh_rm 6y ago

Tara looks great, trying it out. Also, I love the clarity of the landing page. I apologize if it is off-topic: what product/tool did you use for creating the main video in landing page? Thank you!

iba99 6y ago
Good ol' camtasia from my video editing days! Side hustled as a Udemy instructor in 2012, and camtasia is just as good now as it was back then.
- mahesh_rm 6y ago
  Thank you!

aarbor989 6y ago

Would love to get off JIRA but the leverage jira has over alternatives is that there are integrations for _everything_. Slack, PagerDuty, Freshdesk, etc. I wonder how long it will take Tara to get up to speed

iba99 6y ago
We're releasing about two integrations per month (April was trello import and Github bi-directional sync) so we should get there soon! Our speed of shipping integrations is getting faster with time however.
- aarbor989 6y ago
  Awesome..is there anywhere I can track the integrations, like a public roadmap or something along those lines?
  - iba99 6y ago
    Ahh that's a cool idea- we really need to work on public sprint boards and actually show our weekly sprints and releases. We typically just discuss them on our twitter and our blog. Here's today's release: https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-may-1/ https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-may-1/

techcofounder 6y ago

Hey Tara team. Ben here from Armory (YC W17). Love that you are tackling this very important problem for product and eng teams. We use JIRA (surprise!) as do all of customers. I've long wished I had the time and energy to think about and maybe even tackle the challenge you are facing - building a JIRA-killer. Go forth and conquer! I would be very happy to help in any way I can!

Giorgi 6y ago

Is this self-hosted? or can custom domain be added?

iba99 6y ago
It's web-based.

mkchoi212 6y ago

Congrats the on beta! Just a quick question though. Seems like in the about page, you guys mention that the "platform leverages machine learning". How do Tara leverage ML? From the landing page, it was hard to see any features relevant to ML. Thanks

iba99 6y ago
We actually need to update our about page - it still shows copy from our older version which was a predictions only product (I also talk about this below) with ref to a question asked about our .ai TLD. We will be bringing our ML models back into the product for predictions over time. For now, we're really focusing on workflow and design as a platform.
- mkchoi212 6y ago
  Ah gotcha. Yeah, the same situation for us over at http://getmosaic.io/ http://getmosaic.io/ Initially, we were worried that people would think we're putting "AI/ML" in the name/description just for the hype. But hopefully if the workflow/design is good enough, and the AI/ML features follow, customers should be satisfied.
  - iba99 6y ago
    Mosaic looks cool! Will give it a spin.

sjohn93 6y ago

Cool idea. We would like to feature your startup in our website, submit here: https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-startup https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-startup

solarkraft 6y ago

Oh, "free" means "free to use", not "free software". Would've been a cool feature. It also looks pretty cool otherwise, but ... does it contain "AI"? The TLD and title seem to point towards it.

HelloNurse 6y ago

Your Jira alternative is currently a better replacement for a limited but important part of Jira features: clearly only an initial, promising feature set that will be expanded and improved. But in what direction? The more technical side of software development (e.g. configuration, building and deployment of the releases)? Generic ticket handling and time tracking/accounting to expand the product's usefulness beyond specialized software product development teams? Integration with other software and processes?

iba99 6y ago
The key for our platform will always be simplicity. For now, the plan is to head into the technical side of software dev (Gitlab, Bitbucket and integrations with CI/CD tooling), without alienating business teams. One of the biggest issues with existing PM software is that it's purpose built for singular teams, vs providing utility to cross-functional teams (e.g. engineering and growth). And it's usually overly complex with significant configuration required. We're seeing early signs of this with requests from teams/orgs to add in marketing, growth and design teams as they need to be in the loop of releases and the overall SDLC.