14 ms·

Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab

298 points by iba99 6y ago

iba99 6y ago
Hi HN! We last crossed paths 6 months ago, when we shared Tara 1.0, a simple Jira alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 I'm one of the creators of Tara, and with support and feedback from the community, we've been hard at work building this v1.5 release over 24 sprints and 500+ pull requests. Several of you asked for an improved Github sync, PRs and commits tracked in tasks, alongside a Gitlab integration. We've discovered from teams, just how painful Jira and Confluence can be for tracking issues, sprints and docs. Our requirements feature has also gone through a bit of a re-design, and with Gitlab, we've also shipped commenting, workspaces and teams. As for why we're working on this problem; we just wanted to use something fast, with minimal setup, and built-in views for Git. We just couldn't find anything designed from the ground up for development teams. Finally, Tara AI is free for teams and developers. Our free forever plan has no limits on users, tasks or workspaces. Looking forward, we're working on predictive functionality around effort estimation, release planning and engineering analytics. Thanks for reading!
- ApolloRising 6y ago
  Just signed up and so far everything worked well. Couple tweaks, you may want to use more than 1 letter for the workspace name icon in the left menu when a user has a few workspaces since naming is unpredictable. There is also a lot of whitespace between welcome username, and the getting started copy on the page. The home icon and the logo in the left nav do the same thing not sure if you need both. Create task in the backlog should stand out more, I'm a PM and that is probably one of the most used options. Is there an option to add time to a task or urgency? Hope this helps, looks like a great start.
  - iba99 6y ago
    Hey! So we had the option for a min char count, but users wanted to have one letter workspaces (for fun I guess?). We need to revamp our navigation anyway since it's hard to know where to click to change workspaces. Good point on the whitespace- will take a look. As for creating tasks- we're thinking of a sticky area on the left (that's always on) to create tasks. For priority- we're releasing labels in 3 weeks. You should be able to assign #P1 or priority overall on different sets of tasks. That being said- we are considering adding some form of auto recognition or NLP to suggest priority and labels automatically based on past tasks. For time, we have 3 effort options (points, hours or days), we kept it simple to create a standup view where you can see how engineers track throughout the week. Let us know which other parts may be tedious. We have more work to do!
    - ApolloRising 6y ago
      Will do and good luck!
- drcongo 6y ago
  Can I be the first to ask _how_ it's free?
  - freddier 6y ago
    The website mentions in the pricing popup: >We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play. I've also been hurt by free tools that disappear after we commit to them but since Tara did AI stuff for PM in the past maybe they already have it in the roadmap.
    - drcongo 6y ago
      Thanks
- dnsmichi 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the GitLab integration, is there a page on your website describing it in more detail?
  - iba99 6y ago
    Just made this live: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-Integration https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I... Basically, RN its a webhook. Once active, you can view merge requests related to a task, when synced. Over time, we should be releasing a full fledged Gitlab bi-directional sync and app (similar to our Github app here: https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai) Our Github app also allows you to view stale PRs that are blocking the sprint. We should have similar functionality for Gitlab over the next few wks.
    - danudey 6y ago
      Is there a reason for announcing it now, when it's incomplete and less useful, rather than once it's done (or more feature complete, at least)? I ask because this seems like the sort of thing I would look at, then shrug off because it's not all there, as I don't want to put time and energy into learning a product that will have the features I want "some day", so I'd be likely to skip out on it for now and then forget about it basically forever. Personally, I'd much rather be shown something that feels "done" and try to integrate it then than work with someone's first pass on the implementation, and I'm concerned that others would feel the same way and you would miss out on users.
      - iba99 6y ago
        Solid point, but I would counter that a feature or a product is never truly complete. The goal should be to get to a stage where users can derive value from the feature (or product), and ship. In our case, the main ask from developers is the ability to sync/connect their tasks to merge requests on Gitlab. v1 of the integration does exactly that, and additional elements will be shipped over the coming weeks as users activate the integration.
- loufe 6y ago
  Any plans to accommodate privately-hosted git servers?
  - iba99 6y ago
    Not yet but it would form part of a future on-prem version of Tara, where privately-hosted instances of Github/Gitlab are accommodated.
- crdrost 6y ago
  To set up my question, maybe I should share a sort of hazy crackpot vision or dream. So when I look at Git, I see a variety of postmodernism that's like “look, we’re not being pretentiously intellectual or even pessimistic—we’re being realistic, software just is a postmodern world, Alice and Bob both have software that they call ‘Linux’ on their laptops, and they just aren’t the same source code, but they are both Linux, and trying to assess which one is the “true” Linux really does devolve into asking questions about power and basically in this case the power is vested ultimately in one king, Linus Torvalds, who says which one is more modern, and that’s fine as long as you understand that it’s arbitrary and anyone can fork the project at any time and create a rival power-structure and so forth.” Like, these ideas that I made fun of when I was a kid turn out to be amazingly practical things as finally revealed by git enlightenment. I would summarize the problems of various bugtrackers including Jira as being insufficiently “up with the times” therefore. They reflect the old modernist approach to truth. Schedules, deadlines, when was this “done”. But we know in software that really you want your source of truth of your bugtracker to basically be in the same Git repository as your code: one and the same commit needs to simultaneously close a bug as needs to properly change the source code to fix that bug, because the bug may be fixed in your “staging” codebase but that bugfix may not yet be deployed to “prod.” A reversion merged into prod as a hotfix needs to suddenly re-open the bug that we said was fixed-in-prod because now it no longer is. All of that. That's my hazy crackpot vision. :) Given all that, there is also a great difficulty with people using workflows like GitFlow which have the same “old way of doing things” misunderstandings. It’s not that those workflows aren’t good, they are good—for SVN repositories. You apply them to a Git repository and then you have this strange tension where the workflow and the VCS are working at cross-purposes sometimes. So it's also things like GitLab's CI/CD being a file checked into Git. This sounds great until you realize that nobody is expecting postmodernism to suddenly pop up here. “How did you merge that thing into prod when all of our admins were unreachable? Admins are supposed to have to push the button.” “Well, I was really in a bind, so I did something I would have never normally done: I pushed up my own branch `fix-master`, and in that branch I changed the CI/CD file to trigger deploys to production on pushes to `fix-master` instead of `master`.” But I had to!” Git was like “hegemony? what hegemony? if `master` has power then everyone has power.” Hah. So my question is, based on this description, I am not sure that I see you have “drunk the same Kool-aid” about Git, I am instead seeing a declaration that you want something fast-and-easy-and-supports-Git. Which, like, is fine. I don’t want to come across as crapping on your invention with a dream that I absolutely admit is hazy and crackpot, right? You have actually done the work and I am hypothetical and I have mad respect for you and your work. But I am sharing kind of my bigger vision to ask, “do you have a bigger vision? is it different than mine, some more systematic structure?” Is Tara just an easy way to do something like Jira with Git, or do you have a fundamentally new concept in mind that you are headed towards that will change how we track issues with our software?
- oxfordmale 6y ago
  @iba99 If only company founders could be forced to pay for "free forever plan" once they are no longer free. In reality "Free for ever" seems to mean "free untill I sell the company"
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
This thing is in absolutely no way a Jira alternative. (YouTrack is the Jira alternative, but it's not free.)
- iba99 6y ago
  For us, the key was to build a simple Jira alternative. A good PM tool should do the basics, and get out of the way. Personal opinion, so many PM tools tend to be bloated and each view ends up causing more mental overload for the team, EM and PM. We've tried to focus on speed with performance and keeping things simple.
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    "Simple" isn't a Jira alternative; not being "simple" is Jira's entire raison d'etre. If you want "simple" there are already a thousand and one options available, but alternatives to Jira are extremely rare. This is how Atlassian captured the market. So in my opinion you should really change your marketing, as it is it really gives off a false advertising vibe.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    Jira is a project management tool? I think that one of the only things we don't use it for.
    - taejavu 6y ago
      It's a great operating system, lacking only a decent project management tool.
    - krick 6y ago
      That's surprising to hear. What do you use for this purpose then?
      - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
        Jira is a communication and documentation platform. You can bolt on some agile project management stuff (Kanban boards and whatnot), but that stuff always seems like a fifth wheel for Jira.
poleapple 6y ago
Does Tara support a public facing board to capture bugs feature requests from our users? We would like to be able to link public facing issues to internal issues.
- iba99 6y ago
  Not yet but it's on the roadmap! Several pen source repositories are requesting this feature as well, to monitor development with their contributors and we need to ship this. We've discovered there are very few options for open source communities to monitor and track/report on progress - and the cost for hundreds of contributors can become prohibitive with other PM tools.
  - poleapple 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply.
  - nahtnam 6y ago
    And upvoting would be good as well! Not sure how you'd authenticate or maybe allow anon votes?
    - iba99 6y ago
      I think we would just integrate with an existing tool for this vs building it ourselves.
shadykiller 6y ago
Your careers page is broken :(
- iba99 6y ago
  Hey sorry about that! Fixing now.
dindresto 6y ago
From the privacy policy: https://tara.ai/privacy/ https://tara.ai/privacy/ "THIS IS A WEBSITE PRIVACY DRAFTED UNDER U.S. LAW. THIS POLICY IS NOT INTENDED TO SATISFY ANY 'FAIR PROCESSING NOTICE' OBLIGATIONS THAT YOU MAY HAVE UNDER GDPR OR OTHER APPLICABLE NON-US LAW." As a European, it's very unfortunate that I'm not legally able to try your product.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Is there anything that legally (on the user’s side) stops a European user from using an American service that doesn’t collect/operate on address information but bills their service as “for USA only”?
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    It might be problematic if they ever want to charge customers of their AI service in Europe.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  Are you routinely putting GDPR sensitive information into your ticket tracking system? I'd suggestion most people shouldn't irrespective of GDPR. And if you don't then those terms aren't an issue.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    People's names could be in their logins, which means you have a portion of their employment record.
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      That's a bit of a stretch. Any large organisation would already have a central database of employee names and job titles that are accessible to everyone within the organisation. That data is available to anyone who looks up an email addresses, let alone any web based services such as Sharepoint. Many businesses even advertise their team publicly as part of their marketing, I can't see court in the EU ruling in favour of the employee on this specific topic. More likely the GDPR notice is to remind people about customer data. Which is fine, that's the right thing for Tara to do. However any company using a Tara-like solution for putting customer data on would be in the wrong. That sort of practice would have failed PCI DSS even before GDPR was a thing.
BtM909 6y ago
@iba99, what tool did you use to create (or how did you create) the promo video on the homepage? I like the style :)
- iba99 6y ago
  Framer!
brorange 6y ago
I don't see anything on the website about Gitlab integration
- iba99 6y ago
  We haven't had time to update the homepage or the overall website, just been focusing on shipping early and often. This was just published - a quick guide on setting up the Gitlab webhook: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-Integration https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I...
  - jahlove 6y ago
    "now with Gitlab" is overselling it a bit, no?
- smartbit 6y ago
  Gitlab CE free edition has many plan features https://about.gitlab.com/features/#plan https://about.gitlab.com/features/#plan including Milestones, Issue Board, etc. What features is gitlab ce lacking, that makes you want to use a 3rd party planning product?
  - jahlove 6y ago
    sprints, epics, kanban boards. They seem to use their "milestones" as sprints in the examples, but its a little clunky.
ComputerGuru 6y ago
How is “an AI for teams” a replacement for Jira, which doesn’t market itself as an AI at all? I’m looking at your features and I don’t see anywhere that AI plays a role in the core offering? Can you provide more info on how this is your distinguishing feature?
- gorpomon 6y ago
  It's hard to find but if you click pricing, it pops up a modal with a FAQ: > How will you stay in business? "We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play."
  - eecc 6y ago
    Perhaps they’re using AI to predict capacity “based on past sprint performance” /s
    - hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
      Is that a bad idea?
3np 6y ago
Is self-hosted on the roadmap?
- mrweasel 6y ago
  One would hope, that's one of Jiras best features, even if Atlassian clearly doesn't agree. I get why they want to compare Tara to Jira, but when you look at what companies actually do with Jira, then you'll hit a wall rather quickly with pretty much everything else. Like them or not, Atlassians product integrate rather well, and you can "easily" customize them to integrate into pretty much everything else. We have Jira integrated into pretty much everything from monitoring to invoicing. You can also customize the snot of internal workflows in Jira, per project basis. Even to the point where nothing makes sense any more. Finding a replacement is hard, but relevant given the latest pricing changes from Atlassian. That and their idiotic prioritisation of their cloud offering. Oh yeah, and no Atlassian product has a functional search feature.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 6y ago
    I think that "nonfunctional" is a bit of an undersell. I've used Confluence for years and while I don't think the search is great by any means, it's certainly usable once you figure out its quirks. I think we are all spoiled by how great Google is about edge cases and deriving meaning from your queries and we are too quick to judge other search offerings.
- iba99 6y ago
  Yep.
  - 3np 6y ago
    sweet!
eecc 6y ago
Does it have something like JIRA-1330? Because that’s what makes everything else in Jira a sorry kludge
- iba99 6y ago
  What's your take on changing the status quo around unique task/issue ID's?
  - eecc 6y ago
    Can't say anything more than: it depends. To its essence, an ID allows interested parties to track something over time. If you add additional meanings to an ID - e.g. the parent project as Jira does, or the kind as in ServiceNow - these can become outdated over time, and deceiving. I'd say it's ok to change the "external name" as this other metadata changes over time (project name, bug, task, story, whatever...) but make the obsolete synonyms redirect to the currently active name.
    - derektwong 6y ago
      Curious, do you mean: if a task was part of project ABC, with an ID of ABC-123, then if someone moved it into project DEF, its ID is now changed to DEF-621, those two should be linked, right?
    - iba99 6y ago
      One way we've tried to fix this is with our slack integration. Using the task URL, or ID, the integration quickly unfurls context in the task (showing story info) and allows quick actions. Same process with requirements/epics. URL unfurling was shipped today with the slack app, and quick actions are coming in a few weeks.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      The prefix is just a project name though? It's no different from a convention saying that IDs 1000XXX are for project A and IDs for 2000XXX are for project B, it's just easier to read and distinguish like PROJA-0001 and PROJB-0001. Obviously, you wouldn't want to have things migrating between projects - but if that is even concievable for an issue to do, then the division in 2 projects was probably not correct and it should perhaps have been a single project. That is: the PROJA-0001 is as immutable and unchanging as 1000001 is. A thing changing "kind" (e.g. a bug to a feature) doesn't seem far fetched, and I'd be reluctant (Meaning I think it would be a flawed design) to use that as the public identifier prefix for a feature.
viach 6y ago
> Our free forever plan has unlimited tasks, sprints and workspaces, with no user limits. If so, what obstacles prevent from open sourcing it? At least the the part of functionality which is declared to be free forever?
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  So a competitor isn’t made.
- georgyo 6y ago
  It is free now, they never say it will be free forever.
  - serial_dev 6y ago
    How do you interpret this in the "Pricing" modal: > Our free forever plan has unlimited tasks, sprints and workspaces, with no user limits.
    - viach 6y ago
      I interpret it as "we will somehow monetize your data and train our AI model on your activities"
      - syed99 6y ago
        Hey! Co-founder/CTO of Tara here. We take privacy around your data very seriously. We're thinking about the ML training model as a "walled garden", ie recommendations are based on your past sprint activity, effort load, tasks completed during a sprint, etc. and are exclusive to your organization. In the future, if we decided to do benchmarking (for eg quick recommendations on how companies in your industry are running sprints), we would have a double opt-in. This would mean anonymizing the data, and providing the recommendations an opt-in. Basically, very similar to how google's autocomplete email recommendations work.
        6y ago
flixic 6y ago
"Free" is the worst pricing of all. Open-source is great. One time purchase price is great for products that don't require maintenance. Subscription pricing is perfectly valid for online services that are not open-source. Free? Free is the worst. I don't get any trust that the service will stay around, it can completely change along the way to "paid", and I don't get to keep anything in that case.
- pj_mukh 6y ago
  FWIW, they explain exactly how they'll make money in the website (under Pricing) and in this thread.
  - masukomi 6y ago
    we hope to get you dependent upon our product, and in the meantime come up with something we hope you'll be willing to pay for is not the most confidence inducing of business plans. Also, if the current plans are "free forever" have no caps on users or much of anything else and are good enough to use until they actually finish off the things worth paying for then how many folks are actually going to be inclined to pay for them? if it's NOT good enough as-is then why bother using it in the first place?
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      The business model isn't anything special... It's just freemium. Take a look at ProfitWell for instance, they do the same thing: Give away their core product then make money on upsells. Also, building the business model as they go is pretty normal for a startup.
      - mbreese 6y ago
        > building the business model as they go This just means that what used to be free will end up costing money when whatever new features they think they can charge for won't get enough users to cover their costs. This is especially true if the free plan is more than enough for most users. Which, if you're positioning yourself as a Jira alternative -- most users won't need in-depth AI planning for sprints. It's not a great business plan...
autotune 6y ago
Do you offer SSO auth like Okta integration?
- grinich 6y ago
  Happy to help! :) mg@WorkOS.com
- iba99 6y ago
  On the roadmap but looks like we should checkout WorkOS :)
gjvc 6y ago
https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ is a better option
- gjvc 6y ago
  ...and is open source
- rurban 6y ago
  And with better humor. "Use sophisticated drag and drop to make sure your project is properly micro managed with Workboards. Grab ahold of tasks, literally. Place them in confusing, new orders. Make a column just for interns! Ignore the backlog forever." They might be british
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    - Runs on Linux, Mac OS X - Also "runs" on Windows.
syats 6y ago
Just wanted to mention Redmine, which is actually GPL and can be installed on premises. Looks a bit dated and somehow hard to customize.. but at least you keep your data (ai models, you say?) you get to keep it when "free" is no longer a valid business model.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  See also the OpenProject fork of Redmine. https://www.openproject.org/jira-alternative/ https://www.openproject.org/jira-alternative/
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
"Free" in the title should not mean free-as-in-been on a website called "hacker" news......
mkarliner 6y ago
I really, really don't want another Jira.
- iba99 6y ago
  Nobody does. It's ridiculous that it takes 21 clicks to create a sprint. We've literally timed ourselves in every Jira instance (cloud and next-gen), and every point of configuration, setup or action just takes hours. A platform for productivity, should have zero to minimal setup, built-in views and it should work hard to get out of your way. If it helps, creating a sprint is 1-click on Tara. And I'm hoping it stays that way!
dvt 6y ago
This is a bit of a meta-discussion (apologies to the people at Tara, they did a fantastic job!), but is the market really large enough for the insane amount of productivity tools that have been released over the past few years? From Airtable, to Monday, to Hugo, to Tara, to Asana, etc., etc. It feels like there's a lot of stagnation here, also. If I was building a product management tool, I would certainly not make it anything like Jira. Jira's a bit of a "dirty word," anyway -- it's a monolithic system that seems to suck more productivity than it generates. Where's the innovation? The last truly revolutionary productivity tool was Slack, and maybe Dropbox before that. I don't mean to throw any shade at the Tara people -- it seems like a ton of work went into the product. But I guess I just don't really get the state of the market (even though I work as an engineer and am often-times force-fed these kinds of tools).
- rubyron 6y ago
  Software is “eating the world,” as they say, and selling blue jeans and pick axes to gold miners is a perennially solid way to make money.
- iba99 6y ago
  At it's core, we find it to be an Apple OS vs Windows OS problem. You can either build highly complex project management systems, with 50 different types of subsets, customizations and setup instructions (ie Windows?) or try to design software that just works through simplicity in design and set defaults based on your workflow (ie Apple!). It's an interesting conundrum and one that we think B2B software rarely gets right. Why can't B2B software inspire delight in the user and just work? We've decided to have a laser focus on teams that ship early and often, and help with their workflows, by innovating through design. That being said, we still have a long way to go.
  - oaiey 6y ago
    The problem here is that processes in enterprises are never default. Depending on the company the requirement to these processes are always different. Tools like Jira reflect these complexity on us during customization and are rated by their capability to handle them.
dflock 6y ago
Will you supporting: - on-prem - kanban with no sprints?
- iba99 6y ago
  On prem will take more time - but kanban and calendar views are on the roadmap.
zed88 6y ago
It's an interesting pivot for you guys from building some sort of recruitment AI (I remember seeing it somewhere) to this. Would you mind elaborating this shift? Anyways, Good luck with the launch!Will give this a go.
- iba99 6y ago
  In our experience building any form of meritocracy in recruiting, was excruciatingly difficult due to 1) inherent subconscious bias on the part of the recruiting team 2) pedigree bias - employers only wanting to view candidates that were from certain ivy league institutions We tried long and hard, for a good 18 months, and it became an arduous battle fraught with the possibility of having to make unethical decisions in the structure of our algorithms. Our whole thesis was to create a system that recommended candidates based on their github repos. Pretty sure someone will solve this problem, but in our experience, it felt like a losing battle since recruiters wanted access to certain types of candidates and were continuing to reject candidates that were surfaced, with non-traditional backgrounds. This was 2015, I think someone will solve this problem with time. The experience did teach us a thing or two about git commits, PRs and the overall experience of productivity through git based systems.
dntrkv 6y ago
https://www.atlassian.com https://www.atlassian.com https://tara.ai https://tara.ai Your branding is awfully similar to Atlassian. Not saying it's intentional, but considering you are pitching yourself as a Jira alternative, it would be wise to differentiate yourselves a bit more. Specifically talking about the logo and color.
- divbzero 6y ago
  As a current and former user of BitBucket, Confluence, Jira, and HipChat, the look and feel of Tara is miles away from any Atlassian product. After reading the parent comment, it still took me a few times switching back and forth to notice that both logos happen to be triangular and blueish, and even then the logos are easy to distinguish — obtuse vs. acute apex, curved vs. sharp legs, different shades and gradients of blue.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  You're right. Let my introduce you to "Dotan's Blur Test": Blur your eyes a bit when looking at the two homepages so that the shapes of logos and text disappears but the colours and placement stay the same. I cannot tell the two logos nor pages apart in the blur test. That may draw fire from Atlassian's legal team, and should probably be addressed.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    On second thought, all publicity is good publicity. Maybe drawing the attention of Atlassian would be good from a marketing perspective. They would effectively let Atlassian initiate a comparison between the two products.
nishparadox 6y ago
Hey, our startup recently moved to tara because we couldn't afford jira. Thanks for this tool. We've been using it for a month or two now and the task management seems to be doing fine. Not that we are that much managed, but still tara seems to be a good (and of course, free) alternative to get the things done.
imvetri 6y ago
First read: A jira free alternative. Wait let me reread. A free jira alternative.
xaedes 6y ago
Why is the user in the "terms and conditions" called a "tester"? > this pilot agreement ("agreement") is a legal agreement between you ("tester") and tara intelligence inc. ("company"). company is developing a software platform product offering for managing product development lifecycles ("company platform"), and this agreement governs tester's use of the company platform. by accessing or using the service or by clicking the "i accept" button, tester acknowledges that tester has reviewed and accepts this agreement.
- 3r8riacz 6y ago
  Maybe you always use the beta version for free, and only the paid plan will use the fixed production build?
madrox 6y ago
A little off topic, but has anyone else noticed that when you look at any product that shows off their client list, Cisco is on it most of the time?
chrismorgan 6y ago
When I click on “Release log” near the bottom of the page (which isn’t a link, BTW), it loads https://tara.ai/undefined https://tara.ai/undefined which loads the front page again and then changes its URL back to https://tara.ai/ https://tara.ai/.
steve_taylor 6y ago
Given the timing, I was expecting to see an on-prem alternative to Jira, so this is disappointing.
- vaceletm 6y ago
  For an on prem alternative to Jira, you can have a look at Tuleap. We (I'm from the dev team) don't aims to re-do a "simple" alternative to jira because there are tons of them and they fall short when things to track get more complex. You can do simple (as github) you can do hellish (as jira) but unlike jira, you don't mandate one model over another (no hundreds of un-necessary fields because someone asked them once). It's GPL, there is an entreprise plan, it's available on prem and cloud.
mister_hn 6y ago
But where can I download it without doing a login and doing self-hosting? Where's the "free"?
gjvc 6y ago
Make no mistake, if it's free, you're the product.
LysPJ 6y ago
Speaking of Jira alternatives, I recently discovered Kitemaker [1], which is really nice. The UI is clean and it's fast too (has keyboard shortcuts for everything, etc). [1] https://kitemaker.co/ https://kitemaker.co/
- kevsim 6y ago
  Hi. Co-founder of Kitemaker here. Thanks for the kind words! Do let us know if you have any feedback or improvements you'd like to see.
armindou5 6y ago
Really cool initiative! :)
geniium 6y ago
I was interested to test this to see if it could add some values to our team. And am always curious to see what other people come up with. Oh I was disappointed. Logging in on a mobile device was already cumbersome. Finally checked on the desktop and tested a bit. But the UX is so messy! It's really not clean nor simple to use. Would never want to use that with SCRUM. Just having to think about on boarding customer to this tool gives me headaches. Recently, we have switched to https://linear.app https://linear.app (note: I have no affiliation with them). It's just super amazing to use, lots of shortcut, clear, dead simple, well documented. Perfect balance for us. Hope this comments helps both the team behind Tara and some other looking at alternatives.

298 points by iba99 6y ago

Hi HN! We last crossed paths 6 months ago, when we shared Tara 1.0, a simple Jira alternative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 I'm one of the creators of Tara, and with support and feedback from the community, we've been hard at work building this v1.5 release over 24 sprints and 500+ pull requests. Several of you asked for an improved Github sync, PRs and commits tracked in tasks, alongside a Gitlab integration. We've discovered from teams, just how painful Jira and Confluence can be for tracking issues, sprints and docs. Our requirements feature has also gone through a bit of a re-design, and with Gitlab, we've also shipped commenting, workspaces and teams. As for why we're working on this problem; we just wanted to use something fast, with minimal setup, and built-in views for Git. We just couldn't find anything designed from the ground up for development teams. Finally, Tara AI is free for teams and developers. Our free forever plan has no limits on users, tasks or workspaces. Looking forward, we're working on predictive functionality around effort estimation, release planning and engineering analytics. Thanks for reading!

ApolloRising 6y ago
Just signed up and so far everything worked well. Couple tweaks, you may want to use more than 1 letter for the workspace name icon in the left menu when a user has a few workspaces since naming is unpredictable. There is also a lot of whitespace between welcome username, and the getting started copy on the page. The home icon and the logo in the left nav do the same thing not sure if you need both. Create task in the backlog should stand out more, I'm a PM and that is probably one of the most used options. Is there an option to add time to a task or urgency? Hope this helps, looks like a great start.
- iba99 6y ago
  Hey! So we had the option for a min char count, but users wanted to have one letter workspaces (for fun I guess?). We need to revamp our navigation anyway since it's hard to know where to click to change workspaces. Good point on the whitespace- will take a look. As for creating tasks- we're thinking of a sticky area on the left (that's always on) to create tasks. For priority- we're releasing labels in 3 weeks. You should be able to assign #P1 or priority overall on different sets of tasks. That being said- we are considering adding some form of auto recognition or NLP to suggest priority and labels automatically based on past tasks. For time, we have 3 effort options (points, hours or days), we kept it simple to create a standup view where you can see how engineers track throughout the week. Let us know which other parts may be tedious. We have more work to do!
  - ApolloRising 6y ago
    Will do and good luck!
drcongo 6y ago
Can I be the first to ask _how_ it's free?
- freddier 6y ago
  The website mentions in the pricing popup: >We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play. I've also been hurt by free tools that disappear after we commit to them but since Tara did AI stuff for PM in the past maybe they already have it in the roadmap.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    Thanks
dnsmichi 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the GitLab integration, is there a page on your website describing it in more detail?
- iba99 6y ago
  Just made this live: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-Integration https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I... Basically, RN its a webhook. Once active, you can view merge requests related to a task, when synced. Over time, we should be releasing a full fledged Gitlab bi-directional sync and app (similar to our Github app here: https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai) Our Github app also allows you to view stale PRs that are blocking the sprint. We should have similar functionality for Gitlab over the next few wks.
  - danudey 6y ago
    Is there a reason for announcing it now, when it's incomplete and less useful, rather than once it's done (or more feature complete, at least)? I ask because this seems like the sort of thing I would look at, then shrug off because it's not all there, as I don't want to put time and energy into learning a product that will have the features I want "some day", so I'd be likely to skip out on it for now and then forget about it basically forever. Personally, I'd much rather be shown something that feels "done" and try to integrate it then than work with someone's first pass on the implementation, and I'm concerned that others would feel the same way and you would miss out on users.
    - iba99 6y ago
      Solid point, but I would counter that a feature or a product is never truly complete. The goal should be to get to a stage where users can derive value from the feature (or product), and ship. In our case, the main ask from developers is the ability to sync/connect their tasks to merge requests on Gitlab. v1 of the integration does exactly that, and additional elements will be shipped over the coming weeks as users activate the integration.
loufe 6y ago
Any plans to accommodate privately-hosted git servers?
- iba99 6y ago
  Not yet but it would form part of a future on-prem version of Tara, where privately-hosted instances of Github/Gitlab are accommodated.
crdrost 6y ago
To set up my question, maybe I should share a sort of hazy crackpot vision or dream. So when I look at Git, I see a variety of postmodernism that's like “look, we’re not being pretentiously intellectual or even pessimistic—we’re being realistic, software just is a postmodern world, Alice and Bob both have software that they call ‘Linux’ on their laptops, and they just aren’t the same source code, but they are both Linux, and trying to assess which one is the “true” Linux really does devolve into asking questions about power and basically in this case the power is vested ultimately in one king, Linus Torvalds, who says which one is more modern, and that’s fine as long as you understand that it’s arbitrary and anyone can fork the project at any time and create a rival power-structure and so forth.” Like, these ideas that I made fun of when I was a kid turn out to be amazingly practical things as finally revealed by git enlightenment. I would summarize the problems of various bugtrackers including Jira as being insufficiently “up with the times” therefore. They reflect the old modernist approach to truth. Schedules, deadlines, when was this “done”. But we know in software that really you want your source of truth of your bugtracker to basically be in the same Git repository as your code: one and the same commit needs to simultaneously close a bug as needs to properly change the source code to fix that bug, because the bug may be fixed in your “staging” codebase but that bugfix may not yet be deployed to “prod.” A reversion merged into prod as a hotfix needs to suddenly re-open the bug that we said was fixed-in-prod because now it no longer is. All of that. That's my hazy crackpot vision. :) Given all that, there is also a great difficulty with people using workflows like GitFlow which have the same “old way of doing things” misunderstandings. It’s not that those workflows aren’t good, they are good—for SVN repositories. You apply them to a Git repository and then you have this strange tension where the workflow and the VCS are working at cross-purposes sometimes. So it's also things like GitLab's CI/CD being a file checked into Git. This sounds great until you realize that nobody is expecting postmodernism to suddenly pop up here. “How did you merge that thing into prod when all of our admins were unreachable? Admins are supposed to have to push the button.” “Well, I was really in a bind, so I did something I would have never normally done: I pushed up my own branch `fix-master`, and in that branch I changed the CI/CD file to trigger deploys to production on pushes to `fix-master` instead of `master`.” But I had to!” Git was like “hegemony? what hegemony? if `master` has power then everyone has power.” Hah. So my question is, based on this description, I am not sure that I see you have “drunk the same Kool-aid” about Git, I am instead seeing a declaration that you want something fast-and-easy-and-supports-Git. Which, like, is fine. I don’t want to come across as crapping on your invention with a dream that I absolutely admit is hazy and crackpot, right? You have actually done the work and I am hypothetical and I have mad respect for you and your work. But I am sharing kind of my bigger vision to ask, “do you have a bigger vision? is it different than mine, some more systematic structure?” Is Tara just an easy way to do something like Jira with Git, or do you have a fundamentally new concept in mind that you are headed towards that will change how we track issues with our software?
oxfordmale 6y ago
@iba99 If only company founders could be forced to pay for "free forever plan" once they are no longer free. In reality "Free for ever" seems to mean "free untill I sell the company"

otabdeveloper4 6y ago

This thing is in absolutely no way a Jira alternative. (YouTrack is the Jira alternative, but it's not free.)

iba99 6y ago
For us, the key was to build a simple Jira alternative. A good PM tool should do the basics, and get out of the way. Personal opinion, so many PM tools tend to be bloated and each view ends up causing more mental overload for the team, EM and PM. We've tried to focus on speed with performance and keeping things simple.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  "Simple" isn't a Jira alternative; not being "simple" is Jira's entire raison d'etre. If you want "simple" there are already a thousand and one options available, but alternatives to Jira are extremely rare. This is how Atlassian captured the market. So in my opinion you should really change your marketing, as it is it really gives off a false advertising vibe.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Jira is a project management tool? I think that one of the only things we don't use it for.
  - taejavu 6y ago
    It's a great operating system, lacking only a decent project management tool.
  - krick 6y ago
    That's surprising to hear. What do you use for this purpose then?
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      Jira is a communication and documentation platform. You can bolt on some agile project management stuff (Kanban boards and whatnot), but that stuff always seems like a fifth wheel for Jira.

poleapple 6y ago

Does Tara support a public facing board to capture bugs feature requests from our users? We would like to be able to link public facing issues to internal issues.

iba99 6y ago
Not yet but it's on the roadmap! Several pen source repositories are requesting this feature as well, to monitor development with their contributors and we need to ship this. We've discovered there are very few options for open source communities to monitor and track/report on progress - and the cost for hundreds of contributors can become prohibitive with other PM tools.
- poleapple 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply.
- nahtnam 6y ago
  And upvoting would be good as well! Not sure how you'd authenticate or maybe allow anon votes?
  - iba99 6y ago
    I think we would just integrate with an existing tool for this vs building it ourselves.

shadykiller 6y ago

Your careers page is broken :(

iba99 6y ago
Hey sorry about that! Fixing now.

dindresto 6y ago

From the privacy policy: https://tara.ai/privacy/ https://tara.ai/privacy/ "THIS IS A WEBSITE PRIVACY DRAFTED UNDER U.S. LAW. THIS POLICY IS NOT INTENDED TO SATISFY ANY 'FAIR PROCESSING NOTICE' OBLIGATIONS THAT YOU MAY HAVE UNDER GDPR OR OTHER APPLICABLE NON-US LAW." As a European, it's very unfortunate that I'm not legally able to try your product.

ComputerGuru 6y ago
Is there anything that legally (on the user’s side) stops a European user from using an American service that doesn’t collect/operate on address information but bills their service as “for USA only”?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  It might be problematic if they ever want to charge customers of their AI service in Europe.
hnlmorg 6y ago
Are you routinely putting GDPR sensitive information into your ticket tracking system? I'd suggestion most people shouldn't irrespective of GDPR. And if you don't then those terms aren't an issue.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  People's names could be in their logins, which means you have a portion of their employment record.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    That's a bit of a stretch. Any large organisation would already have a central database of employee names and job titles that are accessible to everyone within the organisation. That data is available to anyone who looks up an email addresses, let alone any web based services such as Sharepoint. Many businesses even advertise their team publicly as part of their marketing, I can't see court in the EU ruling in favour of the employee on this specific topic. More likely the GDPR notice is to remind people about customer data. Which is fine, that's the right thing for Tara to do. However any company using a Tara-like solution for putting customer data on would be in the wrong. That sort of practice would have failed PCI DSS even before GDPR was a thing.

BtM909 6y ago

@iba99, what tool did you use to create (or how did you create) the promo video on the homepage? I like the style :)

iba99 6y ago
Framer!

brorange 6y ago

I don't see anything on the website about Gitlab integration

iba99 6y ago
We haven't had time to update the homepage or the overall website, just been focusing on shipping early and often. This was just published - a quick guide on setting up the Gitlab webhook: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-Integration https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I...
- jahlove 6y ago
  "now with Gitlab" is overselling it a bit, no?
smartbit 6y ago
Gitlab CE free edition has many plan features https://about.gitlab.com/features/#plan https://about.gitlab.com/features/#plan including Milestones, Issue Board, etc. What features is gitlab ce lacking, that makes you want to use a 3rd party planning product?
- jahlove 6y ago
  sprints, epics, kanban boards. They seem to use their "milestones" as sprints in the examples, but its a little clunky.

ComputerGuru 6y ago

How is “an AI for teams” a replacement for Jira, which doesn’t market itself as an AI at all? I’m looking at your features and I don’t see anywhere that AI plays a role in the core offering? Can you provide more info on how this is your distinguishing feature?

gorpomon 6y ago
It's hard to find but if you click pricing, it pops up a modal with a FAQ: > How will you stay in business? "We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play."
- eecc 6y ago
  Perhaps they’re using AI to predict capacity “based on past sprint performance” /s
  - hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
    Is that a bad idea?

3np 6y ago

Is self-hosted on the roadmap?

mrweasel 6y ago
One would hope, that's one of Jiras best features, even if Atlassian clearly doesn't agree. I get why they want to compare Tara to Jira, but when you look at what companies actually do with Jira, then you'll hit a wall rather quickly with pretty much everything else. Like them or not, Atlassians product integrate rather well, and you can "easily" customize them to integrate into pretty much everything else. We have Jira integrated into pretty much everything from monitoring to invoicing. You can also customize the snot of internal workflows in Jira, per project basis. Even to the point where nothing makes sense any more. Finding a replacement is hard, but relevant given the latest pricing changes from Atlassian. That and their idiotic prioritisation of their cloud offering. Oh yeah, and no Atlassian product has a functional search feature.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 6y ago
  I think that "nonfunctional" is a bit of an undersell. I've used Confluence for years and while I don't think the search is great by any means, it's certainly usable once you figure out its quirks. I think we are all spoiled by how great Google is about edge cases and deriving meaning from your queries and we are too quick to judge other search offerings.
iba99 6y ago
Yep.
- 3np 6y ago
  sweet!

eecc 6y ago

Does it have something like JIRA-1330? Because that’s what makes everything else in Jira a sorry kludge

iba99 6y ago
What's your take on changing the status quo around unique task/issue ID's?
- eecc 6y ago
  Can't say anything more than: it depends. To its essence, an ID allows interested parties to track something over time. If you add additional meanings to an ID - e.g. the parent project as Jira does, or the kind as in ServiceNow - these can become outdated over time, and deceiving. I'd say it's ok to change the "external name" as this other metadata changes over time (project name, bug, task, story, whatever...) but make the obsolete synonyms redirect to the currently active name.
  - derektwong 6y ago
    Curious, do you mean: if a task was part of project ABC, with an ID of ABC-123, then if someone moved it into project DEF, its ID is now changed to DEF-621, those two should be linked, right?
  - iba99 6y ago
    One way we've tried to fix this is with our slack integration. Using the task URL, or ID, the integration quickly unfurls context in the task (showing story info) and allows quick actions. Same process with requirements/epics. URL unfurling was shipped today with the slack app, and quick actions are coming in a few weeks.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    The prefix is just a project name though? It's no different from a convention saying that IDs 1000XXX are for project A and IDs for 2000XXX are for project B, it's just easier to read and distinguish like PROJA-0001 and PROJB-0001. Obviously, you wouldn't want to have things migrating between projects - but if that is even concievable for an issue to do, then the division in 2 projects was probably not correct and it should perhaps have been a single project. That is: the PROJA-0001 is as immutable and unchanging as 1000001 is. A thing changing "kind" (e.g. a bug to a feature) doesn't seem far fetched, and I'd be reluctant (Meaning I think it would be a flawed design) to use that as the public identifier prefix for a feature.

viach 6y ago

> Our free forever plan has unlimited tasks, sprints and workspaces, with no user limits. If so, what obstacles prevent from open sourcing it? At least the the part of functionality which is declared to be free forever?

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
So a competitor isn’t made.
georgyo 6y ago
It is free now, they never say it will be free forever.
- serial_dev 6y ago
  How do you interpret this in the "Pricing" modal: > Our free forever plan has unlimited tasks, sprints and workspaces, with no user limits.
  - viach 6y ago
    I interpret it as "we will somehow monetize your data and train our AI model on your activities"
    - syed99 6y ago
      Hey! Co-founder/CTO of Tara here. We take privacy around your data very seriously. We're thinking about the ML training model as a "walled garden", ie recommendations are based on your past sprint activity, effort load, tasks completed during a sprint, etc. and are exclusive to your organization. In the future, if we decided to do benchmarking (for eg quick recommendations on how companies in your industry are running sprints), we would have a double opt-in. This would mean anonymizing the data, and providing the recommendations an opt-in. Basically, very similar to how google's autocomplete email recommendations work.
      - 6y ago

flixic 6y ago

"Free" is the worst pricing of all. Open-source is great. One time purchase price is great for products that don't require maintenance. Subscription pricing is perfectly valid for online services that are not open-source. Free? Free is the worst. I don't get any trust that the service will stay around, it can completely change along the way to "paid", and I don't get to keep anything in that case.

pj_mukh 6y ago
FWIW, they explain exactly how they'll make money in the website (under Pricing) and in this thread.
- masukomi 6y ago
  we hope to get you dependent upon our product, and in the meantime come up with something we hope you'll be willing to pay for is not the most confidence inducing of business plans. Also, if the current plans are "free forever" have no caps on users or much of anything else and are good enough to use until they actually finish off the things worth paying for then how many folks are actually going to be inclined to pay for them? if it's NOT good enough as-is then why bother using it in the first place?
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    The business model isn't anything special... It's just freemium. Take a look at ProfitWell for instance, they do the same thing: Give away their core product then make money on upsells. Also, building the business model as they go is pretty normal for a startup.
    - mbreese 6y ago
      > building the business model as they go This just means that what used to be free will end up costing money when whatever new features they think they can charge for won't get enough users to cover their costs. This is especially true if the free plan is more than enough for most users. Which, if you're positioning yourself as a Jira alternative -- most users won't need in-depth AI planning for sprints. It's not a great business plan...

autotune 6y ago

Do you offer SSO auth like Okta integration?

grinich 6y ago
Happy to help! :) mg@WorkOS.com
iba99 6y ago
On the roadmap but looks like we should checkout WorkOS :)

gjvc 6y ago

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ is a better option

gjvc 6y ago
...and is open source
rurban 6y ago
And with better humor. "Use sophisticated drag and drop to make sure your project is properly micro managed with Workboards. Grab ahold of tasks, literally. Place them in confusing, new orders. Make a column just for interns! Ignore the backlog forever." They might be british
- Chris2048 6y ago
  - Runs on Linux, Mac OS X - Also "runs" on Windows.

syats 6y ago

Just wanted to mention Redmine, which is actually GPL and can be installed on premises. Looks a bit dated and somehow hard to customize.. but at least you keep your data (ai models, you say?) you get to keep it when "free" is no longer a valid business model.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
See also the OpenProject fork of Redmine. https://www.openproject.org/jira-alternative/ https://www.openproject.org/jira-alternative/

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

"Free" in the title should not mean free-as-in-been on a website called "hacker" news......

mkarliner 6y ago

I really, really don't want another Jira.

iba99 6y ago
Nobody does. It's ridiculous that it takes 21 clicks to create a sprint. We've literally timed ourselves in every Jira instance (cloud and next-gen), and every point of configuration, setup or action just takes hours. A platform for productivity, should have zero to minimal setup, built-in views and it should work hard to get out of your way. If it helps, creating a sprint is 1-click on Tara. And I'm hoping it stays that way!

dvt 6y ago

This is a bit of a meta-discussion (apologies to the people at Tara, they did a fantastic job!), but is the market really large enough for the insane amount of productivity tools that have been released over the past few years? From Airtable, to Monday, to Hugo, to Tara, to Asana, etc., etc. It feels like there's a lot of stagnation here, also. If I was building a product management tool, I would certainly not make it anything like Jira. Jira's a bit of a "dirty word," anyway -- it's a monolithic system that seems to suck more productivity than it generates. Where's the innovation? The last truly revolutionary productivity tool was Slack, and maybe Dropbox before that. I don't mean to throw any shade at the Tara people -- it seems like a ton of work went into the product. But I guess I just don't really get the state of the market (even though I work as an engineer and am often-times force-fed these kinds of tools).

rubyron 6y ago
Software is “eating the world,” as they say, and selling blue jeans and pick axes to gold miners is a perennially solid way to make money.
iba99 6y ago
At it's core, we find it to be an Apple OS vs Windows OS problem. You can either build highly complex project management systems, with 50 different types of subsets, customizations and setup instructions (ie Windows?) or try to design software that just works through simplicity in design and set defaults based on your workflow (ie Apple!). It's an interesting conundrum and one that we think B2B software rarely gets right. Why can't B2B software inspire delight in the user and just work? We've decided to have a laser focus on teams that ship early and often, and help with their workflows, by innovating through design. That being said, we still have a long way to go.
- oaiey 6y ago
  The problem here is that processes in enterprises are never default. Depending on the company the requirement to these processes are always different. Tools like Jira reflect these complexity on us during customization and are rated by their capability to handle them.

dflock 6y ago

Will you supporting: - on-prem - kanban with no sprints?

iba99 6y ago
On prem will take more time - but kanban and calendar views are on the roadmap.

zed88 6y ago

It's an interesting pivot for you guys from building some sort of recruitment AI (I remember seeing it somewhere) to this. Would you mind elaborating this shift? Anyways, Good luck with the launch!Will give this a go.

iba99 6y ago
In our experience building any form of meritocracy in recruiting, was excruciatingly difficult due to 1) inherent subconscious bias on the part of the recruiting team 2) pedigree bias - employers only wanting to view candidates that were from certain ivy league institutions We tried long and hard, for a good 18 months, and it became an arduous battle fraught with the possibility of having to make unethical decisions in the structure of our algorithms. Our whole thesis was to create a system that recommended candidates based on their github repos. Pretty sure someone will solve this problem, but in our experience, it felt like a losing battle since recruiters wanted access to certain types of candidates and were continuing to reject candidates that were surfaced, with non-traditional backgrounds. This was 2015, I think someone will solve this problem with time. The experience did teach us a thing or two about git commits, PRs and the overall experience of productivity through git based systems.

dntrkv 6y ago

https://www.atlassian.com https://www.atlassian.com https://tara.ai https://tara.ai Your branding is awfully similar to Atlassian. Not saying it's intentional, but considering you are pitching yourself as a Jira alternative, it would be wise to differentiate yourselves a bit more. Specifically talking about the logo and color.

divbzero 6y ago
As a current and former user of BitBucket, Confluence, Jira, and HipChat, the look and feel of Tara is miles away from any Atlassian product. After reading the parent comment, it still took me a few times switching back and forth to notice that both logos happen to be triangular and blueish, and even then the logos are easy to distinguish — obtuse vs. acute apex, curved vs. sharp legs, different shades and gradients of blue.
dotancohen 6y ago
You're right. Let my introduce you to "Dotan's Blur Test": Blur your eyes a bit when looking at the two homepages so that the shapes of logos and text disappears but the colours and placement stay the same. I cannot tell the two logos nor pages apart in the blur test. That may draw fire from Atlassian's legal team, and should probably be addressed.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  On second thought, all publicity is good publicity. Maybe drawing the attention of Atlassian would be good from a marketing perspective. They would effectively let Atlassian initiate a comparison between the two products.

nishparadox 6y ago

Hey, our startup recently moved to tara because we couldn't afford jira. Thanks for this tool. We've been using it for a month or two now and the task management seems to be doing fine. Not that we are that much managed, but still tara seems to be a good (and of course, free) alternative to get the things done.

imvetri 6y ago

First read: A jira free alternative. Wait let me reread. A free jira alternative.

xaedes 6y ago

Why is the user in the "terms and conditions" called a "tester"? > this pilot agreement ("agreement") is a legal agreement between you ("tester") and tara intelligence inc. ("company"). company is developing a software platform product offering for managing product development lifecycles ("company platform"), and this agreement governs tester's use of the company platform. by accessing or using the service or by clicking the "i accept" button, tester acknowledges that tester has reviewed and accepts this agreement.

3r8riacz 6y ago
Maybe you always use the beta version for free, and only the paid plan will use the fixed production build?

madrox 6y ago

A little off topic, but has anyone else noticed that when you look at any product that shows off their client list, Cisco is on it most of the time?

chrismorgan 6y ago

When I click on “Release log” near the bottom of the page (which isn’t a link, BTW), it loads https://tara.ai/undefined https://tara.ai/undefined which loads the front page again and then changes its URL back to https://tara.ai/ https://tara.ai/.

steve_taylor 6y ago

Given the timing, I was expecting to see an on-prem alternative to Jira, so this is disappointing.

vaceletm 6y ago
For an on prem alternative to Jira, you can have a look at Tuleap. We (I'm from the dev team) don't aims to re-do a "simple" alternative to jira because there are tons of them and they fall short when things to track get more complex. You can do simple (as github) you can do hellish (as jira) but unlike jira, you don't mandate one model over another (no hundreds of un-necessary fields because someone asked them once). It's GPL, there is an entreprise plan, it's available on prem and cloud.

mister_hn 6y ago

But where can I download it without doing a login and doing self-hosting? Where's the "free"?

gjvc 6y ago

Make no mistake, if it's free, you're the product.

LysPJ 6y ago

Speaking of Jira alternatives, I recently discovered Kitemaker [1], which is really nice. The UI is clean and it's fast too (has keyboard shortcuts for everything, etc). [1] https://kitemaker.co/ https://kitemaker.co/

kevsim 6y ago
Hi. Co-founder of Kitemaker here. Thanks for the kind words! Do let us know if you have any feedback or improvements you'd like to see.

armindou5 6y ago

Really cool initiative! :)

geniium 6y ago

I was interested to test this to see if it could add some values to our team. And am always curious to see what other people come up with. Oh I was disappointed. Logging in on a mobile device was already cumbersome. Finally checked on the desktop and tested a bit. But the UX is so messy! It's really not clean nor simple to use. Would never want to use that with SCRUM. Just having to think about on boarding customer to this tool gives me headaches. Recently, we have switched to https://linear.app https://linear.app (note: I have no affiliation with them). It's just super amazing to use, lots of shortcut, clear, dead simple, well documented. Perfect balance for us. Hope this comments helps both the team behind Tara and some other looking at alternatives.