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Show HN: Tara 2.0 – Fast Jira alternative with automation based on Git events
- iba99 5y agoHi folks, we launched to ShowHN over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387 Since then, we've continued to chip away at the problem of building responsive project management software, that syncs to Git source control and works with no setup. A re-designed Atlassian stack if you will, with automation based on Git events. So we can finally stop updating tickets as often as we do; the work is already in git, and it should be automatically reflected in our issue tracking or project management software. With support from HN, we’re getting closer to this mission. You've spent time with us in calls, video sessions and over boba, to talk through how you ship mission-critical product updates, and how Jira continues to frustrate your teams, because it just wasn't designed for shipping. Today, we're releasing a host of new features. Tara AI 2.0 delivers a new design optimized for creation, zero loads, automated workflows, and our new restful API. Also, you can now create tasks, requirements, with automated roll-over for sprints, in 1/4th of the time it takes in typical PM software. We've created a hierarchy system with a universal work drawer, so work can be viewed and organized across the workspace. As always, our free plan is still free for unlimited users, with upgrades available to premium or co-pilot plans. I'd love to hear your feedback & thoughts. Thanks!
- jotato 5y agoLogin with google isn't working. I'm redirect to google, select my account, and then I'm sent back to the login page. edit: I just created an account using my email instead. You give a 404 after clicking "take me to my workspace" after the onboarding flow.
- iba99 5y agoThanks for reporting this! Please try a page refresh or typing in /logout and heading back to login again. This may happen with certain browsers or configurations - it's happening rarely so we still need to properly debug. Let us know if you've been able to get into your workspace.
- syed99 5y agoHi, it might be a cache issue with your user object. I’d suggest navigating to app.tara.ai/logout and then try logging back in.
- gigatexal 5y agolooks super clean. Jira is powerful but the UI sucks
- iba99 5y agoThanks giga, let us know how you get on with the platform as you start using it! We've thought about work hierarchy and how to create persistent states across the workspace with the universal drawer. It allows fast task, doc and subtask creation. The ideal here is to get to a point where you don't have to think about creating, it happens naturally.
- ddon 5y agoWhy startups don't try to break this charge per user per month thing? Would be great to have products which would charge like $10 a month for up to 5 users or so... why so greedy and charge 10 per user? So, if small team of 5..10 people, at $8 a month per user, is like $100 a month for single service. And if startup needs like 5..10 different services to pay, it becomes like a pretty good amount for paying for different services.
- syed99 5y agoHi ddon, one of the founders here. I personally do agree on flipping the pricing models to be more inclusive. We’ve tried our best to make them as cost effective as possible and even go as far as allowing unlimited users on a free plan. When we were working on pricing, we looked into everything from compute costs per user, data storage per workspace, new feature development, marketing costs and much more over the span of time. We came up with our pricing based off those costs and hence on our lower plans we’re still under the price of similar tools. We’d love to, in the future figure out more flexible ways to price our users but at the same time maintain the service and growing feature set. I can assure you that we definitely gave having a Spotify family plan like pricing model a thought. In the mean time we are working with startups to accommodate their needs as they move into paid plans by offering discounts on long term commitments, we’re always open to discussions with our users and helping them stay empowered on our platform.
- rocmcd 5y agoBecause per user pricing is in line with the value you are receiving as a customer. If you are not receiving $XXX dollars per month in value, why use the service at all? You are trading money for time and efficiency, after all.
- gexla 5y agoIf you're actually employing 5 people then $100 is nothing for service which is central to your work. If it's 5 people not making money, then maybe you don't need a proprietary service.
- brightball 5y ago
- Nelkins 5y agoI love the pun on the front page. Will definitely be keeping an eye on this.
- iba99 5y agoHere's a few that didn't make the cut: The Dev files - the source code is out there Dancing with the git stars. (I could go on).
- dsr_ 5y agoCan I self-host it? The only reason we're going to move away from JIRA is that Atlassian dropped server installs and is moving everyone to their cloud or datacenter products. Have a great conversion from JIRA and a reasonably-priced self-hosted option, we'll be looking at you in six months.
- syed99 5y agoIts definitely something we've been exploring when putting our product roadmap together. I'm curious though, if we had a private cloud instance vs self hosted? I'd love to understand why self hosted would be the option you'd go for.
- superMutex 5y agoIn our case it's due to regulations in place. For example, our data must stay on Canadian servers at all times.
- syed99 5y agoMakes a lot more sense now, the flexibility to configure to your own resources for regulatory reasons.
- tyingq 5y agoYou'll probably also encounter people who are a bit jaded after their experience with Jira's hosted cloud versus on-prem. Jira on-prem can be slow also, but at least you can throw ridiculous amounts of hardware at it and make it okay-ish.
- syed99 5y agoWe had a horrendous experience with on-prem during my last tenure. A lot of it came from lack of support and performance improvements. Atlassian has its way to strong arm it’s biggest customers into paying more or throwing in sub processors in the mix. At some point we had IT, Dev Ops and Engineering consultants trying to get our workflows running. Eventually we caved and pushed their account execs to support a “secure” private cloud that passed our IT teams compliance criteria. Fun times!
- Aeolun 5y agoI like this, but my enterprise will not be switching away from Jira any time soon, which is my main problem with all these new fancy services. It just shows me what is possible, but I can never have.
- syed99 5y agoI do agree it’s hard, I’d love to know though, if there was a way for you to use the tool internally. How would you envision that happening, could it be a plugin, something working side by side JIRA perhaps?
- Aeolun 5y agoWell, for tools of this kind, they could never be hosted, it would have to be on-premise. I think if a tool like this would ever be adopted the first thing it’d need to do is sync with Jira, so things that happen in the tool happen in Jira too, and vice versa. I’m not too sure though, I guess I kind of feel that the inertia is just too big. Unless it can do the same things that people (not developers, business people) want to do with Jira all the time (add thousands of custom fields, do arbitrary queries on those, build lots of unuseable dashboards, tens of different issue types with different fields and tabs for each, link issues with semantic types) and do them better, Jira will never be replaced. I guess what I’d hope for is a way I can use the app while not having to deal with Jira, but then so much of our process is based on obscure Jira features that I’m not sure it’s possible.
- xyst 5y agoTrue. The decision makers at Fortune 500s usually don’t care about the performance of the tool. I find companies that offer all in one solutions (ie, Microsoft Teams vs just using Slack) have better chances at securing a contract. My company has probably paid out millions per year for a lesser product just so it integrates with existing software and services (outlook, office products like excel, office 365, azure ad, …). Plus they only have to deal with one vendor.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoI honestly wouldn't use such a tool for anything mid to large size. Git is kind of a nightmare. Now, an SQL database, or a distributed key-value store, I would use as a backend.
- nonameiguess 5y agoI don't believe they mean they're using git as the data store for the application. Sync with git means updating tickets based on parsing action commands embedded in commit messages pushed to your git server. Jira can actually do this, too, though I think you need to be using Bitbucket as your git server.
- allset_ 5y agoYou do not need to use Bitbucket, works with Github too.
- chrisweekly 5y agoGitlab, too -- tho Jira still sucks.
- iba99 5y agoHere are the issues though with Jira's Github integration: 1- Requires unito or an additional plugin to truly function 2- Needs quite a bit of setup to get minimal value 3- No built-in dashboards optimized for git events (ie when is a PR merged, predicted vs actual, how does that relate to your team's current sprint). 4- One-directional sync (vs a true bi-directional sync). We've optimized for built-in dashboards, minimal setup and a bi-directional sync. Over time, we're also going to be building inside the terminal or inside Github's interface, to truly enable seamless interactions with Git.
- syed99 5y agoWe use Firestore as our DB :) I don’t think git and LFS as a hosting service could take us beyond a hundred users.
- chris1993 5y agoI looked but can't see in the FAQ or anywhere - do you provide a way to migrate from Jira and do you integrate with bitbucket?
- syed99 5y agoHi there, we currently don’t have a bitbucket integration but it’s on our roadmap towards the end of the year. We will however be updating our migrate tools early Q4 with Jira/Confluence mapping.
- korginator 5y agoAny plans of supporting kanban boards in future? We find that kanban works very nicely to manage certain types of projects, and we're currently using Jira's kanban features for many projects. I'd love to see alternatives. Sync'ing with self-hosted Git servers would be good to have. Many of our projects are hosted on Git servers in a "secure network" behind a corporate VPN that, for legal and commercial reasons, cannot be hosted externally. Any thoughts on this?
- syed99 5y agoWe do plan on supporting kanban views over the next few months. It’s a WIP along with list views. The question about self hosted git servers, we do support them but not officially through the GitHub app which is on the App Store. We do have a fully compatible backend that can integrate with any self hosted git using webhooks, we haven’t exposed those to users as of yet.
- korginator 5y agoThanks for the response, though my question was more about whether you've thought through how your webhooks based approach can work through VPNs. For example, one of the organisations I work with uses a CheckPoint capsule VPN with some non-standard configuration that's controlled by their IT department that manages and supports client workstations. To even access the Git server requires the user to be connected through VPN. I suppose you'll need Tara to follow the same route to the Git server that's sitting behind this VPN, right? This would be quite a different story than having Tara connect to a public facing self-hosted Git server, e.g., on our own data center or on AWS. I suspect this will he a hard (impossible?) problem to solve unless Tara itself goes self-hosted and is on the same VPC as the Git server behind our VPN.
- syed99 5y agoThanks for clarifying. Yes this would be fairly different and requires an extra layer or configuration on our backend. You’re absolutely right about following the same route to the server per user and since our current configuration allows a workspace level workflow, we would have to write some middleware to handle this use case. You are absolutely right about a self hosted solution being the better workaround which means it resides on an internally accessible network where the setup experience would be much more seamless.
- ukd1 5y agoThe website is super slow for me, which doesn't feel like a good thing.
- manigandham 5y agoCongrats on the new launch Iba and Syed, I still remember meeting you guys years ago in LA, you've come a long way! I'll echo some of the other comments here that most of the bigger companies I've worked with want a better JIRA but are weary of smaller companies, data security, and the switching costs involved. Is there a way to offer this on top of the existing Atlassian tools? A similar model would be something like Scratchpad for Salesforce: https://scratchpad.com/ https://scratchpad.com/
- iba99 5y agoHey Mani! Great to see you here- it's been a while. You read our minds. We are thinking about how we can integrate with Jira for a truly sync'ed experience (since several teams have suggested using our interface to make updates in Jira + since we have simple built-in dashboards it just makes it easier to use for everyone). The challenge is to design it in such a way, that you don't have to spend a ton of time configuring the integration, mapping fields or needing a dedicated engineer for setup. We're on it - in the meantime would love to hear your feedback if you get the chance to try out Tara.
- anticodon 5y agoWe use JIRA and GitLab at work. In the GitLab CI/CD configuration we define a few hooks that update JIRA task status on various events (MR is created, MR is merged, etc). It's a bit of manual work but it's working flawlessly for years. How is it different from this offer?
- syed99 5y agoIt works the same way for the automations but it’s a one click set up for GitHub. It’s makes it easier for Team leads or people who may not have the resources to bind together workflows and it ensures consistency in experience. Secondly we also infer statuses on PRs and through CI/CD that let you know where features are in the pipeline (coming very soon). Our aim is to make powerful git event drive features more accessible with the least amount of configuration.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoIt's not a "Jira alternative" in any sense. (Well, maybe in the sense that any issue tracker can be a Jira alternative.) If you really want a Jira alternative, look at Youtrack.
- a-dub 5y agoi'm just going to throw out a few questions asking if features i wish these kinds of systems had are in here. maybe they are, and if they aren't, hopefully it's helpful! what is the workflow like for going from a commit id (ala git-blame) to all available discussion and context around that change? is there any sort of unified search through history that shows both changes and all discussion/context around them? (pull requests, kanban cards, related issues and prs, design docs/sketches/etc, slack threads) is there any workflow/smarts for detecting recurring issues/bugs/fixes? i used to ask "can you drive most of it by email" ... i guess these days it's "can you drive most of it by chat integration?"
- syed99 5y agoThats something we're working on i.e most of our R&D goes here, we've been building up capacity on getting contextual data from the commits/PR's and possibly from slack too and then surfacing it as meta data as a first step. For example being able to identify questions, solutions, possible additions to documentation. The aim is to eventually pass on that data or use it for smarter inference like catching duplicates, bug frequency, reintroduction of code and possibly identifying tech debt. Our vision has been to go ticketless, while we're supplying the tooling to make those tickets today, in the future contextual information from different systems could provide enough context to do that work.
- buro9 5y agoTell me about the sync... how complete is it? And the pricing... how do you accommodate OSS projects? Our scenario is that our work comes in from multiple places, i.e; OSS community (one repo), SaaS offering (another repo) and Enterprise offering (another repo). What we're trying to achieve is a single pane of glass for a team to see all of their work, but the work to remain in the respective repos. So whatever tool we use must treat Github Issues as the system of record, and any tool must reflect what it does in Github. And further, it would be great to make that single pane of glass dynamic... i.e; I'm a Prometheus engineer and I want to create a team/project that aggregates all work on Alertmanager across all of the big projects that use it (even the ones that exist in other orgs). ACK that our use-case may be at the extremes of what others do, so it's cool if this is not yet possible. Additionally with the OSS repos per-user licensing of potentially all contributors is a tough ask, we would have no control over our pricing and most contributors would be idle... they're not employees, but we'd want to ensure the community could use/see the same tools that we would use, how could we enable community involvement in the tools without exposing ourselves to a loss of control over the operating costs of it?
- stunt 5y agoIt's hard to tell if it's it integrated with Git directly or only via Github & Gitlab! Both Github and Gitlab have built-in project management features! Why should I use a different tool if I'm using Github/Gitlab?
- syed99 5y agoWith GitHub we sync all the issues in real time. So all changes you make in Tara reflect on GitHub issues too. We make it easier for larger teams who run sprints and require a more accessible interface work better together i.e designers, PMs and EMs. For the Gitlab for the time being we only allow connection of issue tickets to MRs and some organized views of commits and MRs in our progress mode.
- wyuenho 5y agoAny integration with Notion on the roadmap? How do teams migrate from JIRA to Tara?
- iba99 5y agoWe just launched an API and should have a migration tool soon. Right now, it's typically a simple CSV import of issues, but the data mapping doesn't work too well with Jira's data. So far, it's been a trojan horse approach. A small team starts using Tara, enjoys the experience, and it starts to spread within the organization. Startups have been our bread & butter, but we also have small teams at larger enterprises using it. The long game is to continue with the approach of allowing small teams to use Tara, and go under the radar for as long as possible. As for Notion integration, yup, it's on the roadmap. Our integrations roadmap should get faster now that our restful API fully releases this week.
- Gravityloss 5y agoConfluence is excellent. Jira is too slow and a big productivity brake. Tara seems interesting.
- iba99 5y agoOne other thing we've noticed is how slow Confluence and Jira are together. It's fascinating that stitching these products together under one Atlassian service (through acquisitions) hasn't served to provide a good or modern user experience. We built our "define" feature to allow for spec'ing, and docs. And let's not forget how frustrating markdown is in confluence. We're working to really service markdown well in our text editor, and should have it released soon.