I had a very negative experience with Jira and Confluence. The context was a very small development team (around 5) in a very small company (under 50), and som

I had a very negative experience with Jira and Confluence. The context was a very small development team (around 5) in a very small company (under 50), and some very inexperienced administrators, so maybe some of those are key factors. And again, I want to emphasize that no one really knew what they were doing with it, including me, so maybe in 20 years I'll have better context that lets me appreciate what Jira was doing for us. Certainly when I read ghshepard's several comments, I think "wow, okay, if you're a much bigger heavier bloatier organization, with much more byzantine needs from an issue tracker, maybe this thing actually has some value!" I eventually got superuser privileges, and spent a lot of time myself trying to figure out how to beat it into getting out of our way and just tracking some frigging tickets. That's a week of my life I'll never have back, with no benefit to anyone. At some point, management decided to double-down, and renew our license, to get an upgrade (I think to Jira 4.0, since this decision was late 2009). Oh my god. For one thing, we wasted SO MUCH TIME on that upgrade. And for another, the dashboard started taking 30-60 seconds to load, because it's suddenly full of clever (read: not clever, not performant) AJAX. And I still don't remember getting anything out of it. Please, Jira, just get the hell out of our way! At this point, if Jira was the only product on the market, I'd rather use one huge text file to track tickets, shared via svn or git. It would offer less useful features, sure, but it'd also offer way way less pain. The main argument anyone could give was that it would have features not present in our other issue tracker, RT 1.0. Uh, y'think? Short summary of my experience: on my small team, in a small company, with no experienced hands to manage it quickly and efficiently, Jira is a big bag of slow-down pain, with nothing to recommend it, and I'd rather use NO tool than use THIS tool. $10 for 10 users sounds like about $1000 too much. Oh, and don't get me started on Confluence. I mean, less pain than Jira, but ZERO useful features (relative to free pain-free alternatives). Why would you ever choose this over Mediawiki? My new company uses ikiwiki, and that's beautiful, and it clocks in under 25kloc of Perl.