6 ms·

I never hear anyone shilling for them, so now is my chance. Anyone who’s looking for a great JIRA alternative, I love Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse). It’s the be

I never hear anyone shilling for them, so now is my chance. Anyone who’s looking for a great JIRA alternative, I love Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse). It’s the best task management software I’ve used aside from the “no task management software” option. Very snappy, updates in real time, notifications make sense, and no workflow-manipulation shenanigans.

Mandatum 5y ago
https://prismic.shortcut.com/pricing https://prismic.shortcut.com/pricing Their pricing and feature breakdown across plans is a joke. Milestones, reporting and roadmap are all top tier features? They're base features on a product like this.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Not once have I wanted reporting or roadmap functionalities as an engineer. Those are management functions, and task management software should serve the people performing the tasks (engineers) first and foremost. Milestones, that’s a bit debatable but still doesn’t seem like core functionality when you have labels and epics.
  - Mandatum 5y ago
    It’s laughable that you think this is an engineer-first product. Management products are used by engineers LAST. You project management stuff beyond your own Trello/TODO.txt once someone from management tells you to.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      That’s the exact misconception that leads to the development of a tool like JIRA. Despite its name, JIRA is a data entry tool first and foremost, and analysis is run a minority of the time. How many engineers vs managers are there at an organization? Many more engineers. So it makes sense that data entry is the heaviest use case.
grayrest 5y ago
> Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) I've been semi-tracking them because they're a local NYC Clojure shop and had wondered how they were handling the social network name overlap. Glad to hear they're still around.
bromuro 5y ago
Shortcut is great, but their UI is slow and outdated.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  How? It seems responsive to me. Most actions result in changing the UI a bit but showing data that’s already preloaded. So no delay waiting for a server roundtrip most of the time.
  - bromuro 5y ago
    We do use extensively in a team of 50+ engineers. Loading an epic may last 10-15 seconds, triggering the buttons to open the pop-ups menu is sluggish, etc. I think the main problem is that the browser has to render so many elements, most of them are not even related to the page I am opening. For example, opening a story, it loads behind hundreds of cards before opening the "modal" dialog. These modal dialogs are the most frustrating experience in SC – they close with the ESC key while you are writing, and it already happened the story I was writing was not saved, despite the obnoxious toast alerts saying the contrary. Modals also often breaks "modals menu" in Safari placing them in random places of the UI. They don't use the whole viewport so there's lot of distracting noise in the whole UI. Some time ago there was some weird cartoonish animations popping out during my work. What a nice idea to consume even more browser resources and get into the middle of your workflow :(
nvch 5y ago
Using Clubhouse was a huge pain. Feeling that even they don’t understand what all their epics, stories and milestones do haunted me all the time. Page load times up to 10 seconds and totally unusable on a big screen (just insanely slow after window size bigger then on avarage laptops). Convincing my company to switch to Linear was better than any holiday.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  The concept confusion is the one annoying thing about it. Too many nouns and no rigorous definitions of them. I’ve never encountered page load times, maybe we just have fewer tickets at my job.
  - afandian 5y ago
    I liked (but was conflicted) Clubhouse enough to end up on a sales call. The person I talked to said much the same, “story” is more or less arbitrary and iirc, there’s no real concept of “bug”. We went with Jira on the end. It’s fine, and we’re not that special. Plus no way to open up issue tracking to the public.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      I’m more speaking to people using Jira who hate it but are encountering the “there’s no good enough alternative” argument. I’m glad the Linear crowd is speaking up; I had never heard of it, but whatever alternatives are available, I hope people start using them more, because Jira is just some of the most frustrating software we have to use these days, and there’s no good reason task management should be this bad.
- jjeremycai 5y ago
  +1 , Linear has been fantastic for us
- johnx123-up 5y ago
  FWIW, Restya Core works good for us. Disclosure: We were privileged to be on their private beta.
brundolf 5y ago
+1, I used it while it was still called Clubhouse and it was very pleasant. Its performance is the biggest thing I miss after changing jobs and having to go back to Jira.
pxue 5y ago
What the heck really? I had the complete exact opposite experience. I actually do wish we are still on jira. it's slow. It's filters make no sense. It's entire flow make no sense.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Filters make no sense? You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing. What flow? It’s a task management software, not a traffic system. I don’t want it manipulating the flow of anything. It provides swimlanes and that’s more than enough for me. I can move any task anywhere at any time which is exactly what I want out of a software — for it to get out of the way.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing. That's where you've lost nearly all the people. Who in their right mind crafts filters. What does this even mean?
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
      "Filter artisans" I suppose. It is impossible to tell how many times I tried to filter out something in Jira only to have everything since before the times or absolutely nothing and needed to scratch that and go back to the defaults. Or hunt down the email with an exact link to the issue.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      Anyone who uses a search engine, tries to find an email, or generally deals with large datasets.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
OrlandoHakim 5y ago
I would like to advocate for Linear.app as an outstanding, fast, polished alternative to Jira for teams looking for an alternative.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  gitlab issues seem fine to me. some of the stuff jira does for managers isn't there i guess, but if gitlab solves the engineers problem, having to find a separate tool that can create artifacts for a manager seems like a better idea anyway, one tool per audience.
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    I think this strength of Jira is its biggest weakness. Trying to do everything for everyone and failing either miserably at everything, or just managing some.
- priansh 5y ago
  If they implemented SSO with Office365/AAD it would be a stellar alternative. The GSuite dependency for SSO is damning
  - Corrado 5y ago
    They do seem to offer generic SAML SSO, so I'm guessing you could hook it into M365 manually if necessary. We use JumpCloud and I'm interested in seeing how Linear might integrate using SAML.
- mikercampbell 5y ago
  I love linear. I'm starting a culinary mushroom farm (small scale) and need to track innoculation/colonisation times and such so I can forecast. Linear was my go-to and I signed up today. I used it at getweave.com and loved using it there
- helsontaveras18 5y ago
  Linear is awesome. It gets out of your way and let’s you focus on creating tickets really quickly. The integration with GitHub means engineers rarely need to update the board since tickets sync with your pull request. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing and so is the performance. I’d highly recommend it.
akvadrako 5y ago
No way is Shortcut snappy, at least for EU users. They used it for my last gig and I mostly avoided it as much as possible because the constant 1-5 second page transitions drove me crazy.
ineedasername 5y ago
I just use todoist. Very simple, you can create a bit of structure if you want it, or just keep it very simple as a to-do list & color code priority. The primary downside is that viewing history (closed tasks) is complete shit. They have an API, and that's the only way of getting history out in any sort of convenient format to review. A very strange oversight. I'm also not sure how well it would scale to large teams.
polski-g 5y ago
What's with people posting "alternatives" to Jira that aren't self hosted? The problem with jira is that it costs $27k/year to self host.
- native_samples 5y ago
  How about YouTrack? It's pretty competent, comes in self hosted and SaaS editions and is very keyboardable.
  - polski-g 5y ago
    Leaning towards that or Mantis
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Having used self-hosted JIRA before I can tell you with confidence that’s far from the only problem with it.
markogresak 5y ago
Based on my experience from 2-3 years ago, I would say to avoid it. It would be a decent pick for a really small team without a lot of product management expectation, which would probably be served just as well by something like trello. Example: We wanted to create tasks from Intercom conversations and the only way was a custom implementation. Using their api was not a pleasant experience. Also there were annoying UI bugs that made the product feel unpolished. I ended up using tampermonkey to fix and improve the UI. We ended up switching to jira and it’s 100% an upgrade, we were happy with the change. People shit on it when it goes down, same as github, but then it’s all fine and dandy the other 99% of the time.

Mandatum 5y ago

https://prismic.shortcut.com/pricing https://prismic.shortcut.com/pricing Their pricing and feature breakdown across plans is a joke. Milestones, reporting and roadmap are all top tier features? They're base features on a product like this.

ironmagma 5y ago
Not once have I wanted reporting or roadmap functionalities as an engineer. Those are management functions, and task management software should serve the people performing the tasks (engineers) first and foremost. Milestones, that’s a bit debatable but still doesn’t seem like core functionality when you have labels and epics.
- Mandatum 5y ago
  It’s laughable that you think this is an engineer-first product. Management products are used by engineers LAST. You project management stuff beyond your own Trello/TODO.txt once someone from management tells you to.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    That’s the exact misconception that leads to the development of a tool like JIRA. Despite its name, JIRA is a data entry tool first and foremost, and analysis is run a minority of the time. How many engineers vs managers are there at an organization? Many more engineers. So it makes sense that data entry is the heaviest use case.

grayrest 5y ago

> Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) I've been semi-tracking them because they're a local NYC Clojure shop and had wondered how they were handling the social network name overlap. Glad to hear they're still around.

bromuro 5y ago

Shortcut is great, but their UI is slow and outdated.

ironmagma 5y ago
How? It seems responsive to me. Most actions result in changing the UI a bit but showing data that’s already preloaded. So no delay waiting for a server roundtrip most of the time.
- bromuro 5y ago
  We do use extensively in a team of 50+ engineers. Loading an epic may last 10-15 seconds, triggering the buttons to open the pop-ups menu is sluggish, etc. I think the main problem is that the browser has to render so many elements, most of them are not even related to the page I am opening. For example, opening a story, it loads behind hundreds of cards before opening the "modal" dialog. These modal dialogs are the most frustrating experience in SC – they close with the ESC key while you are writing, and it already happened the story I was writing was not saved, despite the obnoxious toast alerts saying the contrary. Modals also often breaks "modals menu" in Safari placing them in random places of the UI. They don't use the whole viewport so there's lot of distracting noise in the whole UI. Some time ago there was some weird cartoonish animations popping out during my work. What a nice idea to consume even more browser resources and get into the middle of your workflow :(

nvch 5y ago

Using Clubhouse was a huge pain. Feeling that even they don’t understand what all their epics, stories and milestones do haunted me all the time. Page load times up to 10 seconds and totally unusable on a big screen (just insanely slow after window size bigger then on avarage laptops). Convincing my company to switch to Linear was better than any holiday.

ironmagma 5y ago
The concept confusion is the one annoying thing about it. Too many nouns and no rigorous definitions of them. I’ve never encountered page load times, maybe we just have fewer tickets at my job.
- afandian 5y ago
  I liked (but was conflicted) Clubhouse enough to end up on a sales call. The person I talked to said much the same, “story” is more or less arbitrary and iirc, there’s no real concept of “bug”. We went with Jira on the end. It’s fine, and we’re not that special. Plus no way to open up issue tracking to the public.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    I’m more speaking to people using Jira who hate it but are encountering the “there’s no good enough alternative” argument. I’m glad the Linear crowd is speaking up; I had never heard of it, but whatever alternatives are available, I hope people start using them more, because Jira is just some of the most frustrating software we have to use these days, and there’s no good reason task management should be this bad.
jjeremycai 5y ago
+1 , Linear has been fantastic for us
johnx123-up 5y ago
FWIW, Restya Core works good for us. Disclosure: We were privileged to be on their private beta.

brundolf 5y ago

+1, I used it while it was still called Clubhouse and it was very pleasant. Its performance is the biggest thing I miss after changing jobs and having to go back to Jira.

pxue 5y ago

What the heck really? I had the complete exact opposite experience. I actually do wish we are still on jira. it's slow. It's filters make no sense. It's entire flow make no sense.

ironmagma 5y ago
Filters make no sense? You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing. What flow? It’s a task management software, not a traffic system. I don’t want it manipulating the flow of anything. It provides swimlanes and that’s more than enough for me. I can move any task anywhere at any time which is exactly what I want out of a software — for it to get out of the way.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing. That's where you've lost nearly all the people. Who in their right mind crafts filters. What does this even mean?
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    "Filter artisans" I suppose. It is impossible to tell how many times I tried to filter out something in Jira only to have everything since before the times or absolutely nothing and needed to scratch that and go back to the defaults. Or hunt down the email with an exact link to the issue.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Anyone who uses a search engine, tries to find an email, or generally deals with large datasets.
    - dmitriid 5y ago

OrlandoHakim 5y ago

I would like to advocate for Linear.app as an outstanding, fast, polished alternative to Jira for teams looking for an alternative.

galangalalgol 5y ago
gitlab issues seem fine to me. some of the stuff jira does for managers isn't there i guess, but if gitlab solves the engineers problem, having to find a separate tool that can create artifacts for a manager seems like a better idea anyway, one tool per audience.
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  I think this strength of Jira is its biggest weakness. Trying to do everything for everyone and failing either miserably at everything, or just managing some.
priansh 5y ago
If they implemented SSO with Office365/AAD it would be a stellar alternative. The GSuite dependency for SSO is damning
- Corrado 5y ago
  They do seem to offer generic SAML SSO, so I'm guessing you could hook it into M365 manually if necessary. We use JumpCloud and I'm interested in seeing how Linear might integrate using SAML.
mikercampbell 5y ago
I love linear. I'm starting a culinary mushroom farm (small scale) and need to track innoculation/colonisation times and such so I can forecast. Linear was my go-to and I signed up today. I used it at getweave.com and loved using it there
helsontaveras18 5y ago
Linear is awesome. It gets out of your way and let’s you focus on creating tickets really quickly. The integration with GitHub means engineers rarely need to update the board since tickets sync with your pull request. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing and so is the performance. I’d highly recommend it.

akvadrako 5y ago

No way is Shortcut snappy, at least for EU users. They used it for my last gig and I mostly avoided it as much as possible because the constant 1-5 second page transitions drove me crazy.

ineedasername 5y ago

I just use todoist. Very simple, you can create a bit of structure if you want it, or just keep it very simple as a to-do list & color code priority. The primary downside is that viewing history (closed tasks) is complete shit. They have an API, and that's the only way of getting history out in any sort of convenient format to review. A very strange oversight. I'm also not sure how well it would scale to large teams.

polski-g 5y ago

What's with people posting "alternatives" to Jira that aren't self hosted? The problem with jira is that it costs $27k/year to self host.

native_samples 5y ago
How about YouTrack? It's pretty competent, comes in self hosted and SaaS editions and is very keyboardable.
- polski-g 5y ago
  Leaning towards that or Mantis
ironmagma 5y ago
Having used self-hosted JIRA before I can tell you with confidence that’s far from the only problem with it.

markogresak 5y ago

Based on my experience from 2-3 years ago, I would say to avoid it. It would be a decent pick for a really small team without a lot of product management expectation, which would probably be served just as well by something like trello. Example: We wanted to create tasks from Intercom conversations and the only way was a custom implementation. Using their api was not a pleasant experience. Also there were annoying UI bugs that made the product feel unpolished. I ended up using tampermonkey to fix and improve the UI. We ended up switching to jira and it’s 100% an upgrade, we were happy with the change. People shit on it when it goes down, same as github, but then it’s all fine and dandy the other 99% of the time.