37 ms·

Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

638 points by viharkurama 3y ago

kschrader 3y ago
Having spent 7 years now building https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/ it's very clear to me that at a certain point in the life-cycle of many organizations a bunch of people get hired who can only "think in Jira" and the vast majority of feature requests are attempts to get us to add whatever feature(s) they love using. Conversations about why it's bad for developers or product managers or attempts to show them how to get the same value in another way often fall on deaf ears (or don't happen at all) because it's the only way that they know how to work. One of the key indicators that this is happening is when people start saying things like "this can't do Agile because it doesn't have PET_FEATURE" Jira isn't just software, it's a way of working that's become the de facto standard, and it's hard to get out of that box for a lot of people.
- 3riverdev 3y ago
  For what it's worth, thank you for fighting this fight. Shortcut has been a fantastic tool for us as a direct result of it doing things differently and more naturally. Please don't change that!
smallsaas 3y ago
Beware its open core https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1171 https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1171
jimbru 3y ago
What's the tl;dr comparison with Linear?
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Hey, Linear is opinionated in it's philosophy of Project management and the usage of terminology. We do accommodate all the features that linear has in a general way. Plane is extensible where users can build the framework of their choice.
- esafak 3y ago
  Can you compare it with Height too?
  - viharkurama 3y ago
    Height is a very general tool with it's focus on various kinds of teams. With Plane you do that as well. But it's focus is more on the Method. Method or the framework of choice that the team wants to use to manage their projects.
donalhunt 3y ago
How widespread is Ctrl + K -> insert URL?? Because using it for something else could cause confusion (already encountered on other platforms).
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's the cross browser shortcut for "search with default search engine". At least on the browsers I usually encounter it is. These types of shortcut key overrides are why I've got them disabled in my browser by default.
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    For anyone else frustrated, a quick workaround is to do Ctrl+FK instead of Ctrl+K on offending websites. Focuses the browser UI's search input which then makes the Ctrl+K bubble up from the browser UI instead of the website's document tree.
- quasarj 3y ago
  I definitely use it, and you're right that's going to be confusing. But maybe worth it..
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  It's very common across lots of platforms. Slack overrides it, and it irritates me (although I have adjusted to Slack's alternative which is that Cmd/Ctrl+V turns selected text into a link with the clipboard URL, which is actually really slick).
smallerfish 3y ago
I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that at the top of your copy.) Also, please consider finding a native english copywriter to take a run at your writing. It's readable, but not fluent, and overly filled with jargon.
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We will definitely work on it.
  - nberkman 3y ago
    One advantage you have: a BAA, required for HIPAA compliance, is only available with a very expensive Enterprise plan. For HIPAA compliant organizations, a self-hosted alternative could be very attractive.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      If I'm not mistaken, they want a minimum of 800 seats to sign a BAA. It's absolutely crazy, and forced my company to choose a significantly worse product in its place. Edit: for Plane, the GPT powered pages are a non-starter for HIPAA unless the feature can be completely disabled.
- justinpombrio 3y ago
  One feature they have that Jira does not: the ability for a customer to avoid multi-week outages. Jira went down for some customers and took weeks to restore. A customer could avoid this possibility by hosting locally, but I hear Jira is phasing out local hosting while Plane lists it as a feature. Another feature Plane probably has: not being horribly laggy. You could make a ticket in Jira with a bunch of links or whatever the hell it is that makes Jira load so slowly, and make an identical ticket in Plane, and compare the loading times. From my Jira experiences it shouldn't be hard to be 10x faster. https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/252515706/Atlassian-cloud-outage-could-take-days-to-resolve https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/252515706...
echelon 3y ago
Please build a startup on this. I don't want to run a Jira alternative myself. I'll pay you to do it for me. Edit: looks like you do [1]! Perfect! I'll sign up shortly and give it a spin. [1] https://plane.so https://plane.so
- viharkurama 3y ago
  thanks echelon, we are working hard to make it happen in a more simple and extensible way. Also Open source :)
simmanian 3y ago
I've been looking for a competitive open source alternative to Jira for a non-profit I volunteer at because they cannot afford to pay for any cloud service and Trello has its limitations. Does Plane offer all pro features for open source instances as well? Does it support login via Google or other identity providers?
- fmjrey 3y ago
  A good alternative to jira and other tools used in application lifecycle management is tuleap [1]. The PM/agile part is very configurable and it is also offering integrated wiki, gitolite, and hooks to integrate with some CI/CD. Also LDAP and OpenID integration is available in the community edition [2]. [1] https://www.tuleap.org/ https://www.tuleap.org/ [2] https://docs.tuleap.org/administration-guide/users-management/security/user-authentication.html https://docs.tuleap.org/administration-guide/users-managemen...
- smallerfish 3y ago
  Check out Youtrack - not open source, but free if you have 10 or fewer users.
  - simmanian 3y ago
    we are trying to work with ~35 volunteers for this purpose, but i will check it out nonetheless.
  - viharkurama 3y ago
    Youtrack is great but complicated with it's UX. Code level extensibility with Project management tools is near zero. We are working on our extensibility framework called Propel, it gives you the ability to write code with React to extend Plane. Open-sourcing in Q3 2023.
    - shamiln 3y ago
      Now this extensibility is what I’m interested in, as I’m working in a project which needs front end extensibility and have no idea where to start!
jacobsenscott 3y ago
Can it auto-delete issues untouched for the last 30 days? Idk if jira can, but this would be the single biggest productivity boost to any organization forced to use this sort of software.
- simmanian 3y ago
  for jira (and I assume many other similar products), it is definitely possible
- ezekg 3y ago
  Why would you want to do that? I personally hate those “stale issue” bots on GitHub, and this sounds like the same.
  - jacobsenscott 3y ago
    Sounds like you've never worked on a project with hundreds or even thousands of backlogged issues that will never be worked on - it is the same as being deleted except is causes visual clutter.
  - MobiusHorizons 3y ago
    Like it or hate it, there just isn’t enough time and energy to do all the things you might like to do. Triaging and prioritizing are usually best done manually, but “it hasn’t been worked on” is a cheap and acceptably accurate proxy for “not that important” for some teams.
    - alkonaut 3y ago
      Taking a bug report and making a good workitem might be a lot of work. If the same thing happens 2 years later you'd need to do the same work again if you already deleted the bug workitem. If the old stale bug ticket was still around you'd both have a) saved the work of writing it again because you would find it when searching and b) have a very good indication that the bug you are triaging might not be that serious because it has been seen before and not prioritized. You could just automatically mark it "stale" or whatever instead of hiding it, which would give the best of both worlds. Automatic sunset for the item, without the duplicated effort.
29athrowaway 3y ago
It's weird that the landing page has "Joe" and "Leo" (uncommon names in India), as placeholder users, but the authors are from India.
- gervwyk 3y ago
  It is weird to hight this as feedback. Choosing very common names for a product intended for a global audience. How is that weird?
  - 29athrowaway 3y ago
    It is just weird to me that using those names was perceived as a necessary step.
    - viharkurama 3y ago
      I agree to the idea of not ignoring Indian names. We do have India names as well on certain screenshots. To distribute well we used all kinds of names. We tried our best to globalize.
    - pdappollonio 3y ago
      Native Spanish speaker that builds software for English speaking markets: I don't think I would write a software or make screenshots where I would think first to put names like Juan or Pedro in them if the target audience is English speakers. When you're writing English it just feels like the names flow better, that's all (like, avoiding stutter in a sentence, but with names). I don't think it would be fair to say we're just not honoring our roots
      - 29athrowaway 3y ago
        Why not? Also you could use "Joe" and "Pedro" instead. To me it seems even more global.
        viharkurama 3y ago
findthebug 3y ago
mmh, on ipad i cant add an new issue. my issues > add issue. enter title/desc, click add issue. issue is not saved, all fields blank
DrAwesome 3y ago
I played around with Plane locally a little bit about a month ago - I think it's really promising! I wish the documentation was a little better, though; I had to dig around through the source code to figure out how to get the OpenAI/GPT-powered features to work locally. I also wish it supported the gpt-3.5-turbo model instead of relying on the InstructGPT models (like text-davinci-003) for those features (while this isn't exactly a "chat" use-case, I think the chat model would still do a good job, and the 1/10 token cost would be nice). I'm planning to set up a Plane instance for my friend group as soon as it supports OpenID Connect (SAML would work as well, but I imagine OIDC is coming first, since it's a lot more sane). We have some small projects we maintain, and we desperately need a nice issue tracking tool like this.
throwuwu 3y ago
Walk through video please. For people on mobile checking it out it’s more convenient to watch a short video. Serious about short, I’m not going to start a half hour long video while browsing. Also subtitles.
- kjs3 3y ago
  And a pony. They must provide a complimentary pony. An Andalusian...I wouldn't be caught dead on some common draft horse. Also a stable.
- NegativeK 3y ago
  It's an open source project. PRs would probably be welcomed.
aetherspawn 3y ago
Has anyone had a play with this and know whether it supports multiple different issue types and/or tiered issues (parent/child-level1/child-level2)?
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Hey, we do have a feature of nested issues as part of Plane. You can go n-levels. You can have different type of issues via labelling.
  - aetherspawn 3y ago
    Thanks, our use-case is requirements management and n-level support is perfect. I think labelling would get us out of the woods. Schema would be preferable, but there’s no reason why labeling won’t work. I plan to give it a go at our consultancy next week, thanks
rst 3y ago
Just about any ticketing system (including the established open-source ones) could be described as an "alternative to JIRA", even if bare-bones, so you might be better off describing the unique capabilities or UX that makes this one special. (And if mentioning JIRA at all, say what you offer to people converting -- $dayjob would probably be interested in one that seamlessly imports tickets with extra custom attributes and custom workflow which refers to them, but implementing that is not an easy lift.)
- jrockway 3y ago
  You reminded me of Jira's most hilarious feature; if you type JIRA in a ticket, it auto-corrects it to "Jira". This one better do that or, uh, it's one less checkmark on the comparison chart!
icemelt8 3y ago
inb4 . they use Discord and Docker, I will not use it
- bogwog 3y ago
  Discord I understand, but Docker?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zmmmmm 3y ago
Worth noting - I am not sure how the legalities of it all map out but although it is Apache licensed, it appears to depend on MinIO which is AGPL for self-hosting. That may be just a swappable back end S3 layer but if you want to self host this you may need to be comfortable with AGPL (for those in environments that are allergic to AGPL ...)
oefnak 3y ago
Are there mobile clients for Android and/or iOS?
charles_f 3y ago
> Open Source JIRA [...] in the simplest way possible Mmh. I like that it's opensource, that way product owners can become even more inventive with great ways of making a process cumbersome
spyremeown 3y ago
Please, kill Jira and Confluence. I hate Atlassian tools so much. The user interfaces are sluggish no matter the hardware you're using... it's a shame it became almost a standard in our industry.
- gabrielgio 3y ago
  I just opened a view mode page in confluence, and it made >400 calls until fully loaded. ~80 XHR calls and >300 js files being loaded, in what world that is acceptable? Indeed it is a shame that they still a thing.
gexla 3y ago
Seems to me that "open source alternative" is missing the key thing which the company provides. Which is support, and a button for "call us" as an enterprise plan.
jupp0r 3y ago
"Alternative to JIRA" makes me cringe. Why would you put the most hated brand of all issue trackers in your pitch line?
- halestock 3y ago
  It's also the most widely used of all issue trackers.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    That makes it even worse!
- snthpy 3y ago
  That was my first thought as well. So glad someone else said it.
- malikNF 3y ago
  Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say here. If JIRA is the "most hated" brand and at the same time a very popular issue tracker, then "Alternative to JIRA" sounds like, "here's an alternative to the product you so hate" isn't it ? I mean why would I look for an alternative if I didn't hate the thing I am working with or thought it was not good enough?
nnurmanov 3y ago
It seems, over an extended period of development, any enterprise software tends to become equally hated:)
- da39a3ee 3y ago
  Right, so perhaps the answer to that is not to make your software "Enterprise". There are a lot of idiots in management; do not give them what they ask for if you want your product to retain any vestiges of quality.
deepak_sozial 3y ago
[flagged]
- nine_k 3y ago
  (I wonder what do these "1 ." at the end of some sentences mean.)
  - lobochrome 3y ago
    it's a glitch. hush. don't disturb the transformer.
atbpaca 3y ago
This looks nice. I will have a look. Meanwhile, does it have a Gantt view?
- kaliara 3y ago
  Looks like they just announced Gantt on the changelog: https://plane.so/changelog https://plane.so/changelog
throwaway290 3y ago
Spamming description with emoji is certainly one way to show a project is serious...
MobiusHorizons 3y ago
From a brief look at the code, it appears to be written in python. I am surprised at that choice for an application that has speed as a goal. Of course database performance is likely to dominate, but every bit adds up. I feel like I’ve only heard bad things about trying to maintain a service written in python long term (both from a performance perspective, as well as ease of code maintenance). This is not first hand knowledge though. Does anyone here have experience to comment on the wisdom of using python in an application like this?
- rirze 3y ago
  From what I can tell, it's Python for the API server, Typescript for everything else. FWIW, Python servers like this are just a wrapper around `gunicorn` or some other performant low level tool. For some teams, it's easier to define a schema in Python for a couple years now due to some very innovative libraries with easy-to-use decorators. I have no personal experience with using it in production or for an extended amount of time however.
fijiaarone 3y ago
Im glad there is finally an open source app with a UI that has more white space than content.
pfych 3y ago
I tried setting this up on my homelab via docker. Not only did it take ages to build, I found it really difficult to run it behind an already configured nginx instance, it seemed set on running its own one. There's an open ticket on the repo to improved the docker setup experience, I'll definitely be checking this out in a few months once its all be streamlined.
- fffrantz 3y ago
  It seems ok with podman but I can never login using the default credentials. Build time was indeed pretty long as well, and throwing all kinds of errors. I think if you set it up with an IP address, it doesn't run an nginx container to front the whole thing.
pachico 3y ago
I don't know how Plane is but I know very well how Jira is and it definitely needs a viable alternative.
- kritikaup1403 3y ago
  You should give Plane a try then. It is as simple as it can get.
slushh 3y ago
How do you manage the coherence of the entirety of the tickets? E.g. how do you make sure that the tasks of tickets don't overlap or that there is more than one ticket for a task? *edit: For me, backlog views are not enough to structure tickets in a meaningful way. Does Plane have a view to fluidly manage all open tickets?
nixarn 3y ago
Damn so many negative comments here. I think it looks decent, and will probably try it out, paying $10/user/month for something as simple as an issue tracker is annoying. I get that bigger organizations have more feature requirements, but for many companies, we just need a simple issue tracker that's not jira (very biased against jira from my experience, but it's probably gotten better)
alonsozzz 3y ago
Probably the best feature of Linear is realtime sync, that is also what makes it feel so good to use (it writes to memory first so everything is instant). This seems like it doesn't have that, so it lacks a pretty big selling point.
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Plane will also support Real-time, shipping soon :)
unixhero 3y ago
Plans: Plane Free - Free forever Forever, are you sure about that?
- keyle 3y ago
  The plane free plan is ;)
xiaodai 3y ago
I just want a simple customisable ghant chart
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Plane's Gantt Chart component is completely built from scratch and is open-source. Still in early stages, but we expect a stable version by mid-june. https://github.com/makeplane/plane/tree/develop/apps/app/components/gantt-chart https://github.com/makeplane/plane/tree/develop/apps/app/com...
ceving 3y ago
It seems to have no way to define own workflows. This is no alternative to Jira.
tompandolfi 3y ago
Looks great, our team will be trying it out next month
bipson 3y ago
The Problem with Jira is not that it's dumb or too sophisticated. The first problem is that everyone, even in the same team or org, needs something different from it. Sometimes it is even single individuals needing one particular thing one time, and the same day for another workflow or view another thing. It is when Jira caters to the wrong use case for you right now where the a lot of frustration arises. In a similar vein, it wants to cater devs, coaches, POs, business people, customers and all of them over various orgs with drastically different workflows. Serving everyone equally must lead to a mediocre experience. You will always miss something, while there is so much stuff you don't need or want and you have to work around. Arguably, this has become better a lot in the last 10 years, but you will always long for "something better". But the most painful issue is that in some orgs Jira is the workflow, instead of supporting it and staying in the background. At some point people are only sending around ticket links, commenting on tickets, requesting people monitoring their queues. This creates overhead, redirection and Jira becomes a distraction you need to handle. As a result Jira becomes a proxy for all the things going wrong with your daily work and a problem of its own.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Catering to many different kinds of people explains some of the bad stuff, but it does not explain, why seemingly every single Atlassian product including Jira sucks at parsing Markdown or supporting Markdown well. In the big picture maybe some things suffer from catering to too many audiences, but in the small, it is just lack of good engineering. Basically any markdown parser you can install at no cost and even with pushover license for any popular programming language works better than what they cobbled together. Is it a case of some "senior" person sitting somewhere sheltering their brain child? Also they seem to be immune to feedback, which they wanted to collect in Confluence, using some popups.
  - edude03 3y ago
    It does explain it though? Not everyone who uses Atlassian products use markdown, and I'm pretty confident that the biggest users of Jira aren't software engineers so why would they invest time and effort there?
steve1977 3y ago
The problem is not Jira the software, but what corporate people are doing with it. No, you're not "agile" just because you have scrum sprints in Jira.
joduplessis 3y ago
Very nice! Good job to the team - looks great. Crazy how you can jump into so many codebases & find React/Next/Tailwind.
Aleklart 3y ago
Now suffering free of charge
AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
I remember using JIRA like 12 years ago, as a developer. We had a big "issues" list. It was a plain table, really easy to scan and see progress. Ten+ years later I had to use Jira in another company and now it's all like expanding panels, sidebars, constantly navigating to different views. I couldnt get a simple straightforward list of issues, or I could only see things assigned to me as opposed to see the progress of the team in a straightforward table...
mejutoco 3y ago
IMO Jira is not the problem. It is the place where other organizational problems become visible. If the org has a very strict form-filling culture, your Jira tickets will be full of fields to fill for no reason. If no one is valuing documentation, the documents will be outdated or spread randomly. Personally, with the right culture I do not see the problem with Jira, and with the wrong culture Jira can be slog.
ngrilly 3y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I love having an open source option. On the other hand, this is a total rip-off of Linear.app. Even the website is a copy-paste of Linear.app. A bit shocking. And for the record, Linear.app is amazing and a fantastic alternative to Jira.
- pcurve 3y ago
  Yeah, the resemblance is too strong to pass off as coincidence.
- viharkurama 3y ago
  We greatly appreciate the meticulous design and user-friendly approach taken by Linear. Their work serves as a true inspiration to us. However, Plane have implemented all the concepts of Linear in a simpler terminology, making it more accessible to a wider range of users. Additionally, we are proud to make Plane an open-source project, which fosters collaboration within the community.
SoftTalker 3y ago
At the only place I’ve worked where they used Jira, only the product managers and business people used it. Devs worked from stories printed on cards. The cards would get passed around until completed, the manager would then update Jira. The advantage I guess is that Jira had a smaller audience so could be better configured for what the business wanted from it, and fewer people had to learn how to use it.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Printed as in physically printed? That's kinda neat.
remram 3y ago
How is it different from all the other open-source issue trackers and project managers? Taiga.io, Open project, Focalboard, Redmine, etc Those don't market themselves as similar to Jira, but that's not exactly a feature, so what are the differences in practice?
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Hey, Our philosophy behind Plane is based on the concept of "Tasks meets Method." We have specifically designed this product to accommodate various project management practices such as Agile or Waterfall, allowing you to seamlessly implement the framework of your choice. The core idea behind Plane is to provide a solution that is both simple to use and highly extensible. Unlike other tools such as Focalboard, which solely focuses on Kanban, or Taiga, which strictly adheres to Agile principles, and Redmine, which serves as a more general project management tool, Plane aims to offer a versatile platform that combines simplicity with flexibility.
  - remram 3y ago
    It's hard to parse this marketing speak, you are better at specific frameworks than the mono-framework tools, and a better general tool than general tools? But specifically, how?

638 points by viharkurama 3y ago

Having spent 7 years now building https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/ it's very clear to me that at a certain point in the life-cycle of many organizations a bunch of people get hired who can only "think in Jira" and the vast majority of feature requests are attempts to get us to add whatever feature(s) they love using. Conversations about why it's bad for developers or product managers or attempts to show them how to get the same value in another way often fall on deaf ears (or don't happen at all) because it's the only way that they know how to work. One of the key indicators that this is happening is when people start saying things like "this can't do Agile because it doesn't have PET_FEATURE" Jira isn't just software, it's a way of working that's become the de facto standard, and it's hard to get out of that box for a lot of people.

3riverdev 3y ago
For what it's worth, thank you for fighting this fight. Shortcut has been a fantastic tool for us as a direct result of it doing things differently and more naturally. Please don't change that!

smallsaas 3y ago

Beware its open core https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1171 https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1171

jimbru 3y ago

What's the tl;dr comparison with Linear?

viharkurama 3y ago
Hey, Linear is opinionated in it's philosophy of Project management and the usage of terminology. We do accommodate all the features that linear has in a general way. Plane is extensible where users can build the framework of their choice.
esafak 3y ago
Can you compare it with Height too?
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Height is a very general tool with it's focus on various kinds of teams. With Plane you do that as well. But it's focus is more on the Method. Method or the framework of choice that the team wants to use to manage their projects.

donalhunt 3y ago

How widespread is Ctrl + K -> insert URL?? Because using it for something else could cause confusion (already encountered on other platforms).

jeroenhd 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that's the cross browser shortcut for "search with default search engine". At least on the browsers I usually encounter it is. These types of shortcut key overrides are why I've got them disabled in my browser by default.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  For anyone else frustrated, a quick workaround is to do Ctrl+FK instead of Ctrl+K on offending websites. Focuses the browser UI's search input which then makes the Ctrl+K bubble up from the browser UI instead of the website's document tree.
quasarj 3y ago
I definitely use it, and you're right that's going to be confusing. But maybe worth it..
mvdtnz 3y ago
It's very common across lots of platforms. Slack overrides it, and it irritates me (although I have adjusted to Slack's alternative which is that Cmd/Ctrl+V turns selected text into a link with the clipboard URL, which is actually really slick).

smallerfish 3y ago

I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that at the top of your copy.) Also, please consider finding a native english copywriter to take a run at your writing. It's readable, but not fluent, and overly filled with jargon.

viharkurama 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We will definitely work on it.
- nberkman 3y ago
  One advantage you have: a BAA, required for HIPAA compliance, is only available with a very expensive Enterprise plan. For HIPAA compliant organizations, a self-hosted alternative could be very attractive.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    If I'm not mistaken, they want a minimum of 800 seats to sign a BAA. It's absolutely crazy, and forced my company to choose a significantly worse product in its place. Edit: for Plane, the GPT powered pages are a non-starter for HIPAA unless the feature can be completely disabled.
justinpombrio 3y ago
One feature they have that Jira does not: the ability for a customer to avoid multi-week outages. Jira went down for some customers and took weeks to restore. A customer could avoid this possibility by hosting locally, but I hear Jira is phasing out local hosting while Plane lists it as a feature. Another feature Plane probably has: not being horribly laggy. You could make a ticket in Jira with a bunch of links or whatever the hell it is that makes Jira load so slowly, and make an identical ticket in Plane, and compare the loading times. From my Jira experiences it shouldn't be hard to be 10x faster. https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/252515706/Atlassian-cloud-outage-could-take-days-to-resolve https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/252515706...

echelon 3y ago

Please build a startup on this. I don't want to run a Jira alternative myself. I'll pay you to do it for me. Edit: looks like you do [1]! Perfect! I'll sign up shortly and give it a spin. [1] https://plane.so https://plane.so

viharkurama 3y ago
thanks echelon, we are working hard to make it happen in a more simple and extensible way. Also Open source :)

simmanian 3y ago

I've been looking for a competitive open source alternative to Jira for a non-profit I volunteer at because they cannot afford to pay for any cloud service and Trello has its limitations. Does Plane offer all pro features for open source instances as well? Does it support login via Google or other identity providers?

fmjrey 3y ago
A good alternative to jira and other tools used in application lifecycle management is tuleap [1]. The PM/agile part is very configurable and it is also offering integrated wiki, gitolite, and hooks to integrate with some CI/CD. Also LDAP and OpenID integration is available in the community edition [2]. [1] https://www.tuleap.org/ https://www.tuleap.org/ [2] https://docs.tuleap.org/administration-guide/users-management/security/user-authentication.html https://docs.tuleap.org/administration-guide/users-managemen...
smallerfish 3y ago
Check out Youtrack - not open source, but free if you have 10 or fewer users.
- simmanian 3y ago
  we are trying to work with ~35 volunteers for this purpose, but i will check it out nonetheless.
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Youtrack is great but complicated with it's UX. Code level extensibility with Project management tools is near zero. We are working on our extensibility framework called Propel, it gives you the ability to write code with React to extend Plane. Open-sourcing in Q3 2023.
  - shamiln 3y ago
    Now this extensibility is what I’m interested in, as I’m working in a project which needs front end extensibility and have no idea where to start!

jacobsenscott 3y ago

Can it auto-delete issues untouched for the last 30 days? Idk if jira can, but this would be the single biggest productivity boost to any organization forced to use this sort of software.

simmanian 3y ago
for jira (and I assume many other similar products), it is definitely possible
ezekg 3y ago
Why would you want to do that? I personally hate those “stale issue” bots on GitHub, and this sounds like the same.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  Sounds like you've never worked on a project with hundreds or even thousands of backlogged issues that will never be worked on - it is the same as being deleted except is causes visual clutter.
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  Like it or hate it, there just isn’t enough time and energy to do all the things you might like to do. Triaging and prioritizing are usually best done manually, but “it hasn’t been worked on” is a cheap and acceptably accurate proxy for “not that important” for some teams.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Taking a bug report and making a good workitem might be a lot of work. If the same thing happens 2 years later you'd need to do the same work again if you already deleted the bug workitem. If the old stale bug ticket was still around you'd both have a) saved the work of writing it again because you would find it when searching and b) have a very good indication that the bug you are triaging might not be that serious because it has been seen before and not prioritized. You could just automatically mark it "stale" or whatever instead of hiding it, which would give the best of both worlds. Automatic sunset for the item, without the duplicated effort.

29athrowaway 3y ago

It's weird that the landing page has "Joe" and "Leo" (uncommon names in India), as placeholder users, but the authors are from India.

gervwyk 3y ago
It is weird to hight this as feedback. Choosing very common names for a product intended for a global audience. How is that weird?
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  It is just weird to me that using those names was perceived as a necessary step.
  - viharkurama 3y ago
    I agree to the idea of not ignoring Indian names. We do have India names as well on certain screenshots. To distribute well we used all kinds of names. We tried our best to globalize.
  - pdappollonio 3y ago
    Native Spanish speaker that builds software for English speaking markets: I don't think I would write a software or make screenshots where I would think first to put names like Juan or Pedro in them if the target audience is English speakers. When you're writing English it just feels like the names flow better, that's all (like, avoiding stutter in a sentence, but with names). I don't think it would be fair to say we're just not honoring our roots
    - 29athrowaway 3y ago
      Why not? Also you could use "Joe" and "Pedro" instead. To me it seems even more global.
      - viharkurama 3y ago

findthebug 3y ago

mmh, on ipad i cant add an new issue. my issues > add issue. enter title/desc, click add issue. issue is not saved, all fields blank

DrAwesome 3y ago

I played around with Plane locally a little bit about a month ago - I think it's really promising! I wish the documentation was a little better, though; I had to dig around through the source code to figure out how to get the OpenAI/GPT-powered features to work locally. I also wish it supported the gpt-3.5-turbo model instead of relying on the InstructGPT models (like text-davinci-003) for those features (while this isn't exactly a "chat" use-case, I think the chat model would still do a good job, and the 1/10 token cost would be nice). I'm planning to set up a Plane instance for my friend group as soon as it supports OpenID Connect (SAML would work as well, but I imagine OIDC is coming first, since it's a lot more sane). We have some small projects we maintain, and we desperately need a nice issue tracking tool like this.

throwuwu 3y ago

Walk through video please. For people on mobile checking it out it’s more convenient to watch a short video. Serious about short, I’m not going to start a half hour long video while browsing. Also subtitles.

kjs3 3y ago
And a pony. They must provide a complimentary pony. An Andalusian...I wouldn't be caught dead on some common draft horse. Also a stable.
NegativeK 3y ago
It's an open source project. PRs would probably be welcomed.

aetherspawn 3y ago

Has anyone had a play with this and know whether it supports multiple different issue types and/or tiered issues (parent/child-level1/child-level2)?

viharkurama 3y ago
Hey, we do have a feature of nested issues as part of Plane. You can go n-levels. You can have different type of issues via labelling.
- aetherspawn 3y ago
  Thanks, our use-case is requirements management and n-level support is perfect. I think labelling would get us out of the woods. Schema would be preferable, but there’s no reason why labeling won’t work. I plan to give it a go at our consultancy next week, thanks

rst 3y ago

Just about any ticketing system (including the established open-source ones) could be described as an "alternative to JIRA", even if bare-bones, so you might be better off describing the unique capabilities or UX that makes this one special. (And if mentioning JIRA at all, say what you offer to people converting -- $dayjob would probably be interested in one that seamlessly imports tickets with extra custom attributes and custom workflow which refers to them, but implementing that is not an easy lift.)

jrockway 3y ago
You reminded me of Jira's most hilarious feature; if you type JIRA in a ticket, it auto-corrects it to "Jira". This one better do that or, uh, it's one less checkmark on the comparison chart!

icemelt8 3y ago

inb4 . they use Discord and Docker, I will not use it

bogwog 3y ago
Discord I understand, but Docker?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zmmmmm 3y ago

Worth noting - I am not sure how the legalities of it all map out but although it is Apache licensed, it appears to depend on MinIO which is AGPL for self-hosting. That may be just a swappable back end S3 layer but if you want to self host this you may need to be comfortable with AGPL (for those in environments that are allergic to AGPL ...)

oefnak 3y ago

Are there mobile clients for Android and/or iOS?

charles_f 3y ago

> Open Source JIRA [...] in the simplest way possible Mmh. I like that it's opensource, that way product owners can become even more inventive with great ways of making a process cumbersome

spyremeown 3y ago

Please, kill Jira and Confluence. I hate Atlassian tools so much. The user interfaces are sluggish no matter the hardware you're using... it's a shame it became almost a standard in our industry.

gabrielgio 3y ago
I just opened a view mode page in confluence, and it made >400 calls until fully loaded. ~80 XHR calls and >300 js files being loaded, in what world that is acceptable? Indeed it is a shame that they still a thing.

gexla 3y ago

Seems to me that "open source alternative" is missing the key thing which the company provides. Which is support, and a button for "call us" as an enterprise plan.

jupp0r 3y ago

"Alternative to JIRA" makes me cringe. Why would you put the most hated brand of all issue trackers in your pitch line?

halestock 3y ago
It's also the most widely used of all issue trackers.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  That makes it even worse!
snthpy 3y ago
That was my first thought as well. So glad someone else said it.
malikNF 3y ago
Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say here. If JIRA is the "most hated" brand and at the same time a very popular issue tracker, then "Alternative to JIRA" sounds like, "here's an alternative to the product you so hate" isn't it ? I mean why would I look for an alternative if I didn't hate the thing I am working with or thought it was not good enough?

nnurmanov 3y ago

It seems, over an extended period of development, any enterprise software tends to become equally hated:)

da39a3ee 3y ago
Right, so perhaps the answer to that is not to make your software "Enterprise". There are a lot of idiots in management; do not give them what they ask for if you want your product to retain any vestiges of quality.

deepak_sozial 3y ago

[flagged]

nine_k 3y ago
(I wonder what do these "1 ." at the end of some sentences mean.)
- lobochrome 3y ago
  it's a glitch. hush. don't disturb the transformer.

atbpaca 3y ago

This looks nice. I will have a look. Meanwhile, does it have a Gantt view?

kaliara 3y ago
Looks like they just announced Gantt on the changelog: https://plane.so/changelog https://plane.so/changelog

throwaway290 3y ago

Spamming description with emoji is certainly one way to show a project is serious...

MobiusHorizons 3y ago

From a brief look at the code, it appears to be written in python. I am surprised at that choice for an application that has speed as a goal. Of course database performance is likely to dominate, but every bit adds up. I feel like I’ve only heard bad things about trying to maintain a service written in python long term (both from a performance perspective, as well as ease of code maintenance). This is not first hand knowledge though. Does anyone here have experience to comment on the wisdom of using python in an application like this?

rirze 3y ago
From what I can tell, it's Python for the API server, Typescript for everything else. FWIW, Python servers like this are just a wrapper around `gunicorn` or some other performant low level tool. For some teams, it's easier to define a schema in Python for a couple years now due to some very innovative libraries with easy-to-use decorators. I have no personal experience with using it in production or for an extended amount of time however.

fijiaarone 3y ago

Im glad there is finally an open source app with a UI that has more white space than content.

pfych 3y ago

I tried setting this up on my homelab via docker. Not only did it take ages to build, I found it really difficult to run it behind an already configured nginx instance, it seemed set on running its own one. There's an open ticket on the repo to improved the docker setup experience, I'll definitely be checking this out in a few months once its all be streamlined.

fffrantz 3y ago
It seems ok with podman but I can never login using the default credentials. Build time was indeed pretty long as well, and throwing all kinds of errors. I think if you set it up with an IP address, it doesn't run an nginx container to front the whole thing.

pachico 3y ago

I don't know how Plane is but I know very well how Jira is and it definitely needs a viable alternative.

kritikaup1403 3y ago
You should give Plane a try then. It is as simple as it can get.

slushh 3y ago

How do you manage the coherence of the entirety of the tickets? E.g. how do you make sure that the tasks of tickets don't overlap or that there is more than one ticket for a task? *edit: For me, backlog views are not enough to structure tickets in a meaningful way. Does Plane have a view to fluidly manage all open tickets?

nixarn 3y ago

Damn so many negative comments here. I think it looks decent, and will probably try it out, paying $10/user/month for something as simple as an issue tracker is annoying. I get that bigger organizations have more feature requirements, but for many companies, we just need a simple issue tracker that's not jira (very biased against jira from my experience, but it's probably gotten better)

alonsozzz 3y ago

Probably the best feature of Linear is realtime sync, that is also what makes it feel so good to use (it writes to memory first so everything is instant). This seems like it doesn't have that, so it lacks a pretty big selling point.

viharkurama 3y ago
Plane will also support Real-time, shipping soon :)

unixhero 3y ago

Plans: Plane Free - Free forever Forever, are you sure about that?

keyle 3y ago
The plane free plan is ;)

xiaodai 3y ago

I just want a simple customisable ghant chart

viharkurama 3y ago
Plane's Gantt Chart component is completely built from scratch and is open-source. Still in early stages, but we expect a stable version by mid-june. https://github.com/makeplane/plane/tree/develop/apps/app/components/gantt-chart https://github.com/makeplane/plane/tree/develop/apps/app/com...

ceving 3y ago

It seems to have no way to define own workflows. This is no alternative to Jira.

tompandolfi 3y ago

Looks great, our team will be trying it out next month

bipson 3y ago

The Problem with Jira is not that it's dumb or too sophisticated. The first problem is that everyone, even in the same team or org, needs something different from it. Sometimes it is even single individuals needing one particular thing one time, and the same day for another workflow or view another thing. It is when Jira caters to the wrong use case for you right now where the a lot of frustration arises. In a similar vein, it wants to cater devs, coaches, POs, business people, customers and all of them over various orgs with drastically different workflows. Serving everyone equally must lead to a mediocre experience. You will always miss something, while there is so much stuff you don't need or want and you have to work around. Arguably, this has become better a lot in the last 10 years, but you will always long for "something better". But the most painful issue is that in some orgs Jira is the workflow, instead of supporting it and staying in the background. At some point people are only sending around ticket links, commenting on tickets, requesting people monitoring their queues. This creates overhead, redirection and Jira becomes a distraction you need to handle. As a result Jira becomes a proxy for all the things going wrong with your daily work and a problem of its own.

zelphirkalt 3y ago
Catering to many different kinds of people explains some of the bad stuff, but it does not explain, why seemingly every single Atlassian product including Jira sucks at parsing Markdown or supporting Markdown well. In the big picture maybe some things suffer from catering to too many audiences, but in the small, it is just lack of good engineering. Basically any markdown parser you can install at no cost and even with pushover license for any popular programming language works better than what they cobbled together. Is it a case of some "senior" person sitting somewhere sheltering their brain child? Also they seem to be immune to feedback, which they wanted to collect in Confluence, using some popups.
- edude03 3y ago
  It does explain it though? Not everyone who uses Atlassian products use markdown, and I'm pretty confident that the biggest users of Jira aren't software engineers so why would they invest time and effort there?

steve1977 3y ago

The problem is not Jira the software, but what corporate people are doing with it. No, you're not "agile" just because you have scrum sprints in Jira.

joduplessis 3y ago

Very nice! Good job to the team - looks great. Crazy how you can jump into so many codebases & find React/Next/Tailwind.

Aleklart 3y ago

Now suffering free of charge

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago

I remember using JIRA like 12 years ago, as a developer. We had a big "issues" list. It was a plain table, really easy to scan and see progress. Ten+ years later I had to use Jira in another company and now it's all like expanding panels, sidebars, constantly navigating to different views. I couldnt get a simple straightforward list of issues, or I could only see things assigned to me as opposed to see the progress of the team in a straightforward table...

mejutoco 3y ago

IMO Jira is not the problem. It is the place where other organizational problems become visible. If the org has a very strict form-filling culture, your Jira tickets will be full of fields to fill for no reason. If no one is valuing documentation, the documents will be outdated or spread randomly. Personally, with the right culture I do not see the problem with Jira, and with the wrong culture Jira can be slog.

ngrilly 3y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I love having an open source option. On the other hand, this is a total rip-off of Linear.app. Even the website is a copy-paste of Linear.app. A bit shocking. And for the record, Linear.app is amazing and a fantastic alternative to Jira.

pcurve 3y ago
Yeah, the resemblance is too strong to pass off as coincidence.
viharkurama 3y ago
We greatly appreciate the meticulous design and user-friendly approach taken by Linear. Their work serves as a true inspiration to us. However, Plane have implemented all the concepts of Linear in a simpler terminology, making it more accessible to a wider range of users. Additionally, we are proud to make Plane an open-source project, which fosters collaboration within the community.

SoftTalker 3y ago

At the only place I’ve worked where they used Jira, only the product managers and business people used it. Devs worked from stories printed on cards. The cards would get passed around until completed, the manager would then update Jira. The advantage I guess is that Jira had a smaller audience so could be better configured for what the business wanted from it, and fewer people had to learn how to use it.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Printed as in physically printed? That's kinda neat.

remram 3y ago

How is it different from all the other open-source issue trackers and project managers? Taiga.io, Open project, Focalboard, Redmine, etc Those don't market themselves as similar to Jira, but that's not exactly a feature, so what are the differences in practice?

viharkurama 3y ago
Hey, Our philosophy behind Plane is based on the concept of "Tasks meets Method." We have specifically designed this product to accommodate various project management practices such as Agile or Waterfall, allowing you to seamlessly implement the framework of your choice. The core idea behind Plane is to provide a solution that is both simple to use and highly extensible. Unlike other tools such as Focalboard, which solely focuses on Kanban, or Taiga, which strictly adheres to Agile principles, and Redmine, which serves as a more general project management tool, Plane aims to offer a versatile platform that combines simplicity with flexibility.
- remram 3y ago
  It's hard to parse this marketing speak, you are better at specific frameworks than the mono-framework tools, and a better general tool than general tools? But specifically, how?