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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 featu

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...
jszymborski 3y ago
I haven't tried the app, but I'm almost certain you can make certain favourable comparisons of page render speed.
- viharkurama 3y ago
  Our page speeds are currently standing at ~350ms at this point. we are trying hard to make it < 100ms. Feedback helps.
  - fijiaarone 3y ago
    You’ll have hook it up to the network at some point. And then you’ll want to add IO. If page render takes 100ms you’d better have some pretty complex animations. Data and bandwidth should be at least 80% of your web app speed, and you should work on optimizing the other 15% that is server side CPU bound.
aetherspawn 3y ago
The value prop is that you can self-host it at all, which JIRA now discontinued unless you pay ~$50k per year. Within 3 seconds of reading the GitHub page I was sold. It’s already on my todo list for next week.
- Croftengea 3y ago
  This! Jira works ok and gets job done, like the UI and the default workflows or not. But for those who are not willing (or required not to) outsource all their business to the Cloud it just doesn't exist anymore.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die I think when I die in ~50 years that HN will still be filled with stories ragging on Jira, or whatever it is that eventually replaces it. It's like the pastime that will never end. To be clear, I think it's great to see open source projects like this, and I think increasing competition is a really wonderful thing. I also totally agree that Jira has lots of room for improvement, with performance probably being the most common gripe. But I always smirk a little to myself when I hear complaints that are solely from a particular point of view (usually an individual developer). Project management tools have an extremely difficult task of needing to fulfill a gargantuan range of requirements for many varied stakeholders (frontline devs, dev managers, product managers, business leads and execs, sometimes end users depending on ticketing functionality, etc.) Some simple pieces of evidence: 1. For one, just look at the varied list of comments already coming in on this story "does it support multiple issue types or tiered issues?", "Does Plane offer all the pro features for free because we can't afford to pay anything for it?", "Does it support Google login or other identity providers?", "It needs a walkthrough video that must be short, I'm not going to look at a long video", "Is Ctrk+K a good shortcut?", "Can't add an issue on iPad", "Can it autodelete issues after 30 days of no changes?"... Point being, for any project management tool, you're going to basically get feature requests as varied as the number of comments, and I think I see this more frequently with project management tools than almost any other type of software. 2. Think about the legions of Jira competitors that have popped up: Asana, Basecamp, Monday.com, Linear, Rally, YouTrack, ClickUp, Trello (obv. under Atlassian now, but can't count the number of times I've heard "We loved Trello because it was simple and easy to get started, but we eventually outgrew it and needed additional features."), etc. etc. I have yet to ever hear one of those competitors being universally loved. On the contrary, I've seen cases where a competitor is touted as "the next big thing", and then when it gets more popular people talk about how much they hate it (Asana comes to mind in that regard). In general, I don't think the problem is the tool, I think that most people just don't like to do ticket management, so it's all a case of looking for the "least bad" tool out there.
- kschrader 3y ago
  As soon as we add a new feature to Shortcut people inevitably use it in a way that's complex and unexpected and that causes a large portion of the team to hate it. It's a very hard dance to do.
lxe 3y ago
From glancing at the bullet points and feature list, along with commit activity, the value prop seems to be the product and its features... which seem polished and useful.
GuB-42 3y ago
Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizable via plugins. Heck, you can even do it with Excel, I don't recommend it, but it gets the work done at many places. I mean, it is just a shared TODO list. But then you want people to get notified by email, and the boss want a colorful dashboard with progress graphs, and QA wants a documented process, and developers want to attach tickets to their commits, project managers want time estimates, customers want to report bugs, sales want to send invoices, etc... That's how you get monsters like Jira, because the organization itself is a monster.
- xp84 3y ago
  Having used Jira for only a modest 12 years, I have had multiple stages of feelings about it. I agree with the parent that “everybody” hates Jira because “it’s too complicated” — yet when developers try to use a lean, simple tool like Pivotal or Trello, inevitably other stakeholders demand something better for business users, these simpler tools can’t deliver that, and the replacement ends up being Jira 99% of the time. I’ve started tech orgs on multiple issue trackers and this plays out every time. Also, I hated Jira before learning a lot of its features and how to use them, getting frustrated that everything is not just a setting, but something meta where you need to adjust a “scheme” and understand how it works with the other data objects in the system. Eventually I learned it, just in time for Atlassian to put a lot of effort into a candy-coated, “simplified” set of defaults that hides 99% of the system’s power and abilities. The main thing I actually don’t like about Jira is that: its insistence on setting up all new projects with infantile, Trello-like schemes, which then encourage sloppy setup when you start customizing unless you’re very seasoned with Jira. I think they should consider training an AI to “do what I mean” and help users to build out their setups —because transitioning from the “out of box experience” which I call “Expensive Trello” into a sophisticated workflow which actually models the business processes correctly and protects you against breaking your agreements, while making it easy to understand what to do next, is very difficult. In all but the biggest orgs, i don’t think it ever really happens.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. It's... free? Isn't that a pretty big difference? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
- TylerE 3y ago
  Not really. Jira licensing costs are on the order of about 10 minutes of employee time per month. So, if it is even slightly worse it's a financial disaster. (Of course, Jira itself is hell, but then what is a likely-buggy and feature incomplete version of hell?) Plus, even if the software itself is free, you still have to host it somewhere.
  - troyvit 3y ago
    That oversimplifies the cost though. Take your typical 200 person company. Maybe 20 of them develop using Jira, 30 more create issues, and then 10 more poke their head in there so they can check on developers and project managers. So of those 60 registered users 40 of them spend just about 20 minutes a month in it. You still have to pay for them though. The problem grows because we need to run similar numbers for every Saas this 200 person company uses. You've got Jira for project management, Zen/FreshDesk for support issues, Mailchimp for spamming customers, CMS, CRM, payroll, etc. You end up with many many hours of employee time per month spent on licenses for SaaS products that you never own, can't control, and often can't extract your data from if you want to bail. So yeah, as a middle manager trying to cut costs, any free alternative to a SaaS product sounds good to me. It beats dribbling out licenses piecemeal and living without core functionalities (looking at you monday.com) to stay within the lowest payment tier where I can see that 10 minutes-employee-time per month. I admit that paints products like Jira in a bad light and ignores all the upsides (no hosting issues, upgrades are automatic, etc.).
esafak 3y ago
I agree. Call out famous competitors like JIRA and explain how you are better. Don't make me think. It won't cost you any business if everybody already knows them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pokepim 3y ago
[dead]
thiht 3y ago
> I'd be giving up custom workflows That’s the value prop
intelVISA 3y ago
Value prop: - It's not Jira
gghhzzgghhzz 3y ago
I've used it as a stand in workflow/case management tool in dev and production apps a few times. e.g. when presented with a lot of detailed requirements on case management from product managers, and knowing at an early stage they are far too detailed to stand up to the reality of being used in the business, I've argued for simply creating a new project in an existing well-speced Jira instance with minimal workflow, taking that live as a prototype and modifying the workflow later, possibly with the goal of getting better specs for replacing it with something custom-built. As a development tool for stories / tasks and bug tracking I don't enjoy it.
dangus 3y ago
Isn’t a big part of the value prop not paying a big per-user bill to Jira? The fact that it’s basically the same thing is probably a positive for a lot of people shopping for alternatives.

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...

jszymborski 3y ago

I haven't tried the app, but I'm almost certain you can make certain favourable comparisons of page render speed.

viharkurama 3y ago
Our page speeds are currently standing at ~350ms at this point. we are trying hard to make it < 100ms. Feedback helps.
- fijiaarone 3y ago
  You’ll have hook it up to the network at some point. And then you’ll want to add IO. If page render takes 100ms you’d better have some pretty complex animations. Data and bandwidth should be at least 80% of your web app speed, and you should work on optimizing the other 15% that is server side CPU bound.

aetherspawn 3y ago

The value prop is that you can self-host it at all, which JIRA now discontinued unless you pay ~$50k per year. Within 3 seconds of reading the GitHub page I was sold. It’s already on my todo list for next week.

Croftengea 3y ago
This! Jira works ok and gets job done, like the UI and the default workflows or not. But for those who are not willing (or required not to) outsource all their business to the Cloud it just doesn't exist anymore.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

> I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die I think when I die in ~50 years that HN will still be filled with stories ragging on Jira, or whatever it is that eventually replaces it. It's like the pastime that will never end. To be clear, I think it's great to see open source projects like this, and I think increasing competition is a really wonderful thing. I also totally agree that Jira has lots of room for improvement, with performance probably being the most common gripe. But I always smirk a little to myself when I hear complaints that are solely from a particular point of view (usually an individual developer). Project management tools have an extremely difficult task of needing to fulfill a gargantuan range of requirements for many varied stakeholders (frontline devs, dev managers, product managers, business leads and execs, sometimes end users depending on ticketing functionality, etc.) Some simple pieces of evidence: 1. For one, just look at the varied list of comments already coming in on this story "does it support multiple issue types or tiered issues?", "Does Plane offer all the pro features for free because we can't afford to pay anything for it?", "Does it support Google login or other identity providers?", "It needs a walkthrough video that must be short, I'm not going to look at a long video", "Is Ctrk+K a good shortcut?", "Can't add an issue on iPad", "Can it autodelete issues after 30 days of no changes?"... Point being, for any project management tool, you're going to basically get feature requests as varied as the number of comments, and I think I see this more frequently with project management tools than almost any other type of software. 2. Think about the legions of Jira competitors that have popped up: Asana, Basecamp, Monday.com, Linear, Rally, YouTrack, ClickUp, Trello (obv. under Atlassian now, but can't count the number of times I've heard "We loved Trello because it was simple and easy to get started, but we eventually outgrew it and needed additional features."), etc. etc. I have yet to ever hear one of those competitors being universally loved. On the contrary, I've seen cases where a competitor is touted as "the next big thing", and then when it gets more popular people talk about how much they hate it (Asana comes to mind in that regard). In general, I don't think the problem is the tool, I think that most people just don't like to do ticket management, so it's all a case of looking for the "least bad" tool out there.

kschrader 3y ago
As soon as we add a new feature to Shortcut people inevitably use it in a way that's complex and unexpected and that causes a large portion of the team to hate it. It's a very hard dance to do.

lxe 3y ago

From glancing at the bullet points and feature list, along with commit activity, the value prop seems to be the product and its features... which seem polished and useful.

GuB-42 3y ago

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizable via plugins. Heck, you can even do it with Excel, I don't recommend it, but it gets the work done at many places. I mean, it is just a shared TODO list. But then you want people to get notified by email, and the boss want a colorful dashboard with progress graphs, and QA wants a documented process, and developers want to attach tickets to their commits, project managers want time estimates, customers want to report bugs, sales want to send invoices, etc... That's how you get monsters like Jira, because the organization itself is a monster.

xp84 3y ago
Having used Jira for only a modest 12 years, I have had multiple stages of feelings about it. I agree with the parent that “everybody” hates Jira because “it’s too complicated” — yet when developers try to use a lean, simple tool like Pivotal or Trello, inevitably other stakeholders demand something better for business users, these simpler tools can’t deliver that, and the replacement ends up being Jira 99% of the time. I’ve started tech orgs on multiple issue trackers and this plays out every time. Also, I hated Jira before learning a lot of its features and how to use them, getting frustrated that everything is not just a setting, but something meta where you need to adjust a “scheme” and understand how it works with the other data objects in the system. Eventually I learned it, just in time for Atlassian to put a lot of effort into a candy-coated, “simplified” set of defaults that hides 99% of the system’s power and abilities. The main thing I actually don’t like about Jira is that: its insistence on setting up all new projects with infantile, Trello-like schemes, which then encourage sloppy setup when you start customizing unless you’re very seasoned with Jira. I think they should consider training an AI to “do what I mean” and help users to build out their setups —because transitioning from the “out of box experience” which I call “Expensive Trello” into a sophisticated workflow which actually models the business processes correctly and protects you against breaking your agreements, while making it easy to understand what to do next, is very difficult. In all but the biggest orgs, i don’t think it ever really happens.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. It's... free? Isn't that a pretty big difference? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing

TylerE 3y ago
Not really. Jira licensing costs are on the order of about 10 minutes of employee time per month. So, if it is even slightly worse it's a financial disaster. (Of course, Jira itself is hell, but then what is a likely-buggy and feature incomplete version of hell?) Plus, even if the software itself is free, you still have to host it somewhere.
- troyvit 3y ago
  That oversimplifies the cost though. Take your typical 200 person company. Maybe 20 of them develop using Jira, 30 more create issues, and then 10 more poke their head in there so they can check on developers and project managers. So of those 60 registered users 40 of them spend just about 20 minutes a month in it. You still have to pay for them though. The problem grows because we need to run similar numbers for every Saas this 200 person company uses. You've got Jira for project management, Zen/FreshDesk for support issues, Mailchimp for spamming customers, CMS, CRM, payroll, etc. You end up with many many hours of employee time per month spent on licenses for SaaS products that you never own, can't control, and often can't extract your data from if you want to bail. So yeah, as a middle manager trying to cut costs, any free alternative to a SaaS product sounds good to me. It beats dribbling out licenses piecemeal and living without core functionalities (looking at you monday.com) to stay within the lowest payment tier where I can see that 10 minutes-employee-time per month. I admit that paints products like Jira in a bad light and ignores all the upsides (no hosting issues, upgrades are automatic, etc.).

esafak 3y ago

I agree. Call out famous competitors like JIRA and explain how you are better. Don't make me think. It won't cost you any business if everybody already knows them.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pokepim 3y ago

[dead]

thiht 3y ago

> I'd be giving up custom workflows That’s the value prop

intelVISA 3y ago

Value prop: - It's not Jira

gghhzzgghhzz 3y ago

I've used it as a stand in workflow/case management tool in dev and production apps a few times. e.g. when presented with a lot of detailed requirements on case management from product managers, and knowing at an early stage they are far too detailed to stand up to the reality of being used in the business, I've argued for simply creating a new project in an existing well-speced Jira instance with minimal workflow, taking that live as a prototype and modifying the workflow later, possibly with the goal of getting better specs for replacing it with something custom-built. As a development tool for stories / tasks and bug tracking I don't enjoy it.

dangus 3y ago

Isn’t a big part of the value prop not paying a big per-user bill to Jira? The fact that it’s basically the same thing is probably a positive for a lot of people shopping for alternatives.