8 ms·

Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

181 points by intheleantime 3y ago

yencabulator 3y ago
The license on this is curious. They claim AGPLv3 and position themselves to be open source, but it's really Open Core with them being the only party who can make privileged non-AGPL plugins. Or, perhaps, if you fork it and add your own non-AGPL stuff only to the app/plugins/ subdirectory, you might also be in the clear? The exception is poorly worded. And then the README and the LICENSE files list different exceptions to AGPL. I'm not even convinced that mishmash of exceptions constitutes a valid license. https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a04a64b5781882b3754c087f/README.md#L161-L164 https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a0... https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a04a64b5781882b3754c087f/LICENSE#L664-L670 https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a0...
kyaghmour 3y ago
[flagged]
- broskees 3y ago
  What's wrong with AGPL?
  - kyaghmour 3y ago
    Affero is effectively bait-and-switch.
    - intheleantime 3y ago
      That is BS. Affero is not any different to GPL but the fact that network distribution is included in its definition of "distributing software" and having to relicense under the same license. Where do you even get this from?
      - kyaghmour 3y ago
        Call it what makes you warm and fuzzy. Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/ https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use." The pattern is effectively always the same. Many companies use this license to offer a free version while offering a "way out" by providing an "enterprise license". They get you hooked because it's open source. But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you. It's a matter of personal choice. I choose NOT to use any Affero licensed software if I can help it.
        intheleantime 3y ago
        I think there is a misunderstanding of the license(s) here: "But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you" Neither GPL nor AGPL require you to submit anything back (or charges you) for changes made to your system for your own usage. Even if it is within a company. It is about preventing distributing derivates to the public under closed source licenses. You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license. There is no baiting here.
        kyaghmour 3y ago
        Have you actually read the Affero license? From section 13: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software." Your statement is incorrect: "You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license." Even *HOSTING* a private instance puts you under Affero. Even if the instance isn't public, if you so much as have a contractor remotely accessing an internal deployment of a customized Affero-licensed software then they can ask for this customization. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
    - mqus 3y ago
      Which license is then not bait-and-switch? Imho it is only that if they put all contributors under CLAs (they do) and even then this is a problem with the CLA, not the AGPL.
- bilekas 3y ago
  I am really not savvy with the open source licenses, but why did you dislike the Affery license model ?
  - _ZeD_ 3y ago
    this tool cannot be jeff'd
  - kyaghmour 3y ago
    Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/ https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."
    - johandicap 3y ago
      Under GPL-2, is the company not allowed to modify the code for internal (company) use given they avoid publishing or distributing these modifications?
- intheleantime 3y ago
  How come? The practical difference between AGPL and GPL is that the term "distribution" now includes distribution via network aka SaaS. Now I can see how this might be a problem for code libraries, infrastructure system etc but the only reason to worry about AGPL in an end user application context is the desire to repackage and sell commercially. Aka do the Amazon thing.
  - jddj 3y ago
    It's the obligatory copyleft is not free software astroturfing comment. Prompt is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611571 -- More seriously and charitably though, affero is vaguely scary because there's a (perhaps misunderstood, but I can understand) feeling that if you cooperate with it in any way in the backend and then a value-added product of that interaction makes it to a user of yours then you're up for copyright infringement. This isn't a reason not to release under affero, nor is it a bad thing that entities producing non-free software need to take care what they leverage, but I can see how the decision could be made to avoid using agpl style software whereever possible to err on the side of caution. A good example is ghostscript. At what point does an app converting PDFs to images (to display thumbnails, for example) as a small part of its workflow become an aggregate of that free software? According to the faq it ends up being a fairly subjective question of form and intent. Syscalls or static linking? Etc.
    - leanable 3y ago
      From your experience using Affero, could you explain a bit more on how to safely and correctly separate unrelated code from Affero code? What is often misunderstood about Affero?
      - jddj 3y ago
        Unfortunately I'm not a lawyer and wouldn't want to mislead anyone. The best I can do is direct people to the GNU FAQs on the topic
      - ljf 3y ago
graypegg 3y ago
I love the confetti and easy tech (just PHP and MySQL) for self hosting! But browsing the marketing site, you have a lot of AI tools for prioritizing lists. This is 100% the place where I don’t want things to move without me knowing. My biggest complaint with JIRA/Monday/etc is they have some entity representing “tasks”, that’s displayed in a million different perspectives. Finding a thing is usually what I want to do and I hate it when stuff disappears or changes in a view I was using. No matter how good your tool is at prioritizing, it will be wrong some percentage of the time and while it’s a little annoying to skim a big unsorted unchanging list, it’s even worse when it changes ALL the time.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. This may have not come across clearly enough on the website. The AI prioritization is an optional mechanism (toggle) to help individual users prioritize the tasks that have already been assigned to them using signals like task sentiment (how do you feel about a task), priority etc. The priority field is not changed as part of that function. I agree that AI cannot be the primary prioritization mechanism. All it can do is augment existing processes and help individuals be more effective.
  - 6keZbCECT2uB 3y ago
    How does the tool ingest task sentiment? As a developer, I would never put in writing that I'm less than enthusiastic about any task.
    - intheleantime 3y ago
      This is something we thought about a lot as well; right now it's just an emoji rating. Once set the picker changes to a checked mark and is not visible to others. The data is stored in the db but not visible to others in the system.
- wredue 3y ago
  I find that the AI is better at prioritization and triage than the human support. But then, for some reason, whenever support fails to read their tickets, they just dump the ticket on to my queue. So I could just be being salty, or seeing fewer misses because the ai is better at failing the triage.
jeo123 3y ago
Not touching this AGPLv3 software. Every company I work on ban any software with that license. This will be a niche project or " propietary" to orginal developers. It is open-source for users using. Unlikely to see any open source developers contributing it back. Good luck.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  I mean, we have 89 contributors... What are your concerns with AGPL? The practical difference is the clause that SaaS distributions require to be licensed as AGPL as well. Would you plan to take this, add commercial features and repackage as commercial closed source system?
  - cybrexalpha 3y ago
    It spooks company lawyers. The AGPL's "license transference at a distance" is scary from a legal risk point of view. Many corporate legal departments forbid it, or at least getting the exception approved by legal is so painful as to not be worth it.
    - intheleantime 3y ago
      Correct but the reason for that is the fact that all of the sudden companies are forced to contribute back if they want to offer commercial software on top of the labor of OSS projects. Again, I agree with the reasoning for libraries, devTools, infrastructure etc given that those libraries end up in commercial products. However in the case of full fleshed enduser applications AGPL is a great protector against the amazons of the world.
      - hedora 3y ago
        For device manufacturers, GPL3 is just as onerous as AGPL. As an end user, I'd rather not use GPL3 software that has a carve out that enables the software to be used by privacy hostile service providers that routinely force-upgrade their user customers to worse versions of their systems, but that prevents people from just sticking a customized version of the software on a gizmo and selling it to me. After all, I can least air-gap and not upgrade most gizmos. Anyway, I wish they'd rename AGPL to GPLv4 so the infamous "or later" clause applied to it.
jroseattle 3y ago
I see marketing-speak for how this is so much easier than other tools like JIRA (which we use.) However, I'm not finding details about how this is accomplished. What are the key differentiators in how this is easier specific to those that use JIRA?
- gloriaf 3y ago
  Great question and thanks for pointing it out -- we'll make sure to address this on the website. In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up -- each work function already has a home. The thing you have to decide is how you want to see the tasks. Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards either. The other approach we do differently is to work to engage ICs in the value of the work and we do that by making the goals and work more clear. Some of this is still being developed out and rounded out better by our AI features -- which can be better read about here and how we view it in relationship to our own ADHD and the features behind it... https://leantime.io/2023/07/30/the-top-digital-planner-for-adhd-brains/ https://leantime.io/2023/07/30/the-top-digital-planner-for-a.... Lastly, for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards. Some of which will be coming out in plugins to OSS here soon.
  - jroseattle 3y ago
    > In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up I'm not sure what this means entirely, but across our projects we have some with different workflows than the others. These are necessary in that we have certain workflows that must meet compliance requirements, and those workflows are the best way to ensure we execute those. In other projects, they are less onerous and apply to different kinds of work (so, different workflows.) > Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards This is good, but we generally keep our exec leadership out of JIRA (they don't really have the context for the details.) Our users can design their own dashboards, but that's a personal preference. We use the standard views. > making the goals and work more clear I would prefer to see more fall-into-the-pit-of-success for the equivalent of JIRA stories to be more oriented toward the outcome or feature or capability, as opposed to the accounting/I-got-receipts feeling I get from JIRA. While story points are fine, I prefer a focus on clarity and a better measurement for effort than the subjectivity of a team's interpretation of the fibonacci sequence. > for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards So, Leantime includes a markup engine as well as a whiteboard feature? If I already have a deep investment in other tools that do those things, how do they integrate?
phoronixrly 3y ago
Thank you for this, it looks great! I also admire your choice of license. We need more fresh AGPL software.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Thank you for the feedback! Don't hear a lot of people say anything positive about AGPL these days... :)
crabbone 3y ago
I keep looking at various JIRA alternatives, but no good finds so far. This is definitely not it. I don't really like the idea of bug tracker as a sort of a GUI program that acts like time management software, i.e. focuses on planning work, tracking how much effort was spent, ability to add notes to tasks etc. My ideal bug-tracking software works more like Git: it has a server-client relationship where clients query the database with predefined set of commands, while at the same time it has programmable interface facing test code. This interface should enable tests to do things like: * figure out what components need tests to run against them when a particular feature branch sees a code update. * extract history of tests running against a defined group of features. * manage association of tests and program components. * manage test sets that aren't feature-related (eg. nightlies). JIRA kind of has this database / query component, but all the functionality above needs to be built on top of it. And the data organization of JIRA relies on issues as the basic unit, where I'd like the basic component to be "features" (similar to how branches are in Git). My biggest problem with the currently popular approach (emphasis on time management) is that it's very informal and unstructured when it comes to testing, poorly automated and poorly integrated with other development tools to the point that it makes it both easy to forget to do the necessary stuff and a very repetitive chore to keep the necessary stuff up-to-date, while it's clear that it's possible to automate it. The attempts to automate this process by adding bots that manage issue life-cycle or generate trivial fixes / merge trivial PRs isn't the way to solve the problem, IMO because this automation is stupid and has a potential to cause harm. Instead it needs to be very tightly integrated with VCS (but, let's be honest, with Git) to the point that such configuration would require minimal effort on the part of the admin and be vendor-independent, and, most importantly, be feature-oriented to mirror how programmers conceptualize the development of their program.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  I really appreciate your feedback here and I see where you're coming from and can agree if you're looking at Jira as a purely bug tracking / development tool. Unfortunately, and I think important to call out -- is that most companies are trying to use these tools as a "catch all" -- "a one in all solution that solves everyone's problems" and then ultimately, half of the company refuses to use the tools because it's too focused on one user group. Our long term approach is really about making work and getting sh*t done as a relevant part of the PM process and less on time management. Time management is part of organization but people want to care about what they're building and why... something that can be absent in a lot of orgs and even in how we organize ourselves in small teams, startups or small businesses. What I do hear and think would be interesting -- is incorporating a plugin more specific to your workflow mentioned here... because absolutely, tighter QA, etc, is vital and there are things not otherwise easily replicated as part of a dev's flow. We, otherwise, don't have any current intentions to use "bots" in a way that automates things that people should really still be overseeing.
ramzez 3y ago
I quite liked it but last time I checked there was no GitHub integration and that's I would say one of the top features, as every card we complete we want to have PR/Commit attached to it in development lifecycle.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Thanks, and I agree. We spend the last 4 months working on a plugin infrastructure including events, api, plugin management etc so that we can now focus on building integrations. The next 3 months or so will be heads down integration work.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hyggetrold 3y ago
Looks nice - major feature request / design ask / feedback. The current "kanban board" looks basically the same as JIRA's and it's what a lot of people are familiar with. I would love love love to see a visualization that puts all current planned stories into a single vertical column and groups them by status. Done at the top, ready for review underneath, then in progress, and not started. It's a way more compact view of stories and better use of real estate. For prior art look at Pivotal Tracker.
- latchkey 3y ago
  PT is the gold standard imho. Mainly around the fact that it does such a great job tracking velocity. The primary issue is that outside of developers who've worked at Pivotal (I have), most people don't understand the process of using PT.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Thank you for the feedback! Our table views as well as the list views allow grouping by status and will show the vertical groups as you described. Is that what you are looking for? There are a couple screenshots on the repo. (Though they show the group by milestone, status is possible the same way)
  - latchkey 3y ago
    PT goes far beyond just grouping information. Coming from just using Jira, it is lightyears ahead of a standard issue tracking system. I suggest you spend some time diving deep into PT and understanding how it tracks velocity and encourages writing useful stories. The documentation on the site is pretty good and there are a ton of googleable resources.
  - hyggetrold 3y ago
    What I'm hoping for is beyond what I currently see on the repo - I want a dense view of story information. 'latchkey got what I meant in the other comments below my top comment. Definitely recommend you look at PT and see what it does. I'm not suggesting you make a carbon copy but there's a lot to learn from the PT model.
greenflux 3y ago
"We take the WTF out of managing work" -nice. I love the animation with this. The UI of the product looks pretty good too. Glad to see you have row grouping on the table view. Another good open-source Jira alternative is https://plane.so/ https://plane.so/ . They also have a free cloud plan with unlimited users.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  We feel like the free cloud plan is the way to go -- by keeping our core features free, we think it's the "level up" PM features that start to bring value worth paying for.
jdlyga 3y ago
You're preaching to the choir with Jira alternatives. For devs, Jira more often gets in the way than helps. We're ok with a minimal set of features. In order to really get traction, you need to sell PM's and leadership types.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  I agree, there is a real challenging disconnect between messaging for PMs/Leaders vs individual contributors and it boils down to organization size. Small companies and startups tent to be a lot more democratic about their choice of tools where as large organizations tend to be more pm/leadership driven with input from ICs. Right now we are targeting the smaller companies that don't have a lot of PM experience or resources available. The dream being the slack story of IC driven product adoption :D
az09mugen 3y ago
Another open source alternative for jira is taiga : https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/
- broskees 3y ago
  I tried Taiga. It was a little overly opinionated for me (like it's decision to force me to use story points). I used leantime now and its customizable basically any way i need it to be via plugins.
  - az09mugen 3y ago
    Thanks for your feedback
stuckkeys 3y ago
Leantime.io so heavy with trackers that the page fails to load lol. I am using Pihole btw.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  We got Google Analytics and Clarity on the site. Not sure that is out of the ordinary. The site should still work with pihole though, so I'll take a look at that.
pagutierrezn 3y ago
TBH it looks pretty much like Redmine: https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/ (also open source) configured with the appropiate set of pluggins
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Huh, not sure I would agree with that. We have some overlapping feature set but I would argue Leantime looks a bit better but I may be biased :D The key differentiators are our goal and strategy tracking though.
  - k4rli 3y ago
    To each their own. HN users prefer light sites like HN itself so Leantime with material styles is not ideal for lightness. Pivotaltracker and Redmine are really nice with basic-looking UI. Though I've just set up Leantime in my homelab for todo list/calendar.
dmazzoni 3y ago
Can you talk about your tech stack? One of the biggest complaints about Jira is how slow it is. While I'm really interested in potential alternatives, I'm curious if you think PHP might be a bottleneck. If I follow a direct link to either a single existing issue, or a create new issue page, how fast does the page load? How well does the backend scale to 100k or 1M issues? How well does the frontend scale if you try to open a view with 1k or 10k issues?
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Hi, thanks for the question. It is a simple PHP application using Mysql as the database backend. We are using a domain driven design architecture across the application and decided to skip the slow ORMs in favor of a repository layer with hand written sql. We are framework agnostic to not be locked into any flow but you will see classes from Symfony and Laravel. The goal has always been to make Leantime as lean as possible to allow hosting it on any shared host out there. That means we don't use any exotic extensions or OS features. You can run it safely on the smallest Godaddy instance if you wanted to. We recently introduced htmx into the stack to offload some of the rendering back to the server and we love it. PHP itself is really not a bottle neck anymore especially since PHP 8.0 We haven't had a chance to run a lot of large scale load tests yet so take the following with a grain of salt but a direct Task hit currently takes about 2.08 sec to load on our production site. (that includes javascript processing time as it loads in a modal) I know we have instances with thousands of tasks and users in the wild and generally performance is not an issue we get reports on on our github repo.
  - intheleantime 3y ago
    PS I forgot to mention that we have Sentry profiling. Full Application load (php side) P95 is 120.9ms and P99 is 634.11ms
  - alexchamberlain 3y ago
    2 seconds is pretty slow, especially for a single item lookup which is about as good as it gets for database lookups etc. Where is that time spent?
that_guy_iain 3y ago
Nice to see an open source project posted here that is actively being developed. A lot of the time I go to the pulse and it'll have 500 lines of code added over a month, if it's lucky. This has 50,000 lines which is cool.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  Thanks! There is so much more to come!

181 points by intheleantime 3y ago

The license on this is curious. They claim AGPLv3 and position themselves to be open source, but it's really Open Core with them being the only party who can make privileged non-AGPL plugins. Or, perhaps, if you fork it and add your own non-AGPL stuff only to the app/plugins/ subdirectory, you might also be in the clear? The exception is poorly worded. And then the README and the LICENSE files list different exceptions to AGPL. I'm not even convinced that mishmash of exceptions constitutes a valid license. https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a04a64b5781882b3754c087f/README.md#L161-L164 https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a0... https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a04a64b5781882b3754c087f/LICENSE#L664-L670 https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a0...

kyaghmour 3y ago

[flagged]

broskees 3y ago
What's wrong with AGPL?
- kyaghmour 3y ago
  Affero is effectively bait-and-switch.
  - intheleantime 3y ago
    That is BS. Affero is not any different to GPL but the fact that network distribution is included in its definition of "distributing software" and having to relicense under the same license. Where do you even get this from?
    - kyaghmour 3y ago
      Call it what makes you warm and fuzzy. Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/ https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use." The pattern is effectively always the same. Many companies use this license to offer a free version while offering a "way out" by providing an "enterprise license". They get you hooked because it's open source. But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you. It's a matter of personal choice. I choose NOT to use any Affero licensed software if I can help it.
      - intheleantime 3y ago
        I think there is a misunderstanding of the license(s) here: "But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you" Neither GPL nor AGPL require you to submit anything back (or charges you) for changes made to your system for your own usage. Even if it is within a company. It is about preventing distributing derivates to the public under closed source licenses. You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license. There is no baiting here.
        kyaghmour 3y ago
        Have you actually read the Affero license? From section 13: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software." Your statement is incorrect: "You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license." Even *HOSTING* a private instance puts you under Affero. Even if the instance isn't public, if you so much as have a contractor remotely accessing an internal deployment of a customized Affero-licensed software then they can ask for this customization. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
  - mqus 3y ago
    Which license is then not bait-and-switch? Imho it is only that if they put all contributors under CLAs (they do) and even then this is a problem with the CLA, not the AGPL.
bilekas 3y ago
I am really not savvy with the open source licenses, but why did you dislike the Affery license model ?
- _ZeD_ 3y ago
  this tool cannot be jeff'd
- kyaghmour 3y ago
  Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/ https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."
  - johandicap 3y ago
    Under GPL-2, is the company not allowed to modify the code for internal (company) use given they avoid publishing or distributing these modifications?
intheleantime 3y ago
How come? The practical difference between AGPL and GPL is that the term "distribution" now includes distribution via network aka SaaS. Now I can see how this might be a problem for code libraries, infrastructure system etc but the only reason to worry about AGPL in an end user application context is the desire to repackage and sell commercially. Aka do the Amazon thing.
- jddj 3y ago
  It's the obligatory copyleft is not free software astroturfing comment. Prompt is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611571 -- More seriously and charitably though, affero is vaguely scary because there's a (perhaps misunderstood, but I can understand) feeling that if you cooperate with it in any way in the backend and then a value-added product of that interaction makes it to a user of yours then you're up for copyright infringement. This isn't a reason not to release under affero, nor is it a bad thing that entities producing non-free software need to take care what they leverage, but I can see how the decision could be made to avoid using agpl style software whereever possible to err on the side of caution. A good example is ghostscript. At what point does an app converting PDFs to images (to display thumbnails, for example) as a small part of its workflow become an aggregate of that free software? According to the faq it ends up being a fairly subjective question of form and intent. Syscalls or static linking? Etc.
  - leanable 3y ago
    From your experience using Affero, could you explain a bit more on how to safely and correctly separate unrelated code from Affero code? What is often misunderstood about Affero?
    - jddj 3y ago
      Unfortunately I'm not a lawyer and wouldn't want to mislead anyone. The best I can do is direct people to the GNU FAQs on the topic
    - ljf 3y ago

graypegg 3y ago

I love the confetti and easy tech (just PHP and MySQL) for self hosting! But browsing the marketing site, you have a lot of AI tools for prioritizing lists. This is 100% the place where I don’t want things to move without me knowing. My biggest complaint with JIRA/Monday/etc is they have some entity representing “tasks”, that’s displayed in a million different perspectives. Finding a thing is usually what I want to do and I hate it when stuff disappears or changes in a view I was using. No matter how good your tool is at prioritizing, it will be wrong some percentage of the time and while it’s a little annoying to skim a big unsorted unchanging list, it’s even worse when it changes ALL the time.

intheleantime 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback. This may have not come across clearly enough on the website. The AI prioritization is an optional mechanism (toggle) to help individual users prioritize the tasks that have already been assigned to them using signals like task sentiment (how do you feel about a task), priority etc. The priority field is not changed as part of that function. I agree that AI cannot be the primary prioritization mechanism. All it can do is augment existing processes and help individuals be more effective.
- 6keZbCECT2uB 3y ago
  How does the tool ingest task sentiment? As a developer, I would never put in writing that I'm less than enthusiastic about any task.
  - intheleantime 3y ago
    This is something we thought about a lot as well; right now it's just an emoji rating. Once set the picker changes to a checked mark and is not visible to others. The data is stored in the db but not visible to others in the system.
wredue 3y ago
I find that the AI is better at prioritization and triage than the human support. But then, for some reason, whenever support fails to read their tickets, they just dump the ticket on to my queue. So I could just be being salty, or seeing fewer misses because the ai is better at failing the triage.

jeo123 3y ago

Not touching this AGPLv3 software. Every company I work on ban any software with that license. This will be a niche project or " propietary" to orginal developers. It is open-source for users using. Unlikely to see any open source developers contributing it back. Good luck.

intheleantime 3y ago
I mean, we have 89 contributors... What are your concerns with AGPL? The practical difference is the clause that SaaS distributions require to be licensed as AGPL as well. Would you plan to take this, add commercial features and repackage as commercial closed source system?
- cybrexalpha 3y ago
  It spooks company lawyers. The AGPL's "license transference at a distance" is scary from a legal risk point of view. Many corporate legal departments forbid it, or at least getting the exception approved by legal is so painful as to not be worth it.
  - intheleantime 3y ago
    Correct but the reason for that is the fact that all of the sudden companies are forced to contribute back if they want to offer commercial software on top of the labor of OSS projects. Again, I agree with the reasoning for libraries, devTools, infrastructure etc given that those libraries end up in commercial products. However in the case of full fleshed enduser applications AGPL is a great protector against the amazons of the world.
    - hedora 3y ago
      For device manufacturers, GPL3 is just as onerous as AGPL. As an end user, I'd rather not use GPL3 software that has a carve out that enables the software to be used by privacy hostile service providers that routinely force-upgrade their user customers to worse versions of their systems, but that prevents people from just sticking a customized version of the software on a gizmo and selling it to me. After all, I can least air-gap and not upgrade most gizmos. Anyway, I wish they'd rename AGPL to GPLv4 so the infamous "or later" clause applied to it.

jroseattle 3y ago

I see marketing-speak for how this is so much easier than other tools like JIRA (which we use.) However, I'm not finding details about how this is accomplished. What are the key differentiators in how this is easier specific to those that use JIRA?

gloriaf 3y ago
Great question and thanks for pointing it out -- we'll make sure to address this on the website. In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up -- each work function already has a home. The thing you have to decide is how you want to see the tasks. Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards either. The other approach we do differently is to work to engage ICs in the value of the work and we do that by making the goals and work more clear. Some of this is still being developed out and rounded out better by our AI features -- which can be better read about here and how we view it in relationship to our own ADHD and the features behind it... https://leantime.io/2023/07/30/the-top-digital-planner-for-adhd-brains/ https://leantime.io/2023/07/30/the-top-digital-planner-for-a.... Lastly, for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards. Some of which will be coming out in plugins to OSS here soon.
- jroseattle 3y ago
  > In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up I'm not sure what this means entirely, but across our projects we have some with different workflows than the others. These are necessary in that we have certain workflows that must meet compliance requirements, and those workflows are the best way to ensure we execute those. In other projects, they are less onerous and apply to different kinds of work (so, different workflows.) > Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards This is good, but we generally keep our exec leadership out of JIRA (they don't really have the context for the details.) Our users can design their own dashboards, but that's a personal preference. We use the standard views. > making the goals and work more clear I would prefer to see more fall-into-the-pit-of-success for the equivalent of JIRA stories to be more oriented toward the outcome or feature or capability, as opposed to the accounting/I-got-receipts feeling I get from JIRA. While story points are fine, I prefer a focus on clarity and a better measurement for effort than the subjectivity of a team's interpretation of the fibonacci sequence. > for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards So, Leantime includes a markup engine as well as a whiteboard feature? If I already have a deep investment in other tools that do those things, how do they integrate?

phoronixrly 3y ago

Thank you for this, it looks great! I also admire your choice of license. We need more fresh AGPL software.

intheleantime 3y ago
Thank you for the feedback! Don't hear a lot of people say anything positive about AGPL these days... :)

crabbone 3y ago

I keep looking at various JIRA alternatives, but no good finds so far. This is definitely not it. I don't really like the idea of bug tracker as a sort of a GUI program that acts like time management software, i.e. focuses on planning work, tracking how much effort was spent, ability to add notes to tasks etc. My ideal bug-tracking software works more like Git: it has a server-client relationship where clients query the database with predefined set of commands, while at the same time it has programmable interface facing test code. This interface should enable tests to do things like: * figure out what components need tests to run against them when a particular feature branch sees a code update. * extract history of tests running against a defined group of features. * manage association of tests and program components. * manage test sets that aren't feature-related (eg. nightlies). JIRA kind of has this database / query component, but all the functionality above needs to be built on top of it. And the data organization of JIRA relies on issues as the basic unit, where I'd like the basic component to be "features" (similar to how branches are in Git). My biggest problem with the currently popular approach (emphasis on time management) is that it's very informal and unstructured when it comes to testing, poorly automated and poorly integrated with other development tools to the point that it makes it both easy to forget to do the necessary stuff and a very repetitive chore to keep the necessary stuff up-to-date, while it's clear that it's possible to automate it. The attempts to automate this process by adding bots that manage issue life-cycle or generate trivial fixes / merge trivial PRs isn't the way to solve the problem, IMO because this automation is stupid and has a potential to cause harm. Instead it needs to be very tightly integrated with VCS (but, let's be honest, with Git) to the point that such configuration would require minimal effort on the part of the admin and be vendor-independent, and, most importantly, be feature-oriented to mirror how programmers conceptualize the development of their program.

intheleantime 3y ago
I really appreciate your feedback here and I see where you're coming from and can agree if you're looking at Jira as a purely bug tracking / development tool. Unfortunately, and I think important to call out -- is that most companies are trying to use these tools as a "catch all" -- "a one in all solution that solves everyone's problems" and then ultimately, half of the company refuses to use the tools because it's too focused on one user group. Our long term approach is really about making work and getting sh*t done as a relevant part of the PM process and less on time management. Time management is part of organization but people want to care about what they're building and why... something that can be absent in a lot of orgs and even in how we organize ourselves in small teams, startups or small businesses. What I do hear and think would be interesting -- is incorporating a plugin more specific to your workflow mentioned here... because absolutely, tighter QA, etc, is vital and there are things not otherwise easily replicated as part of a dev's flow. We, otherwise, don't have any current intentions to use "bots" in a way that automates things that people should really still be overseeing.

ramzez 3y ago

I quite liked it but last time I checked there was no GitHub integration and that's I would say one of the top features, as every card we complete we want to have PR/Commit attached to it in development lifecycle.

intheleantime 3y ago
Thanks, and I agree. We spend the last 4 months working on a plugin infrastructure including events, api, plugin management etc so that we can now focus on building integrations. The next 3 months or so will be heads down integration work.
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hyggetrold 3y ago

Looks nice - major feature request / design ask / feedback. The current "kanban board" looks basically the same as JIRA's and it's what a lot of people are familiar with. I would love love love to see a visualization that puts all current planned stories into a single vertical column and groups them by status. Done at the top, ready for review underneath, then in progress, and not started. It's a way more compact view of stories and better use of real estate. For prior art look at Pivotal Tracker.

latchkey 3y ago
PT is the gold standard imho. Mainly around the fact that it does such a great job tracking velocity. The primary issue is that outside of developers who've worked at Pivotal (I have), most people don't understand the process of using PT.
intheleantime 3y ago
Thank you for the feedback! Our table views as well as the list views allow grouping by status and will show the vertical groups as you described. Is that what you are looking for? There are a couple screenshots on the repo. (Though they show the group by milestone, status is possible the same way)
- latchkey 3y ago
  PT goes far beyond just grouping information. Coming from just using Jira, it is lightyears ahead of a standard issue tracking system. I suggest you spend some time diving deep into PT and understanding how it tracks velocity and encourages writing useful stories. The documentation on the site is pretty good and there are a ton of googleable resources.
- hyggetrold 3y ago
  What I'm hoping for is beyond what I currently see on the repo - I want a dense view of story information. 'latchkey got what I meant in the other comments below my top comment. Definitely recommend you look at PT and see what it does. I'm not suggesting you make a carbon copy but there's a lot to learn from the PT model.

greenflux 3y ago

"We take the WTF out of managing work" -nice. I love the animation with this. The UI of the product looks pretty good too. Glad to see you have row grouping on the table view. Another good open-source Jira alternative is https://plane.so/ https://plane.so/ . They also have a free cloud plan with unlimited users.

intheleantime 3y ago
We feel like the free cloud plan is the way to go -- by keeping our core features free, we think it's the "level up" PM features that start to bring value worth paying for.

jdlyga 3y ago

You're preaching to the choir with Jira alternatives. For devs, Jira more often gets in the way than helps. We're ok with a minimal set of features. In order to really get traction, you need to sell PM's and leadership types.

intheleantime 3y ago
I agree, there is a real challenging disconnect between messaging for PMs/Leaders vs individual contributors and it boils down to organization size. Small companies and startups tent to be a lot more democratic about their choice of tools where as large organizations tend to be more pm/leadership driven with input from ICs. Right now we are targeting the smaller companies that don't have a lot of PM experience or resources available. The dream being the slack story of IC driven product adoption :D

az09mugen 3y ago

Another open source alternative for jira is taiga : https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/

broskees 3y ago
I tried Taiga. It was a little overly opinionated for me (like it's decision to force me to use story points). I used leantime now and its customizable basically any way i need it to be via plugins.
- az09mugen 3y ago
  Thanks for your feedback

stuckkeys 3y ago

Leantime.io so heavy with trackers that the page fails to load lol. I am using Pihole btw.

intheleantime 3y ago
We got Google Analytics and Clarity on the site. Not sure that is out of the ordinary. The site should still work with pihole though, so I'll take a look at that.

pagutierrezn 3y ago

TBH it looks pretty much like Redmine: https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/ (also open source) configured with the appropiate set of pluggins

intheleantime 3y ago
Huh, not sure I would agree with that. We have some overlapping feature set but I would argue Leantime looks a bit better but I may be biased :D The key differentiators are our goal and strategy tracking though.
- k4rli 3y ago
  To each their own. HN users prefer light sites like HN itself so Leantime with material styles is not ideal for lightness. Pivotaltracker and Redmine are really nice with basic-looking UI. Though I've just set up Leantime in my homelab for todo list/calendar.

dmazzoni 3y ago

Can you talk about your tech stack? One of the biggest complaints about Jira is how slow it is. While I'm really interested in potential alternatives, I'm curious if you think PHP might be a bottleneck. If I follow a direct link to either a single existing issue, or a create new issue page, how fast does the page load? How well does the backend scale to 100k or 1M issues? How well does the frontend scale if you try to open a view with 1k or 10k issues?

intheleantime 3y ago
Hi, thanks for the question. It is a simple PHP application using Mysql as the database backend. We are using a domain driven design architecture across the application and decided to skip the slow ORMs in favor of a repository layer with hand written sql. We are framework agnostic to not be locked into any flow but you will see classes from Symfony and Laravel. The goal has always been to make Leantime as lean as possible to allow hosting it on any shared host out there. That means we don't use any exotic extensions or OS features. You can run it safely on the smallest Godaddy instance if you wanted to. We recently introduced htmx into the stack to offload some of the rendering back to the server and we love it. PHP itself is really not a bottle neck anymore especially since PHP 8.0 We haven't had a chance to run a lot of large scale load tests yet so take the following with a grain of salt but a direct Task hit currently takes about 2.08 sec to load on our production site. (that includes javascript processing time as it loads in a modal) I know we have instances with thousands of tasks and users in the wild and generally performance is not an issue we get reports on on our github repo.
- intheleantime 3y ago
  PS I forgot to mention that we have Sentry profiling. Full Application load (php side) P95 is 120.9ms and P99 is 634.11ms
- alexchamberlain 3y ago
  2 seconds is pretty slow, especially for a single item lookup which is about as good as it gets for database lookups etc. Where is that time spent?

that_guy_iain 3y ago

Nice to see an open source project posted here that is actively being developed. A lot of the time I go to the pulse and it'll have 500 lines of code added over a month, if it's lucky. This has 50,000 lines which is cool.

intheleantime 3y ago
Thanks! There is so much more to come!