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Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement
A lot has changed since the shutdown of pivotal tracker was discussed here. As there were no viable alternatives it seems every month there was a new project popping up. With the last month before the sunsetting approaching, it starts to get exciting who will make it in time, who stays in the race and what the differentiating features of the projects will be.
- jsnk 2y agoI am feeling nostalgic just looking at this. The year is 2012, rails is the hottest thing and mongodb is the inifinity guntlet scaling monster. BackboneJs and underscore were said to replace all jquery and we deployed things with just one command to heroku. The good ol days
- the_lonely_time 2y agocap production deploy still reigns king in some dark corners of the world. Also Hotwire is awesome if you havnt had a chance to check it out.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tyre 2y agocapybaraaaaaaa what a nostalgia proc
- Omni5cience 2y agoI think this was Capistrano, but you're right I that's quite the throwback as well.
- tonyarkles 2y agoYou know... I was a big Capistrano fan back when I worked on Rails webapps and honestly, thinking back to it, it holds up pretty well. I can't really remember a time when I felt like it actually burned me, and that's not something I can say about very many tools. We had Jenkins automatically pushing dev builds all day long (automatically) and had a Jenkins button to deploy to prod. We did have to use the rollback functionality of cap a few times and it always went smoothly.
- twic 2y agoI learned to do deployments using custom shell scripts, and then someone introduced me to Capistrano. And i didn't get it at all. Why would i use this tool when i could just write a shell script? What does it save me? My main conclusion was that some people just don't like shell scripts as much as me.
- tonyarkles 2y agoHah, I agree. I think the thing that made me like Capistrano was basically that someone else had written what was basically shell scripts for me and had worked out a bunch of details so that I didn’t have to on my own (eg rollbacks). Whether cap or custom scripts, the thing I loved about that is… it’s simple enough that you can fully understand what’s happening. Not just at an abstract level but very concretely.
- slowtrek 2y agoSerious question, Grunt or Gulp?
- bartread 2y agoI still use gulp for a side-project: it works and it’s simply not worth the effort of replacing. But I remember back in the day immediately preferring gulp to grunt once I became aware of it.
- Aeolun 2y agoThose were the dark days of JS as far as I’m concerned.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoI don't believe it improved much since then, but at least people have mostly settled on specific tools for e.g. dependency and task management.
- jasonjayr 2y agoOf course! MongoDB is web scale!
- edoceo 2y agoI remember this meme. I was always in the camp of choose Mongo if you hate your data. But, I'm an everything in Postgres since 2001 type.
- benatkin 2y agoBSON. Massive duplication of object keys in requests and responses at least. Also reminds me of tnetstrings and Bencode.
- victor106 2y ago> BSON. Massive duplication of object keys in requests and responses at least. Can you expand on this, please? Why is BSON bad?
- benatkin 2y agoDuplication of keys like name and address in {"name": "Test", "address": "1234 Main St."} - it will have name and address in each record, whereas in SQL it isn't in the data, although it's in the queries.
- applied_heat 2y agoI’ve been a happy redmine user for about 15 years. It may not look as flashy as newer systems but I appreciate the consistent UI which hasn’t broken, and someone is doing the hard work of making non flashy but extremely useful things like e-mail workflows, export as PDF, git integration, etc stay working
- arde 2y agoToo bad its UI is ugly and its update procedures make me nervous. It needs a rewrite.
- vishalontheline 2y agoMake that 11 teams! :) I've been quietly working on oknext.io since late last year. If you're looking for an opinionated task manager for yourself and your team, then I'd love for you to check it out! One thing I love about it is that it sort of takes care of sprint planning for me. No more figuring out how much I can fit into a week - it does that for me, and seeing my progress over the past few weeks motivates me to keep my momentum up. It isn't just like Pivotal tracker - will likely never be - the estimation is in hours, rather than points. I plan on explaining the thought process behind this decision soon. And it isn't built specifically for software teams - I manage personal and dev and non-dev work tasks with it. If you do try it, I'd love to hear from you (vishal@oknext.io).
- apsurd 2y agoname is good ^_^
- vishalontheline 2y agoThank you! I'm glad you like it! ^.^ It rose from the ashes of a long list of well thought out names that my family rejected, and then a good night's sleep.
- pjerem 2y agoLooks nice ! Though, on my iPhone (Orion browser), for some reason, the text on the homepage is black on a dark background. I like the simplicity of your website and the clear screenshot of what it’s about on the homepage page. Try to keep it like this if you can :)
- normie3000 2y ago> on my iPhone (Orion browser), for some reason, the text on the homepage is black on a dark background Same in Safari
- vishalontheline 2y ago
- alakra 2y agoThis was recently posted: Separation of Concerns in a Bug Tracker [2024] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296422
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhere do those team coordinate and track their backlogs and sprints? ;)
- kunzhi 2y agoPivotal Tracker was built bespoke around Extreme Programming so no sprints. And obviously...they track everything in the tools they're building. :)
- 1oooqooq 2y agobut where they logged before the tools were built?
- kunzhi 2y agoOh ya know, a spreadsheet or a to-do list. The first feature you implement when making a tool like this is tracking your own stuff in it. The tool has to be able to iterate on itself.
- jFriedensreich 2y agotracker shuts down end of april so before lanes was able to self host i still used the original tracker.
- bard-tracker 2y agoHeh, gotta love boot-strapping! Like the C compiler that's written in C... At BARD Tracker, we used BARD Tracker to track features and bugs for BARD Tracker, aka, "dog-fooding". We are very happy with the results! It's proving to be an invaluable tool while we continue to build and develop it. :)
- Aurornis 2y agoCan you at least link to some of the efforts? This post is light on details. I’m already seeing parallels to the MeetUp situation: MeetUp hasn’t shut down, but it’s becoming disliked enough that multiple teams are working on replacements. Unfortunately it seems they’re all more interested in doing greenfield work of developing the replacement themselves when it would be more effective in the most dedicated contributors to the various teams were willing to join up and work on one promising replacement.
- dandandan 2y agoThey're each linked from the story url. https://bardtracker.com/ https://bardtracker.com/ https://www.centralcm42.com.br/ https://www.centralcm42.com.br/ https://lanes.pm/ https://lanes.pm/ https://litetracker.com/ https://litetracker.com/ https://storytime.team/ https://storytime.team/ https://planisphere.dev/ https://planisphere.dev/ https://www.kempt.dev/ https://www.kempt.dev/ https://trackerboot.com/ https://trackerboot.com/ https://www.pivotalreplacement.com/ https://www.pivotalreplacement.com/ https://app.velocitytracker.co/ https://app.velocitytracker.co/
- pcthrowaway 2y agoRelated: "Pivotal tracker will shut down" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41591622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41591622
- otikik 2y agoI'm more interested in MilkyTracker replacements. Something that worked well on mobile would be nice.
- bard-tracker 2y agoBard Tracker works on mobile! :)
- otikik 2y agoNot the kind of tracker I'm talking about in my comment, but good luck with your product.
- porker 2y agoWhat made Pivotal Tracker so popular? It had story points front and center, was that it?
- stevage 2y agoHuh, I totally forgot about Pivotal Tracker. There was a phase where every project I was on used it. The killer feature was the UI. When the alternative was basically JIRA, Pivotal was so quick and easy to use. That front page view that let you see every task in a compact list, and easily drag things around to reprioritise was pretty revolutionary. Now it seems kind of passé but it really was pretty excellent at the time.
- jadbox 2y agoThe UI had very few states/pages. 99% of your time was just on the project page to with every card action 1-click away. It also had an optional feature to cap the number of story-point cards in the sprint column based on an upper estimate of the team's story-point velocity. I.e. if the team can only do at max 10pts of cards per week, that's all you are allowed to queue up in sprint. This could be overwritten to force more cards into the sprint, but in practice it provided a nice safety guard from over flooding a sprint's delivery expectations.
- twic 2y agoI think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers. Hence they have endless configurability, millions of views, forms, workflows, and whatnot, all of which gives project managers something to do that feels like work, but end up weighing down the people doing actual work. Tracker has the bare minimum, with no configurability, so it can't be used in that way. As a developer, i actually wished Tracker had a tiny bit more complexity (eg i want to be able to track items past "accepted" and into "in production" and "validated with users"). But i would rather have a bit too little than JIRA!
- gavmor 2y agoYes! Deployed and "validated by users" were on my wishlist, too! Some projects I was on had very large Acceptance queues awaiting various stakeholders. It was a little awkward, and could have been better accommodated. And, of course, the ability to reject a feature which had displeased or been ignored by users? Or failed to accomplish its business purpose? Ah, but these connections are just cute ribbons, and would become repressive if enforced as policy. The story to "Sunset Feature X" needn't be linked to its original implementation, no?
- fumufumu 2y ago[dead]
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoWhat surprises me is that the Linux project is far and away the most successful OSS project (it’s probably underpinning what a couple of trillion dollars of services globally - more?) And yet the processes they follow are completely ignored for pretty much every corporate project - open discussion on open mailing lists, decisions made by those deep in the weeds, the code as the first front and centre, even the standard git.git workflow is pretty much never used I do wonder why …
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoThey do have a bugzilla. I can easily picture Linux's and Gentoo's bugzilla outliving the universe's heat death.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoNah: if universe == $HEATDEATH then set bug_status = “won’t fix”; repeat fi
- zx8080 2y agoIt's like comparing a strong tough guy who doesn't cut corners and plans for the years ahead and a "drug zombie" who only wants to have better KPIs on paper by the end of the month/quarter/year for a title promotion or more internal political power.
- vkou 2y ago> I do wonder why … Because corporations are authoritarian in nature, not open or democratic. If you don't like a decision people with authority over an OSS made, you don't have to work on it. In fact, nothing in one gets made without free consent of the people doing the work. If you don't believe in a feature, but the decision-makers do, they are free to build it themselves. Exercising this kind of veto in a corporation will get you fired.
- IshKebab 2y agoBecause those processes are terrible. Worse than Jira even.
- benatkin 2y agoSome vibe coders incoming after seeing this post?
- henglihong-js 2y ago[dead]
- 999900000999 2y agoNot a single open source solution in the bunch. Whenever I have some money I think I'll wip one up. Although to make it super hardcore, I might just make the whole thing a rest API first. You're responsible for logging in via something like postman or insomnia, and then you need to send in your own rest request to update your tickets. I would do this to encourage a true engineering first mindset. Then I'm going to open source the whole thing MIT. JSON based project management.
- mlyle 2y agoSecond one in the list is AGPL. Did you miss this, or are you making an "agpl-is-not-open-source" argument in disguise?
- 999900000999 2y agoIt's a weak open source license tbf.
- maxhille 2y agoReally interested in why you would say that. I always think of the AGPL as the strictest/strongest possible license...
- 999900000999 2y agoWithout the ability for companies to maintain private forks it's not the best for business. When I build FOSS projects I always use MIT. I'd be honored for a company to use my code. AGPL is a much harder sell to corporate.
- INTPenis 2y agoWe're a small but old company developing one product and we switched from PT YouTrack but I think we might just use Gitlab instead. I honestly don't see why pivotal tracker gets this much attention?
- jFriedensreich 2y agoI am also behind one of the tools ( https://lanes.pm https://lanes.pm ) It works offline with instant interactions and near 1:1 match of features to tracker. (But with a much improved and refreshed UI)
- danson 2y agoDo you have a pricing page? And any information about your company /anything else to suggest whether you're going to be around in 12 months?
- jFriedensreich 2y agoNo prices set in stone yet but it will be around 10 per monthly user, 20 for pro accounts. There will be an option to self host as a single stateless executable/ docker container (plus db) and also to do two way sync with github issues, jira, notion and linear. So the company going away should be less of a danger than with pt.
- _0ffh 2y agoWho else clicked this, thinking it might be about music?
- dcuthbertson 2y agoIn another HN post[0], the top comment mentions Nestfull[1]. Is that a viable candidate to replace Pivotal Tracker? It provides a Kanban board with swimlanes, but the UI is unique AFAICT, because items in the swimlanes can be entire Kanban boards themselves. Regardless, I'm going to try it for personal projects. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362725 [1]: https://nestful.app https://nestful.app
- jFriedensreich 2y agoI dont see how nestfull would be related, it seems like a trello alternative. These are only similar on a extremely high level but the similarity breaks down very fast. I recommend going through the list in the hero section on the linked page (bye-tracker.net) that defines a project tracker
- dcuthbertson 2y agoSorry folks. After only a few minutes of using Nestfull, I don't think it is a good candidate. While the UI, with it's nested Kanban boards and lists, is interesting. I don't see any way to estimate the size/length of tasks, and there's certainly no velocity calculation (sigh).
- tommoor 2y agohttps://linear.app https://linear.app is a very mature alternative at this point, in the same way as Pivotal there are default views, automatic cycles, and a polished IC experience.
- jFriedensreich 2y agolinear is no alternative whatsoever, we state what a project tracker needs to have on the linked page. Part of why i became obsessed with pivotal tracker is that i had to work with linear in a startup and it was so horrible in comparison to tracker.
- slashdev 2y agoWhat are the main things missing?
- jFriedensreich 2y agoThats the wrong question in the first place. Its impossible for something like linear to replace pivotal tracker because part of the appeal of a project tracker is that there is only one view that everyone shares and lives in. If you have different boards and table views and filters and settings a project manager can preset you can never reach this by adding more stuff. As i said before i added a concise list trying to define what a project tracker needs in the hero section of bye-tracker.net If this is not clear i would love to improve it so please share what does not click. I am not 100% sure yet if you need to experience it before its clear or if this is something fully understandable by reading about it.
- derefr 2y agoThis sounds like someone saying that C++ can't replace C on a given project because it has too many features and nobody can agree on which ones should be used. You do realize that any given organization using the tool can just... write a standards document specifying how the tool is (and more importantly, isn't) expected to be used within the org?
- VidasV 2y agohttps://teamhood.com https://teamhood.com, a Kanban-first project tracker.
- jFriedensreich 2y agoLooks like a random PM tool i don't see a single aspect that makes a project tracker there, do i miss something?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bard-tracker 2y agoHello! Nick here from BARD Tracker, one of the ten teams. Just thought I would introduce myself here on HN and reach out in case anyone has questions. We are currently offering free access to a small set of Beta testers. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you are interested! :)
- Nkunku 2y agoHi there , we created something similar so we can be the 12th team Lite Tracker is the name of the app ,so if someone is interested can test it it is live now https://litetracker.com/ https://litetracker.com/
- jFriedensreich 2y agolite tracker was part of the list from day one. it was one of the first teams!
- Nkunku 2y agoOh really the tread is so big ,so I didnt read everything sorry