7 ms·

Every time I saw a project management tool I instantly want to compare it to redmine which is based on Ruby. I failed to see obvious advantages from Phabricator

by ausjke 12y ago

Every time I saw a project management tool I instantly want to compare it to redmine which is based on Ruby. I failed to see obvious advantages from Phabricator yet.

debacle 12y ago
Phabricator is way better if most of your users are readonly. It's also more actively developed and is a bit faster.
adamors 12y ago
Seriously, Redmine is your standard? It has to be one of the clunkiest, slowest and all around uncomfortable project management tools out there. We use it at our place of work, and out of 30+ developers, only a handful of people are content with it.
- leonardinius 12y ago
  What would you recommend / advise then?
  - sogen 12y ago
    At our company we are about to decide between these two: VersionOne and TargetProcess. I'm not affiliated to them.
  - adamors 12y ago
    I honestly don't know. We've been also using Jira but it doesn't cover all of Redmine's features.
    - leonardinius 12y ago
      Same here. I've been Jira user / Jira consultant for some time (around 3.x - 4.x versions). And I loved the tool then. I don't have the same sentiment any more and mostly find it bloated. At the moment I'm daily Redmine and YouTrack[1] user and find both of them much more superior. Personally I think YT is one of the most user friendly tools out there, but I also find it quite limited and lacking (especially in regards to reporting and time management). However it seems it's being addressed with 6.x version (it's still not at the point I would like it to be, but hopefully the trend will continue). At the moment I don't see any viable and full-featured alternatives to Redmine frankly, which is disappointing. I like the tool, however it could be more user friendly (modern) and easier to maintain (at least for non Ruby guy). I'm considering to give a OpenProject[2] a trial demo someday, maybe things are better there (basically it's another Redmine fork). Regarding Redmine performance - yes it could be better. However it my experience it does scale quite decently (e.g. Jira used to have major problems with it, please bear in mind my experience with the tool is ~3 years old, hopefully it's somewhere addressed currently). In one of our Redmine setups we have around 41k issues and we do not experience any major problems with it. [1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ [2]: https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
      - ausjke 12y ago
        openproject is a redmine derivative, good to know its existence and will give it a try someday.
      - jansh 12y ago
        I agree that Redmine can be a bit hard to maintain at times which is why we created Planio[1] in case anyone's interested. (shameless plug ;-) ) [1] https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/ https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/
        leonardinius 12y ago
        We used to use your service in one point of time and I must say we loved it. Actually, a colleague of mine was asking me what services I could recommend for his new venture and all I was able to come up at the time was: - Want to manage it yourself? Use Redmine on DigitalOcean - SaaS?, then Planio will get you covered.
  - vaceletm 12y ago
    If you are looking for something that does "more than just git" and if being open source is valuable to you, you can have a look at Tuleap[1]. It comes with git and svn for source control, built-in tracking technology (big difference with redmine/jira, anyone can customize models & workflows), code review with gerrit, agile dashboard for scrum (kanban on going). Last but not least, it does scale quite well (10k users, 200k tickets, TB of git repo, ...) Full disclosure: I'm dev on that very tool. [1] http://tuleap.org http://tuleap.org
    - touristtam 12y ago
      I am more or less in the market (and evaluating) such tool suite and I must admit that I am pretty impressed at what you have here. However if I can find one downside of the UI is the lack of sheen; things that other tools out there (that get often 'promoted' on HN have). anyway Thanks for sharing. :)
      - vaceletm 12y ago
        Agreed, there is a huge work on going on the UI side and the screenshot gallery doesnt really represent the amount of work done. It's a bit better when you look at it live[1] but the road is long. However, the on going work start on strong bases, for instance for Kanban[2]. [1] https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 [2] https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574 https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574
    - annnnd 12y ago
      Looks nice! A hint though: I was looking for an open source tool and I didn't stumble across yours, so you might want to put some effort in SEO, presence on blogs,... I find the information on your download page (https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go) a bit confusing. What do you charge for? I need to know that up-front before investing my time... There are many products which are "free" until you need some (basic) functionality. Also, you might want to check spelling on that (and probably other) page(s), but I don't personally mind that. :)
SEJeff 12y ago
It has code review that doesn't suck. Redmine is wonderful for issues, but it has no sane code review bits. Also, the gitolite plugin is horrible (I've had to hack several bits of it to work), and there is no really good way to do fine grained access control for your repos. This is all out of the box stuff you get with phabricator. It does those bits exceptionally well. The niceties you get with redmine, such as referencing commits or issues and autoclosing them on code push also exists with phabricator. Think of phabricator as a more meme friendly superset of redmine.
- ausjke 12y ago
  It took a while to set up but Redmine Git Hosting Plugin worked well for me on gitolite-based repos. The web git-diff from Redmine's git kind of helps code-review but it's indeed not ideal. I wish redmine is written in PHP so I don't need run Ruby, as all my other server software are in PHP. otherwise, Redmine rules.

by ausjke 12y ago

Every time I saw a project management tool I instantly want to compare it to redmine which is based on Ruby. I failed to see obvious advantages from Phabricator yet.

debacle 12y ago

Phabricator is way better if most of your users are readonly. It's also more actively developed and is a bit faster.

adamors 12y ago

Seriously, Redmine is your standard? It has to be one of the clunkiest, slowest and all around uncomfortable project management tools out there. We use it at our place of work, and out of 30+ developers, only a handful of people are content with it.

leonardinius 12y ago
What would you recommend / advise then?
- sogen 12y ago
  At our company we are about to decide between these two: VersionOne and TargetProcess. I'm not affiliated to them.
- adamors 12y ago
  I honestly don't know. We've been also using Jira but it doesn't cover all of Redmine's features.
  - leonardinius 12y ago
    Same here. I've been Jira user / Jira consultant for some time (around 3.x - 4.x versions). And I loved the tool then. I don't have the same sentiment any more and mostly find it bloated. At the moment I'm daily Redmine and YouTrack[1] user and find both of them much more superior. Personally I think YT is one of the most user friendly tools out there, but I also find it quite limited and lacking (especially in regards to reporting and time management). However it seems it's being addressed with 6.x version (it's still not at the point I would like it to be, but hopefully the trend will continue). At the moment I don't see any viable and full-featured alternatives to Redmine frankly, which is disappointing. I like the tool, however it could be more user friendly (modern) and easier to maintain (at least for non Ruby guy). I'm considering to give a OpenProject[2] a trial demo someday, maybe things are better there (basically it's another Redmine fork). Regarding Redmine performance - yes it could be better. However it my experience it does scale quite decently (e.g. Jira used to have major problems with it, please bear in mind my experience with the tool is ~3 years old, hopefully it's somewhere addressed currently). In one of our Redmine setups we have around 41k issues and we do not experience any major problems with it. [1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ [2]: https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
    - ausjke 12y ago
      openproject is a redmine derivative, good to know its existence and will give it a try someday.
    - jansh 12y ago
      I agree that Redmine can be a bit hard to maintain at times which is why we created Planio[1] in case anyone's interested. (shameless plug ;-) ) [1] https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/ https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/
      - leonardinius 12y ago
        We used to use your service in one point of time and I must say we loved it. Actually, a colleague of mine was asking me what services I could recommend for his new venture and all I was able to come up at the time was: - Want to manage it yourself? Use Redmine on DigitalOcean - SaaS?, then Planio will get you covered.
- vaceletm 12y ago
  If you are looking for something that does "more than just git" and if being open source is valuable to you, you can have a look at Tuleap[1]. It comes with git and svn for source control, built-in tracking technology (big difference with redmine/jira, anyone can customize models & workflows), code review with gerrit, agile dashboard for scrum (kanban on going). Last but not least, it does scale quite well (10k users, 200k tickets, TB of git repo, ...) Full disclosure: I'm dev on that very tool. [1] http://tuleap.org http://tuleap.org
  - touristtam 12y ago
    I am more or less in the market (and evaluating) such tool suite and I must admit that I am pretty impressed at what you have here. However if I can find one downside of the UI is the lack of sheen; things that other tools out there (that get often 'promoted' on HN have). anyway Thanks for sharing. :)
    - vaceletm 12y ago
      Agreed, there is a huge work on going on the UI side and the screenshot gallery doesnt really represent the amount of work done. It's a bit better when you look at it live[1] but the road is long. However, the on going work start on strong bases, for instance for Kanban[2]. [1] https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 [2] https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574 https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574
  - annnnd 12y ago
    Looks nice! A hint though: I was looking for an open source tool and I didn't stumble across yours, so you might want to put some effort in SEO, presence on blogs,... I find the information on your download page (https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go) a bit confusing. What do you charge for? I need to know that up-front before investing my time... There are many products which are "free" until you need some (basic) functionality. Also, you might want to check spelling on that (and probably other) page(s), but I don't personally mind that. :)

SEJeff 12y ago

It has code review that doesn't suck. Redmine is wonderful for issues, but it has no sane code review bits. Also, the gitolite plugin is horrible (I've had to hack several bits of it to work), and there is no really good way to do fine grained access control for your repos. This is all out of the box stuff you get with phabricator. It does those bits exceptionally well. The niceties you get with redmine, such as referencing commits or issues and autoclosing them on code push also exists with phabricator. Think of phabricator as a more meme friendly superset of redmine.

ausjke 12y ago
It took a while to set up but Redmine Git Hosting Plugin worked well for me on gitolite-based repos. The web git-diff from Redmine's git kind of helps code-review but it's indeed not ideal. I wish redmine is written in PHP so I don't need run Ruby, as all my other server software are in PHP. otherwise, Redmine rules.