Once upon a time I liked Jira, and most of the products shipped by Atlassian.
While Jira has large admin overhead, it can be configured to make things simple for users. And I still think most hatred of Jira ought to be directed at management for imposing bureaucracy and control through the tool, instead of the tool itself (I see this first hand as my current gig has grown from “startup” to “enterprise” in a few short years).
But Atlassian has made a lot of questionable product decisions over the last many years, mostly in terms of UI/UX. What were once very much developer-centric interfaces are now geared to general enterprise product management. Somehow it’s becoming _less_ functional over time with each major revision.
One of the lenses that we look at things through when making product decisions is making it hard to do things that end up feeling like paper cuts for developers all day long.
I've always seen Jira as the "manager's tool" and we're trying to make Clubhouse the "developer's tool."
It's a simple decision that I think (and I'm obviously biased) has had some profound effects on the way we've built Clubhouse.
I detest jira. The software fills me with loathing. We also pay them a little shy of $5k/year, and will be paying $12k/year by the end of next year. I've been begging one of your competitors to let me into their private beta. So I'm close to being an active buyer for software like this. Also, I can personally make the purchase decision.
I went to look at your site, and clicked on pricing because I'm scared of the word free. I want to pay for this type of software so I have reason to believe it will be there in a year.
However, it says I have to go to the enterprise plan to get SSO. Monetizing security is shitty of you all, and I don't want to have to take a call to get the price. I just bounced.
I'm in same spot. Willing to pay (ie, routinely pay reasonably big money just for Microsoft VLSC stuff and a bunch of other specialized software 10K+ annually and willing to do $50K investments in licensing), but want to have some $ around pricing.
The problem is there are too many players in most spaces.
I literally DO NOT HAVE TIME to handle all the inbound / DRIP / follow-up sales marketing, go through your qualifications process etc. I need to do a quick pass - and pricing is an obvious part of that.
Ironically, we have dual fiber options at our location. One sales guy - here are our prices. Not cheap. Other sales guy - we offer a broad array of services yadda yadda would like to schedule a time to meet. We already have VPN / 24/7 on-call help for issues with it etc etc. Called first guy back, said give us a gig, static IP etc - send me contract and signed within an hour. Perfect. I don't even care if we are paying more. I'll look again in 2 years and if I can get someone to give me an actual price I'll make a decision then.
The call for quote folks are HARD to deal with when you change things like seat counts etc. - just be prepared to spend a LOT more time on the licensing piece which is harder to delegate than the folks with clear upfront pricing.
Last bit is so true, stop wasting my time and just tell me the costs. It just indicates that either you're too expensive or you're bad at concisely making a case for your product. Both are a red flag.
Personally also hate the let’s charge extra for SSO but at least with Clubhouse I can login with Google (G Suite account) and use the free product, as that’s what I just did a couple of hours ago to kick the tires.
I think the challenge with this is what happens when you’re in a growing product org.
At a certain point it makes sense to have product managers. Maybe for a while you keep optimizing for developer usecases, but that’s no longer your customer (even if they are most of your users.)
Larger revenue deals come from teams with more people and those are the ones that need more manager-focused features or where there manager is the buyer. From a go-to-market standpoint, you might put a ceiling on your revenue if you limit the addressable market to those teams that are still product managed by developers.
Our product managers user clubhouse constantly and love it.
Club house has done a great job of organising information into stories, epics, milestones, projects.
All task manager products have some variation on these components but I've found clubhouses organisation of them to be the best.
It allows you to very quickly view the data differently depending on the context: stand up, sprint planning, PM trying to figure what's going on and what should be next.
My gut is that it turns out the way developers want to organise there work is actually a really sensible way of doing it, and so it scales up the management stack well.
Just to clarify, we think a lot about product managers, but when there's a tug-of-war between making life easier for developers vs making life easy for PMs we lean towards the former.
This idea that understanding how to build a product means you do not understand why or how someone would want to use it is baffling to me. Yes, some engineers have no product sense and no taste. But there are plenty that do. As is the case for all non-engineering fields as well.
Well you're nailing it IMHO. I'm currently working at a big enterprise place to pay the bills while working evenings and weekends on a startup with a friend. Going from JIRA in my day job to clubhouse at the startup is like a breath of fresh air.
“Schrader and Clubhouse CMO Mitch Wainer believe Clubhouse can maintain its organic growth by staying hyperfocused on designing for product managers and creating simple workflows that keep engineers happy.”
my workflow with jira is to click on a box, then move on to another one and start writing something, at this point the first decoration triggers a page reload and it wipes what I am currently writing.
There is a setting to disable keyboard shortcuts in jira. It don't seem to do anything, but at least there is a setting for it. My guess is that the jira ticket to implement that didn't include what the setting should do, only that the setting was required
this is almost exactly my workflow, but before clicking on a first box I additionally wait several seconds until the page loads. Also, sometimes I extend that workflow with silent cursing and contemplating self-harm
As a full time software engineer I actually like their recent UI/UX changes. I go to Jira for a couple of simple things: to figure out what to work on, ask clarifying comments and update ticket status.
All the other features with velocity, burn down charts, workflow, etc I could care less about. Which makes sense, I'm not a manager. For me the new UI/UX means I don't have to think about using the tool, which is what I want out of a ticketing system. Funny enough, it really seemed to be management who was doing most of the complaining about Jira at my last gig.
i’ve used jira for nearly a decade and seen it grow over that time. i’ve worked in orgs that embraced it, made it a central part of business process workflows, and therefore paid super close attention to making it usable for the company. i’ve worked at places where it was a simple backlog tracker.
i think jira is a best in class tool for the way it is customizable. the ui has changed over the years but not greatly. the rolling and apis have gotten much better. but the way different teams even at the same company can use the same tool is extremely impressive. i think people who say it’s over complicated and bloated are correct, but at a certain size the workaround for that is multiple competing tools. one team on trello. another on pivotal. and that’s a much worse experience.
I have been on teams where an obscene amount of time was spent discussing Jira.
Not "how should we do things?" but "how should we do things on Jira?" where it was abundantly obvious that using Jira compared to literally anything else was worse. We could have hired someone full time and paid quite well to sit on a stool and move post-its around on a wall and it would have been better, faster, and cheaper.
Jira is fine when you have whole teams of people whose entire job it is to care about things like Jira who make it good enough for the engineers to be generally disinterested, but it is toxic for small companies, especially those which contain certain personalities or just inexperience. You get sucked in to endless discussions and revisions (which generally make things worse) of your Jira process with this idea that when you make it perfect work will be so much better but the result is a Sisyphean engineering team spending ever more time rolling the Jira rock over the hill.
There are a lot of cases where one guy with a pad of paper or some sticky notes on a wall (or literally nothing) are much better than Jira, but Jira is one of those cargo cult things people do because they are supposed to and it doesn't seem to add value unless you ignore any customization and just leave it or you have massive resources to put to developing and maintaining the process.
> We could have hired someone full time and paid quite well to sit on a stool and move post-its around on a wall and it would have been better, faster, and cheaper.
There is no audit log for postit’s. If that is your main use case, use Trello.
On the other hand, hiring a jira expert to configure that monster is great. She should also push back on locking things down to much: Do you really want only managers to reassign tasks...?
When do you need an audit log and what do you need it for?
I certainly have answers as to why you would, I'm not questioning the validity of needing one, I just don't think that very many people who use Jira are optimizing for what they want and need. You aren't in the business of having a detailed record of the engineering work you did, you aren't in the business of making burndown charts, organizing process, etc.
Those things are supposed to work to your benefit, you're not supposed to be working for them.
> it can be configured to make things simple for users.
That is the same defense I constantly hear about Jira. And it proves the point - it requires custom configuration to make it easy to use. So people invest time and energy into their instance of it, and build skills on it, and then are in too deep to move away.
I'm fine with Jira improving, and fixing their UX. I'm fine with other products coming up and beating them out. I'd just like to see this industry move forward, and get back to the place where our tools assist us in our work, instead of frustrating it.
I'm convinced at this point that attempt to combine PM planning & projections, IC planning, tracking for management, bugtracking, et c., all under the same roof, are doomed. I think some of those things cannot co-exist with the others without harming them, sometimes mutually.
Graeber calls out one particular cause of his "bullshit jobs" from the book of that title as excessive, misguided, and ultimately counter-productive attempts at highly detailed & granular computer tracking (complete with, necessarily, more rigid and complex processes). I think Jira & friends are entirely part of that effort-wasting, actual-work-harming trap. They let you see when a project has gone sideways but it's hard to tell that your project management software is part of why it went sideways and also part of why it took you longer to figure that out.
> "...most hatred of Jira ought to be directed at management for imposing bureaucracy..."
yup, that's probably right, as jira (and atlassian) has explicitly targeted large (bureaucratic) organizations.
scrum/agile/kanban tools should first and foremost be a lightweight process on top of development to keep folks coordinated and informed. jira can be configured that way while also providing a lot of visibility to product managers and other stakeholders, but most orgs seem to misunderstand both the purpose and the implementation.
with that said, clubhouse looks really slick (in the ~5 minutes i've looked at it). i've also been impressed with the advances that both trello and asana have made for the soho/smb project management segment in the past year or two since i've last looked at both.
I absolutely hate Jira, it's slow, everything takes many steps, overall horrible. That said, I recently tried their next-gen product and it's surprisingly really nice. It doesn't have all the features but it's fast and much more intuitive to use, even though it looks basically the same on the surface.
We have used Clubhouse for a couple of years, it's fine but I feel like the UI is getting more cluttered, there is very little reporting, few new features. For months the only news were updated to their referral program. They just introduced iteration support ️
Strongly considering to move to Jira next-gen, looks very promising.
Unless Atlassian has made some major changes to the new Jira recently, I'd advise a lot of caution before moving.
My small team is currently on Clubhouse after attempting to use Jira for a few months and finding it to get in the way a ton. There wasn't any configuration locking anything down like everyone has been talking about, but the page load times were atrocious and the UI just felt painfully slow all the time (on a 100mpbs+ internet connection and a laptop with an i7).
I believe I also remember having to move back and forth between various views in the side menu depending on which page I was on - essentially going in and out of the "project" view when clicking into certain features.
Consider it by all means, but do your testing thoroughly. My Jira experience turned me off so badly I likely wouldn't consider using any Atlassian products in the future.
> It doesn't have all the features but it's fast and much more intuitive to use, even though it looks basically the same on the surface.
The "It doesn't have all the features" part is the kicker here. I agree that Atlassian has fixed a lot of problems with their next-gen projects, but I think they're unusable for a lot of situations because:
1. the missing features (lots of workflow stuff that people rely on, for example)
2. they don't play well with other Jira projects. That's fine if teams are totally independent, but an epic from a classic project can't contain an issue from a next-gen project, as an example.
That said: if you've got projects that can work within the limitations of next-gen, I think it's a good move forward!
> Somehow it’s becoming _less_ functional over time with each major revision
I would argue that is now the normal case with almost every software. Technology had its peak some time ago. Most things are getting worse. The internet or telephones are great examples.
We've just spent a good half hour or so trying this out.
It has a snappy interface but in some respects it's very heavy - ie in the number of clicks needed to do anything.
The main one for us is estimating. We want to be able to go through a list of stories and edit the estimates. The fact that the table of stories isn't editable means we have to open up the dialog for each story to edit the estimate.
As a comparison, we're currently using Airtable for some projects and Notion for others. In both of those, you can do that.
Also the ability to add our own fields to stories is something we use quite a bit.
Great feedback, thank you! We do have bulk editing (to update many stories at once to the same value) and an ability to update properties in Epics table views, but not Story table views. Your use case makes total sense. We’ll add your feedback to our internal Story for this feature, and if you’d like, we’d be happy to let you know if this ends up being built.
One of our frustrations with Jira is that estimates are only editable in your backlog or active sprint. We often open stories in different tabs, and constantly have to switch back to the backlog in order to add/update the estimate.
I can't believe why nobody has implemented in both screens.
Have you added the field to the issue screen? By default it's not there, and if there's no points, it won't show unless you click the edit button. But I use Jira and can edit estimates on the issue screen
Our startup is one of the happy users of self-hosted Taiga [1] [2], it is much better than a combination of Jira and confluence.
It has all the features and much more with both a complete open source and SaaS offering.
It supports both "scrum" and kanban style development with card layout which rivals trello. It features many importers, integrations and provides an open API to build new one's easy.
Depending on the company's policy it can be deployed in their own environment, cloud of their choice or just sign up for SaaS.
It has a beautiful interface with PWA and mobile apps on app store using its API, by other developers.
I eventually found a small pale grey floppy disk image (on white background) as the magic thing to click when typing in comments. That alone cost far more vs any benefit I had using taiga. Perhaps the folks who set it up for me to use chose a weird theme?
Yes possible they choose something. We have been using it for quite some time. It also server as an example how to build a nice single page progressive web app for the team.
Although we don't use coffeescript, its' nice implemention. Also there design assets [1] are also open source, so indeed if your team wants can change those minor icons or other details.
dragonsh, are you affiliated with Taiga ? I remember seeing you post a similar comment when I looked at the zepel thread this weekend.... or are you just a satisfied customer ?
No I am not an affiliate of Taiga. In our startup we use self-hosted Taiga.
We neither subscribed or paid to Taiga. Their system helped us and served as one example of a beautiful API based app.
So as my startup don't pay anything to Taiga. I feel this is the least I can do, if my evangelism can help them indirectly.
Open source is built on community which works when everyone returns or contribute back in some way. This I thought is one way, I feel better.
Although once my startup becomes bigger I would like to contribute code and enhancement to it. But at least this small thing makes me feel bit better, otherwise I will feel like a leecher.
Indeed I and my team do the same for other parts we use like kallithea-scm, mercurial, many python, golang libraries, obviously Linux, postgresql and other infrastructure software.
The market is so ripe for somebody to take over the Confluence market. I need a documentation platform that has the WYSIWYG aspects like Confluence, be overall less terrible, and can support global replication. I can’t find anything like it for toughly the same price point.
I just want Markdown support in my Atlassian tools. Every time I write a comment on a JIRA ticket, the submitted comment is garbled by whatever formatting the editor thought I was using.
On that note, why are all the editors different in their system? Between Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, each one has its own edit box, its own markup in there, and none of them are wildly pleasing.
On top of that, one thing they have in common is it takes 5-10s to load and 5-10s more to save any page (their hosted).
They're headed(ish) in this direction. In both Jira and Confluence, the newer editors support Markdown keystrokes that translate into a wysiwyg view. Jira is currently a mess, though, because it has a random mix of new editor and old wiki-style markup.
I think it's a deliberate (and, in my opinion, poor) business model similar to mobile app stores: Atlassian has a small army of plugin developers who sell their plugins for the platform (and plenty of Markdown related plugins for this purpose, for example), and Atlassian takes a big cut of that (I think something like 20%).
One thing I really like about notion is how usable it is as a solo user. Its free tier will get you very far, and as a tool it's very cheap if you end up hitting the free tier limits.
We have Confluence. Great for product people but terrible for engineers and data scientists. Then a data scientist in my team got frustrated and installed GitLab...
Being able to work in Markdown and git tripled the amount of documentation I wrote.
You don't realise how much friction Confluence adds until you try an alternative that is fully integrated into your normal dev workflow and tooling.
I'm trying to remember a confluence competitor startup that launched a few months ago & sort of looked like slack with their color theme. Does anyone have an idea of whom I'm talking about ?
Doesn’t really matter what consistency level is picked. We have offices in US, South America, and Australia. Right now every single query has to come back to a central point, which isn’t great for latency. It doesn’t even need to be multi master since 99% of our page views are reads only.
Clubhouse is one of the better kanban/agile-ish tools I've used. It's pretty responsible, generally fast, and overall configurable enough for me to be happy.
I really like Clubhouse, but I'm somewhat skeptical about the free version. (even though it says 'free forever')
In the past two years multiple companies that initially had an affordable plan ( 10 dollars a month or less) for small companies had the same strategy: change the affordable plan to a free plan. And then within a year kill 90% of the features on the free plan and have you upgrade to a full plan much more expensive than the plan you were on before everything became free.
The product is great though, main feature for me is the ability to plan epics at a milestone level.
I don't know why but many project management tools these days do not have a milestone section. Do teams these days not use milestones as a time box for significant feature delivery ?
Yes, before we were using clubhouse someone was doing high-level planning in an Excel/Google docs. A few months later and even marketing is starting to use clubhouse and the milestone planning.
I think it really helps to not have 30 different unrelated stories to work on but plan them at an epic level so at least the things you are working on are related.
Even for things that are not really an epic I now tend to group related features together in an epic to make it easier to keep track and plan. (e.g. grouping 10 minor UX improvements together in one Q3 UX fixes epic)
The thing I don’t like about these tools is that they all imply a core, unspoken taskmaster in the form of a project manager assigning tasks and then chases people down for it, and their whole paradigm is built around that.
The future of workplace collaboration is not in the structured silos like these that are shaped based on project managers’ demands - it arises from the engineers doing the actual work. JIRA, Confluence and its ilk can work for a team where software engineers are replaceable - in fact, one of their main goals is to make them so - but in a startup team, trying to apply this usually leads to people quitting for a better startup. Probably rightfully so.
Full disclosure, I work on a tool (https://aether.app) that does a more organic async collaboration between engineers than explicit task-based project management, so I’m biased.
Aether seems nice, but I’ve never had a “credit card necessary for trial” work out. I understand the downsides to the company for trying to collect this info, but I’m not willing to risk credit card hell even if you super pinkie promise not to be a jerk. Too many jerks made similar promises and then were jerks.
The pricing seems high for what it is. $10/month is not a lot, but compared to the value derived is quite a bit. Especially since the cost of such a service to operate should be extremely low. This would be cool to bundle into something, but if this is a great tool spending $300/month on top of all our other stuff for medium sized team doesn’t compute. I’ll likely use the existing crappy IM that’s already in place but drastically less cost.
I suppose that the value of productivity gained would be worth $300, but the cost of service aspect doesn’t fee right to me. If I buy a book that teaches me a technique that boosts my productivity I don’t want to pay $10/month for the rest of my life.
All that being said the tool looks great and the design is very considerate. I will keep an eye out for any improvements or if the software goes OSS or Microsoft buys you and bundles it with some azure thing.
The cost of service is a little higher than it seems at the beginning because we do full isolation, you get a full separate server VM, your own database, nothing is shared. It’s not like Slack which is effectively a time share on a global singleton instance. That means we can give you the keys to the kingdom, E2E encryption with no key held on our end (i.e. no escrow, you hold the only copy) or we can do on premises in a manner that can be pretty much up to you. We even offer a service to come in and maintain your own air-gapped physical box if you don’t want to do the sysadmin work for the on-prem.
We can even accommodate custom requests like running the instance on our servers, but pointing the database to your on-premises database, so you remain in full control of the data while you can still avoid the maintenance cost for running an on-prem service.
Also, if you’re a team large enough for it to cost $300, we do enterprise pricing, and can actually tailor it to you, so you might actually end up paying less depending on what that ends up being.
For the features, you’re right, and we actually have lots of stuff in the docket, I just didn’t feel great about having upcoming features on the landing page, so that’s why it might have looked this way.
I would love to hear if you have any feature requests, especially if you think it’s missing something. We want this to be as useful as humanly possible, and you’re pretty much our target audience. We’re designing for ourselves here, no holds barred.
Thanks for the response. I know I shouldn’t just an org based on its design but I think that sometimes thoughtfulness in design equates to responsiveness with comments like these.
The isolation might be really helpful to me and is there a way to learn more about it? I work in an organization that is weird as the cost isn’t really the issue, but the effort to test and validate security. So it’s a weird cycle that’s hard to work with vendors because I might evaluate for a long time before purchasing, or never purchase at all.
I rarely contact for enterprise pricing for new tools because I don’t know if it’s an enterprise option or if I want it for enterprise. And I don’t have time to enter the enterprise sales cycle unless I’m certain. This is probably frustrating for growing companies as I’m just another annoying customer and it’s hard to differentiate buyers from non-buyers. And 90% of the time, I’m not buying. Maybe have some case studies for enterprise licenses showing team combinations as I didn’t even consider that a 30 person team would be enterprise worthy. For me “contact us for enterprise” means a lifetime of dodging bizdev people. My throwaway email is now even too crowded :)
Thanks for the oss link, this helps quite a bit and may be good enough for me to eval and follow up. There’s a whole cloud reg called FedRAMP that I rarely find small companies go through the documentation effort even if the design supports it. And the design constraints are real.
All good questions again, and the answer to why of all questions here is because we launched less than a week ago. :) Well, to qualify this, the Pro got launched a week ago, but the open source version has been online for more than a year and it’s been tested up to a few thousand users in the global realm, so the actual product is solid - just the enterprise side is new.
No documentation for the enterprise features yet, and I fully understand, I absolutely hate to do the whole ‘call us for enterprise’ dance (never called that number in my life, never will, hate the whole price opacity thing) because writing about these features is something I have to do myself. The reason why we have that is explicitly because we don’t have docs for those yet. And since it relates to a small percent of users, I have documentation that is asked by more people that's next on my queue, so trying to cover starting from the more common things.
However, I would love to answer all questions myself over email, or even come to your office and have a chat (no obligation! we want feedback) if you’re in San Francisco.
If you end up picking enterprise deployment and choose us to implement it, I’d be the one to come set it up, as the founder myself.
And yes - the community version is a good way to demo it, give it a shot. It does have a decent bit of content in it, so you can definitely see how it would work. One thing though, the community one is a peer to peer network, so data propagation is over P2P (I also wrote the P2P stack) this non-instant. For the Pro, we actually have proper SaaS infra on GCP, so it's much more work-grade.
If you don't mind, could you provide your thoughts on how it differs from Zulip? From a 10,000 foot view, they seem similar, but I don't have experience with either yet (but I'll let you know if we have time this week to check it out!)
We switched from Trello to Clubhouse 3 years ago - having dabbled with JIRA a few times. We'd outgrown Trello (not enough structure) but didn't want to give up on the speed / ease of moving and updating cards. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-tea.... This seems like a sensible move to grow usage - interested to see how it helps!
My team and I was just discussing the Atlassian toolset and how someone should give them some serious competition. Some of the things we are looking for are: markdown support, one place to keep everything (text, xlsx, images, PDFs, etc.), and a shared "whiteboard". We're currently using Confluence and between the lousy support, terrible editing, and the fact that you have to install plugins to get any real functionality it's getting harder and harder to write that check every month.
We looked at Clubhouse a couple of months ago, and while we all liked the look of it the project manager decreed that it didn't have enough integrations, specifically ProductBoard, PipeDrive, Confluence. It looks like that Confluence integration isn't needed since Clubhouse will have it's own "wiki". Nice! If we could get ProductBoard and PipeDrive working I think we would switch tomorrow. Especially if there was a shared whiteboard offering.
In fact, our remote guys are in the office this week for meetings and the other quarterly things and one of the main discussions was a shared whiteboard. We've tried several in the past, as well as other tools (ie. Lucidcharts) but it never really worked for us. I'm excited to give Clubhouse a try and see if it solves our problem.
I have chosen Clubhouse as our main project management platform around 8 months ago and never regretted since then. It was adapted almost flawlessly to out internal processes and procedures.
Can't recommend it enough if you're considering PM system
I really want to see a Jira competitor succeed, it's healthy to have some competition. But it's hard to find something that competes on the per-user price of Jira Software On-Premise. (Jira Cloud is a different story...too many reports of slowness, too many UI/UX changes, too many powerful add-ons do not work on Cloud).
Next, you have to be the system of record for a company. To do that, everyone needs a license. Jira has a foot-hold because it is used for developers and for every other facet of a business (basically all company ticketing).
Although Jira sacrificed ease-of-use by offering customization, it's also what allows orgs to skip buying other tools.
First off really glad with the move to allow small teams to really try the software for free until they grow organically. Kudos to Clubhouse.
I've been using Trello for my 2-person team but the closer we're getting to an initial launch the more we've been missing the abstractions more complex pieces of software like JIRA offer, e.g., Epics, Milestones, issue-linking, issue-types, etc. I'm not saying Trello can't make up for that with proper usage of labels, lists, and powerups, but having been working with JIRA and Fogbugz for over a decade it's hard to change our way of thinking.
So I though I'd give Clubhouse and this free offering was the push I needed. FYI the tool under https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-clubhouse.io does a pretty job of helping import existing Trello boards/cards but there's not 1-1 mapping so some cleanup will be required after the import.
Nice to see that there's a free plan. I'd be really happy to give it a try if free plans meant something. As if to prove the point, ClickUp just sent an email trying to force an upgrade.
The thing about a free plan is that you put all your data into their walled garden, teach everyone else how to use it, and then you have a limited time to move to something else once they decide it's time to squeeze you. They have nothing to lose. If someone doesn't want to pay, it's good to push them away, and if they do pay, the money is just as good whether the customer hates them or not.
The ClickUp announcement has all the usual "features":
- The free plan will be available forever.
- This is necessary for the free plan to be sustainable.
- We're happy to give you a short-term discount to make the upgrade less painful.
Sorry to say it, but this offer from Clubhouse will be no different. They're in business to make money, and once you start relying on it, they'll pull the rug out from under you the same as pretty much every other company.
Just in the process of trying to convert my team from Trello. Clubhouse addresses many of the issues we have:
- Has functional groups (e.g. Reporting, ITSM Admin) while retaining functional stages (e.g. Todo, Delivery etc). – this is a big one for me as we have to use a workaround involving labels in trello
- In-depth reporting
- Ability to mark a card as officially completed without archiving it
- Umbrella projects known as “epics” so you can encapsulate very large projects and have multiple cards (known as stories) for one big piece of work
- Ability to assign “tasks” to people within cards, and they can see these tasks in their dashboard
- Markdown formatting within tasks within stories, rather than just the description like in trello
- “Free forever”, for up to 10 users, with the only limit being no observers – this is similar to Trello.
- It doesn’t appear they charge extra for integrations of which there are many
This is great news. At Exoscale we are now using Clubhouse but keep tracking product descriptions and design documents + ADRs outside of it. Tying these to the in-flight epics would be a very welcome change.
One can only hope it will remain engineer friendly and allow for reviews and good text formats.
I don't see why anyone couldn't unseat Atlassian. JIRA and Confluence are moderately difficult problems to solve, but it's not impossible to create a lean competitor with a small team and some funding. Winning the war will be identifying a reason for companies to switch. There has to be something particularly painful enough with existing solution to help facilitate conversion.
On the opposing side: maybe it's an easier sell to know a business uses Atlassian tools (from a talent acquisition perspective). If you were hiring engineers and told them you used SVN instead of Git for version control, maybe it just makes the role less marketable. "Another tool I have to learn", one could think.
Migrating Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud has taken so much time and support that it would take a strong company to handle migrating out. Of course there are specialists in this migration process, whom I maybe should have hired.
As an engineer, I love Confluence, every business I've interviewed with has used it, and I'd be slightly worried about how a company survives without it. I don't care about Jira, except for how it works with Bitbucket.
> Migrating Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud has taken so much time and support that it would take a strong company to handle migrating out.
I just went through this and my major pain point was having to upgrade my server to 5.9 before the automatic migration tool would work. Hello? I'm moving to cloud because I don't want to have to do the upgrade process yet again. Now I have to upgrade a server I'm about to switch off. Oh, and manual migration with the XML export files just kind of silently fails, so you have no choice but to use the migration tool. Nice.
Other than that, the important switches are buried four levels deep and the docs never describe the particular UI that's in front of me, but that's something I've learned to expect from Atlassian.
Seems to have worked but it took a lot more futzing around than it should have.
It's been my experience that developers care much more about the user/developer experience than having to learn another tool but then again I've spent more time working in startups than I have working for large companies.
I've accepted the obviously flawed UI for what it is. Instead of being able to move an issue from one backlog to another via the Edit modal (where you can edit virtually every piece of information about the issue), you have to click the "More" dropdown, then "Move". I used JIRA for three years before I knew that. I hope somebody from Atlassian sees this comment.
We've been using (self hosted) Phabricator here for a while on our bootstrapped SaaS project. Been looking at Clubhouse with interest.
Anyone here switched from Phabricator to Clubhouse that can give some feedback on the process? I really love Phabricators code review and Git repo management, as well as the secrets management within it. The 'Herald' workflow rules tool is also great, and I am hoping that Clubhouse can duplicate this functionality?
I put together a custom visualization of our projects in a format that I thought made a lot of sense. My wife, who is a mechanical engineer, took one look at it and said “that’s a Gantt chart.” I have been hooked on Gantt charts ever since, and I wish that software engineering tools would embrace and integrate Gantt charts.
We trialled Clubhouse 6 months ago, but didn't find it a good fit for us. After another 3, we settled on ClickUp https://clickup.com/ and have been very happy.
Our clients even use it and they _love_ it. So much so that one has now adopted it internally.
I installed ClickUp over the weekend to give it a whirl, but it seems like managing sub-projects is difficult. I have multiple projects on the go for each of my clients, and I couldn't figure out how to go more than one level deep.
I switched to Clubhouse recently, and it's been great! I still use Trello for personal/founder tasks, but Clubhouse is really great for software development projects.
One of the things I love about Clubhouse, which I believe is unique among PM tools, is that their Github integration makes it feel like I am just using Github Issues when checking in code. Other PM tools have Github integrations too, but I haven't found one that is as seamless.
I was so pleased w/ Clubhouse at one of my previous jobs that I've gotten my past 2 companies to switch to Clubhouse for project tracking (from Trello, Jira/Asana combo respectively). My current team misses required fields, but other than that, Clubhouse serves our needs very well and their support team is very responsive.
We've been using it for years and love it. Our engineering team went from begrudgingly sometimes doing what they're supposed to in Pivotal to actually _loving_ their project tracker. Never seen anything else like it.
We've been using Clubhouse for a few years. It's been rock-solid, has a really polished interface, good integrations (Github, Slack), and is not Jira. (shudders)
We (a small 5-7 person digital agency juggling multiple active projects) have been using Clubhouse for the last couple of years after outgrowing Trello and finding Jira too complex.
It's flexible, fast, good app integration and has a responsive support team. We recommend it.
Future wish list would be:
- Per Project User access, so we could invite clients into just their project.
- Harvest (or similar) time tracking integration, so we can see how long we spent on "stories"
Been using it for a few years and I love it. I started using it after everyone around me revolted against Pivotal, which they felt was too opinionated about how they should work. Clubhouse, by comparison, fit in a lot better for the people who weren’t developers.
I only worked somewhere that used Jira very briefly but I remember finding it extremely over built and enterprisey. Clubhouse is the polar opposite of those things.
I used it at my last company before the JIRA brigade took over, and I"m pushing it at my current gig. My typical JIRA cycle goes like: I use a simple PM tool. PM's insist on JIRA, because "features". PM's can't figure out how to do simple things (because JIRA). PM gives me admin rights. I quit. That was my last three companies. Anyways -- Clubhouse is more limited, focused, opinionated. The UI is snappy behaves exactly like I expected as I learned it. It feels a little cluttered at times, but unlike JIRA everything seems to work in the ways I expect. It has some interesting constraints (stories belong to epics belong to milestones, so you can't put a story directly in a milestone) but overall I like it much more than JIRA.
My tl;dr for Clubhouse is that (imho) most software shops would be better off using it, or something nearly identical to it, instead of opting for JIRA to turn that one knob they just can't live without. JIRA works well if you need complex workflow management and can hire people to administrate that _as their full time job_.
Not any more. New JIRA is more opinionated, less functional, slower and generally missing features while also being less intuitive. Your experts are no longer needed because there's nothing you can change. It's way worse than it used to be and the bar was already really low.
We had a similar issue with building milestones. IMHO milestones in clubhouse are a way for a PM to interrogate the completeness of high level initiatives which are made up of epics. What was missing was the ability to organize a group of stories than span multiple epics into an iteration that the engineering team could push toward delivery. The iteration is a unit that the dev manager and team can use to track the completeness of their commitments. Recently clubhouse introduced iterations, to assist dev managers in tracking their deliverables.
I have never been happier with a tool and am excited to explore their new offering.
What are some of the reasons you hate Jira? I use it all day every day and I don't really have many complaints for it, I find it to be quite a nice tool actually.
The cloud version is extremely slow. It is buggy. Prior to the recent UI update, it was unintuitive. The new UI is better but still not great. Ironically, their UI update makes Jira more like Clubhouse.
I see. We host our own instance of it in AWS and performance has been quite good, it took some tuning to get it right though. I've found the UI to be fairly intuitive, other than some minor things like converting a ticket to another type is under the Move action. To me the new UI shares many similarities with the old one and I don't really have any complaints about either of them.
@dang (Though I don't know if these @tags even help you search for these kinds of comments?)
The original title is "Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool and free version of its project management platform", I'm not sure if it changed or was editorialized here.
I thought it was interesting that the HN title ("Jira competitor Clubhouse launches free plan, Confluence competitor") emphasizes Jira (to frame Clubhouse).
Yeah, the TC headline is still the more neutral version. There was definitely some heavy spin by the poster who, no coincidence, is one of the founders. Unfortunate they chose to come on to the HN scene by violating one of the community guidelines.
While Jira has large admin overhead, it can be configured to make things simple for users. And I still think most hatred of Jira ought to be directed at management for imposing bureaucracy and control through the tool, instead of the tool itself (I see this first hand as my current gig has grown from “startup” to “enterprise” in a few short years).
But Atlassian has made a lot of questionable product decisions over the last many years, mostly in terms of UI/UX. What were once very much developer-centric interfaces are now geared to general enterprise product management. Somehow it’s becoming _less_ functional over time with each major revision.