I'm not a dev, so some of the dev specific tools I can't speak to, but after looking through this list, for biz admin I suggest looking at Zoho One -- it literally has 90 percent of the tools already and they're integrated, for one price per user. It's been incredible for me as a freelancer to have one place and one price for all my needs: docs, mail, social, email campaigns, transactional email, website, crm, invoicing, books, appointments, webinars, meetings, project management, helpdesk, ecommerce etc... It's a pretty robust platform (and for a one-person operation it's less than $500 a year)
I feel like the promise of Zoho One is strong, but when I was using it I found myself frequently frustrated with the way that most of the services seemed to range from slightly-to-dramatically worse than the competition. As soon as you start paying for a couple of alternatives because the Zoho versions are bad, the one-price-for-everything proposition becomes less appealing.
My roots are in engineering, and I agree wholeheartedly: zoho one is a no-brainer compared to having to cobble together solutions for standard business functions from a dozen vendors at triple the aggregate cost. Just the savings vs QBO or Xero makes it worthwhile.
Hi, I'm the author of this post. We prefer to choose tools for a function by daily users than choose an all-in-one suite. One reason is our team is small, so this way is affordable, also we trust the best tool for a function is 10x better than the one of the all-in-one suite. Second, integrating those tools is not a hard thing.
And project has Gantt charts (I clicked your link just to check that). I have always been disappointed by project/ticket apps that pretend to do project management but don't have a gantt view of tasks.
I love seeing pragmatic posts like this. Of course YMMV and people have different tastes in tools so take what you like and leave the rest. It’s fun to see what others are doing and how they’re thinking about stuff.
As far as the Get Things Done aspect goes, I'd happy replace Github + Github Actions + Travis/other CI/CD tools with Gitlab. It really does all that, and the CI/CD tool is >>> Github Actions.
Totally agree, and their free tier (unless it's changed in the last 2 years) is frankly amazing. We ran a start-up entirely in the free tier with our own hosted runners which are also amazing. (Required a bit of hacking but we had scale-to-zero fleet of ARM and x86 runners in AWS with the necessary rights to do whatever, right up to deploys into DEV, packer builds etc)
Sure! As far as normal DVCS features go, I'd say Gitlab and Github are almost at feature parity(I happen to use both extensively). The UI may just come down to a matter of preference.
Github indeed has somewhat superior code-review tools. But I've found Gitlab to be perfectly adequate.
When it comes to CI/CD, Gitlab CI blows Github Actions out of the water by a HUGE margin.
So, if I just wanted a tool that got things done for me, instead of fragmenting myself with Github + Github Actions + TravisCI / CircleCI, etc, I'd just get one Gitlab subscription and call it a day.
I'm a daily user of Papertrail. It's starting to grow too expensive for our team ($100/16 GB). Still I haven't found an alternative with instant text search and infinite scroll. The ability to quickly scroll through the logs has proven to be crucial to debugging critical problems. I'm having a hard time filtering through JSON logs in Grafana/Elastic search/cloud-native log engine.
Papertrail used to be awesome, until the SW acquisition. I've been very happy with LogDNA/Mezmo as a replacement (no affiliation, just a happy customer!).
Could you expand on why it’s no longer awesome? I’ve only used papertrail in Heroku, until recently on a new project. It seems the same as before, but I’m haven’t needed to use it heavily yet.
I'd recommend HelpScout instead of Intercom for standard customer support. It's affordable (pricing per agent) and very high quality software without any bullshit. Intercom might have additional features, but it's also very expensive.
As soon as your company can afford to hire a single full-time employee, most of these fees seem pretty inconsequential. And if you haven't hired any employees, you're probably in bootstrapping mode, so you're betting on becoming profitable before running out of runway.
As someone who operates a small tech company (<5 employees), I can't relate to using all these products. However, our needs are different than the author's. Given that they're paying $800+ USD/month, I suspect their monthly revenue and the time saved from these tools justifies their cost.
Nice sharing!
One question, how could 10G tier for solarwinds-papertrail is enough for you? I am expecting you to have more logs generated, it's due to only short-term data being queried in it(cold ones will be archived in different infra?) or?
There are individual cases where this is the right move. E.g. your main business is consulting services, and you choose a quick-and-dirty service to host a marketing website with no form input and no production content. Convenience of, say, WordPress might trump a static site generator.
The older I get, the more I've slid towards the opinion that I'd much rather configure cloud SaaS via terraform than waste days of work maintaining a self-hosted application.
When I was younger I thought it is cool to be admin and have access to stuff, run things on my own being like Neo in Matrix.
Then I had admin access to wi-fi router in dorm, it stopped being funny when people shitty laptops could not connect and they would blame you or for any kind of connection issue for that matter :)
Then I had a job with support duty, 1 A.M. calls because you need to check logs are not cool.
Now I don't want to have any privileges unless I really cannot do my work. If I don't have to run some application and someone else is getting called for outage or I can say that is our provider can't do much - I am definitely making company I work for - pay to another company and stay out of equation.
If I run some software for myself by myself I am not going to pay for that - but as soon as other people are involved I would tell them to go and buy that service. If it is work related even more so.
Yep. Again, the nuance of this point is lost on the "homelab" crowd, but if you're in a software business, your software is what your business is.
Not running a monitoring platform, not running a logging system, not building your own PaaS. Outsource this as much as possible to 3rd-party agents with a sizable economy of scale.
Nearly all engineering teams(outside of FAANG) simply aren't resourced to re-invent the wheel over and over, especially when it means providing after-hours support for the wheel as well.
Agree to a point. I'd say that "nearly all" teams outside those in medium to large companies aren't resourced enough to maintain existing well-packaged wheels. It's a gradient, not a binary. If you've got someone who's capable of deploying EKS and setting up a CI/CD that lets developers move quickly, it mightn't be a big deal for them to deploy the Grafana stack (loki, mirmir, grafana) and have logs and metrics on the cheap. Log/metric/APM services can get ludicrously expensive and unless you're in fintech, you might only need them for debugging and capacity planning.
Up front: I agree with your “no, thanks”, but, I do think there is a philosophical point the author has to not host software themselves, which 86’s most OSS.
Not that I agree with their “rules”, but I can at least understand why they’d choose to not host.
(Fair warning: I host other peoples software (Heroku architect) for a living so I’m probably very biased)
I don't work for them, I'm just a fan.