Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.
Jira is so customizable and has so many features that it can be made into a sort of bureaucratic prison that's actively counter-productive for everyone except higher-level managers who just use it to generate countless reports. In the worst case, Jira can be used to institutionalize mistrust in employees/developers.
On the other hand, a minimal setup with kanban boards can feel a lot like Trello integrated into a bug database, which can work and scale quite well.
I will say that even a minimal installation of Jira can be overly complex for small teams of 2-5. This is where Trello can really shine.
I think buying Trello was great move for Atlassian. No way could Jira compete with them in the long run. And now they are even safe(r) from new Trello-like competitors. Brilliant move for Atlassian. Too bad for us users... :(
With ~350 employees and many mixed teams using only Trello would be chaos. In key areas we need fixed workflows (-> JIRA).
Right now we are planning to add Wekan (FOSS trello clone) to our toolchain for workflows which are more dynamic (less "C follows B follow A" + smaller teams - e.g. innovation and some planning).
Your comment just illuminated that for me and I think you're right. It's the micromanager's dream, but for good managers it doesn't seem to offer enough over the competition to draw them in. The best I've worked with considered PM tools essentially fungible, and therefore weren't likely to invest in 1) paying for the Atlassian suite or 2) the overhead of getting it up and running.
After taking a class and reading up on project management and trying to get more organized about my own projects, it's basically that. People have been able to orchestrate large projects with nothing more than pencil and paper and then typewriter. The best PMs don't need to force a tool choice.
If anyone here has ever been confused by the expression "damning with faint praise", I hope this is an illustrative example.
The "least-worst option" means it's not good, but all the alternatives are terrible. That's not damning.
> Damning with faint praise is an English idiom for words that effectively condemn by seeming to offer praise which is too moderate or marginal to be considered praise at all.
Which seems about right to me.
It's like writing an employee a letter of reference, and only saying that they're very punctual - meaning that there's nothing else good about them, other than the bare minimum of bothering to show up at work.
It seems to me that saying it's only good by comparison to how awful everything else is falls into this.
Saying that one employee is the least worst employee you have when someone calls you for a reference means they are the best employee. It also means you aren't particularly happy with any of them, but that's just adding a flavor to the sentiment that this employee is your best.
Now, if I asked you to recommend a bunch of project management/issue tracking software suites, and you absolutely floored me with praise for one, but said good but forgettable things about JIRA, that would be be damning with praise.
Coming full circle, saying that JIRA is the least-worst option means it's the best option and you just have an ideal in your head that isn't being met.
They're utterly different things, really.
But when I look at the landscape of tools that I've used that compete with or compete with a part of Jira, I just prefer Jira over the rest of them by an not-unsubstantial margin.
That said, Trello was great for a small team bootstrapping a new product without a lot of external dependencies or parallel release cycles and I hope they let them run independently.
I once, over a beer, told the development team of a ticketing system that I'd never used anything I hated less than theirs, and they all grinned and said that that was high praise to them.
If you believe you can produce such a system that people actually like to use, rather than finding less hateful than the alternatives, I genuinely invite you to try, because I'd love to have such a thing available to me. But I'm afraid I'll remain skeptical until I see it :)
This my experience as well. What are people using that works so much better than JIRA?
JIRA has problems, but it's far better than any other project tracking/management tool I've tried. Managing projects (especially ones with large or multiple teams) is impossible without tools like this, and I haven't seen anything that makes the process painless.
If you have more than 5-10 people using each of your task boards, the problems may be more than any productivity tools can really fix.
We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.
In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate, add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_ happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't want to be too spammy here.
If a security vulnerability happens on the public Fogzbugs instance, we'd be bitten by it badly in this sort of situation. In our setup, we protect against that by exposing the JIRA webserver and git servers only inside of our private network.
It's not about perfect security, but it does greatly reduce the attack surface when the server isn't even accessible via the internet. I can't prevent anyone who wants to from signing up for the free trial of Fogzbugs and exploiting their publicly running system - even logged-in-only exploits are possible in such a case.
Not to mention the issues with downtime on these cloud providers. My provider has had 1 sizeable, noticeable outage in the last 5 years. It spanned about 20 minutes. Look at a big, popular cloud service like GitHub - they've had several in the past year alone, spanning hours at times.
I find these sorts of compromises where I'm offering my code and server configurations to a 3rd party company (where basically any admin there is free to read it, or anyone who can compromise their admins) to be rather poor. I'd rather keep the blame within my own company and be in control of our data fully rather than having to worry about whether Fogzbugs operations follows proper security precautions, I only have to worry about whether we do.
Call it paranoid if you want, but I think it's a more than reasonable precaution to not just throw your data around to anyone who asks for it. Especially data which could lead to compromise of servers and customer information. I value my customer's information much more than I value any gains from some easy to use cloud service.
This would basically resolve my biggest problems with it I suppose, if used fully and properly. Currently comitting with your SSH key basically resolves this issue in the same way, assuming our internal-restricted server isn't compromised of course.
I'd still be a little uncomfortable putting code on 3rd party servers and having any data there at all for stability reasons, but this does make it more viable. I'll definitely be commit signing everything I have on cloud services from now on.
Besides, a disgruntled employee of your company is far more likely to be malicious than a disgruntled employee of some random cloud services company. What would be their motivation? They probably don't care about your code at all -- but your employees -- they certainly might. Has there ever been a case of a disgruntled Github employee hacking a customer company's production code ever in the history of Github? Has there ever in the history of SMEs been a disgruntled employee that harmed his own company? All the time.
So what risk is more realistic to mitigate? The hypothetical disgruntled employee at a vendor that probably has never heard of you or employees sitting right there in the office with you?
Once you have these services running they're fairly stable and hands-off, especially if you have them firewalled off enough to not have to worry too much about remote exploits. A little bit of docker experience can do the job here, we're small enough that we don't need a fancy high availability configuration or anything, so it keeps things fairly simple.
Of course a disgruntled coworker is a bigger concern, but one which is easier to control than outsiders are. And that's not to mention the many times in the past that I've seen 3rd party companies hacked to do things like steal Bitcoin wallets via their providers. If it's an easy risk to mitigate, may as well do it.
Ehh...
The biggest problem JIRA has is tons of legacy that nobody needs (like subtasks, a pain in the ass to work with).
Configure the tool properly and it's actually quite nice to use, especially in combination with Confluence for specs.