Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool, free project management platform
techcrunch.com
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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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
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.
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.
Not that that’s bad! Just a thought.
I would just hire more engineers who have a good product sense and give them more power. That was Facebook's approach (initially).
if you’re building a product for normies, you want to hire normies as your PMs.
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.
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.
"Call for a quote" for software needs to die.
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.
“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.”
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.
There are just no words for how bad this UX is.
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 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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise it's pretty nice.
I can't believe why nobody has implemented in both screens.
You can actually do all actions for the issue just using the keyboard on any list/board view or issue view.
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.
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?
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.
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.
http://taigaio.github.io/taiga-doc/dist/setup-production.htm...
I currently write in notion and export to confluence because I can’t stand the sluggishness of atlassian products.
- right pricing - minimal feature set - good slack integration - decent markdown support
would love to know more about security for the hosted version.
I was looking into the github/outline and saw some references to AWS/S3. That’s the reason I am asking if all data goes to the self-hosting system.
For project management we've been using Trello and it is so far so good. I think I'll give Clubhouse a spin.
A team of engineers may prefer to spend inordinate amounts of time managing an internal docs project just because confluence doesn't do markdown :|
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).
Google docs does collaboration very well, but it doesn’t do all the structured inter-page navigation stuff at all
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.
It's built with Go and EmberJS.
* Designed for tech and non-technical user alike
* Cloud or self-host (single binary deployment)
* Open source core
* Markdown, WYSIWYG with open sourced "connectors"
* Built-in approval and versioning capabilities (no paid add-ons required)
* Secured for internal and external participants
* Opinionated content organization approach
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 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 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.
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.
Aether is actually open source, this specific one is Aether Pro. I’m the maintainer of Aether and the founder of the Pro one. I even wrote about how I ended up there recently: https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-m...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't recommend it enough if you're considering PM system
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.
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.
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.
One can only hope it will remain engineer friendly and allow for reviews and good text formats.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] https://luna1.co/3fa273.png [1] https://asana.com/product/timeline
Our clients even use it and they _love_ it. So much so that one has now adopted it internally.
Any tips? It otherwise looks awesome.
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_.
I have never been happier with a tool and am excited to explore their new offering.
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.
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"
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).