Show HN: Kitemaker – A fast and delightful alternative to Jira/Trello
kitemaker.co
kitemaker.co
I'm one of the founders of Kitemaker. My co-founders and I have been leading and working in software development teams together for many years. While the teams have changed over the years, a few things have remained constant:
- We've always been able to get the most out of a team when the members of the team collaborated closely across engineering, design, product, analysts, etc.
- We've always found that tools like Jira felt like they were built more for the managers on the team rather than the team itself. Things like updating issues only when harassed by a manager or during a planning meeting were not uncommon occurrences.
- The tools we used were usually either clunky and slow, or overly simplified and not particularly suited to software product development
So we decided to make Kitemaker - a tool that's focused on a) helping the team collaborate better rather than helping managers manage the team and b) being delightful and snappy to use.
We have a number of early adopters switching to Kitemaker from Trello, Jira and GitHub issues and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. People love the efficiency of having tons of hotkeys and keyboard navigation (we took a lot of inspiration from Superhuman), as well as our rich issue screen and integrations.
We'd love for you to try it out and let us know what you think. We're available here to answer any questions you might have and also have a Slack community linked from our landing page.
Happy to answer questions about the issue screen! :)
To foster collaboration, we made the description huge (you can write anything from a line to 1 pager, to X pagers there). We also believe that communication contains persistent information and non-persistent information, so we have on the same screen an activity feed with comments (for non-persistent information), next to the description (for jotting down persistent information).
We also have a principle of hiding complexity, so there are not 15 fields to fill in for each issue, a title is enough.
You can also try Kitemaker yourself for free by signing up at www.kitemaker.co
We're currently free. We'll roll out or pricing soon but it will be something like:
- Free for teams under 6 users
- $10-12/month for teams up to 25 users
- Some sort of higher enterprise pricing above that