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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have recommendations for alternatives that would require minimal adjustment for someone accustomed to Pivotal? From a quick glance ClickUp or Monday.com look ok maybe? JIRA is obviously common but presumably would have a large learning curve. Asana?

Also while Pivotal does offer an export, most alternatives don't appear to import from it. Though maybe that will change with this. And I suppose a middleman could be used.

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Linear actually looks quite good, but I'm a bit afraid of committing to a smaller option now and ending up with another rugpull.

I can recommend Linear. Very nice UX.

I think the higher level project stuff is a little bit lacking, especially on the reporting side, but it’s definitely a leaner option than the incumbents.

Linear was awesome when we used it in 2019/2020. The only reason we didn't commit to it long term was that it is impossible to get our business people to commit to estimates that don't at least have the appearance of being a time period.

As others have said, Linear looks nice (no real experience). https://plane.so/ is an open source option that I have also not played with.

I am always on the lookout for options since we're on Jira at $DAYJOB (and yeah it sucks), not that we'll ever change.

I keep hearing that Jira sucks, but I've also heard from some that it only sucks if you make it suck: that it's basically PMs adding a bunch of unnecessary steps and box-ticking and such that makes it painful to use. What would you say, having looked at multiple options?

I agree, it's complicated workflows, it's too many options/features (that we never use), it's clunky and slow and some people are even using spreadsheets for some things ;)

We were on Rally before which was okay. I've used things like Bugzilla and trac in the distant pass (for mostly solo things). Basecamp and trello a few times and even gitbug (again for a solo project).

I currently like Linear's ui/ux/approach (but I have not used it really). Shortcut and Plane.so look very similar.

Happy shortcut.com user here, used pivotal for years previously. I use it for my small engineering team.

I've previously moved from Pivotal to Shortcut (when it was still called Clubhouse) and found it to be a good alternative for our small team. I did end up having to write my own import scripts, though that only took an evening or two.

Shortcut maybe? It's definitely not the same exactly and I haven't used PL in a ton of years, but I think it works pretty well overall. The general organization is Milestones -> Epics -> Iterations -> Stories

> JIRA is obviously common but presumably would have a large learning curve

Out of the box it is quite simple. Complexity comes from companies doing a lot of customisation.

Plus it's free up to 10 users.

Yeah, I'm actually leaning toward giving it a try since we're on Bitbucket already. Might do a limited trial while we still have Pivotal access so we only have to do a full migration once.

We switched from PT to Linear and couldn't be happier.

Were you able to import your data? Directly or through another app?

I wasn't directly involved in importation, but AFAIK it went pretty smoothly: https://linear.app/docs/import-issues#pivotal-tracker

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