And as they say any new companies can replace the Atlassian products by bespoke vibe coded alternatives in a few days...
Our company has drastically downsized its dependence on Atlassian in the past month, we will be completely free in a few more. With the help of modern AI tools we've been able to replace their products with internal tools that are better tailored to our needs.
That said, if you are a smaller company, you absolutely could kill Jira pretty quick.
Ticketing systems are not dumb CRUD apps, they're systems that build workflow engines. If you've never built a workflow engine, they're annoying but fine. Building an engine that can implement any special snowflake flavor of business workflow in a way that's reasonable with a reasonable UI is difficult.
And yes, you could write it for your special use case, but use cases change a lot and different groups need different use cases and the time you spend dicking around on building ticketing software that already exists is time you're not spending on shipping, and at the end of the day Jira is like $15/seat at sticker price, why are you bothering?
And that's why Jira is both terrible and still popular.
Did they ever get around to fixing basic bugs like "Jira and Confluence use different markdown dialects"?
They've had a decade to address those sorts of obvious problems that bite 100% of the end users of their stuff, and apparently employed over 1600 people during that decade. That's 160 centuries of person time. I wonder what it was wasted on, if not making their fairly small core product suite usable.
I think we're going to see more and more incumbent companies with big moats and terrible products get replaced with vibe coded solutions over the next year or two.
Why have every company vibe code their own semi-good bespoke tool when instead one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of, and then sell that tool for a reasonable enough markup that the value proposition is big enough. Especially if the tool is open source open core, so companies can PR improvements they think will be broadly applicable.
You have never used an Atlassian product
It's easy to think of DIY software as "free" because you don't pay seat licenses, but DIY is expensive like a free yacht is expensive. It's a bottomless pit of money and time and upkeep.
Even if it's simple to implement, you still have to support it, update it, get people to use it, be on call if it tips over, teach people to use it, be forced to take it over when the person who wrote it leaves, etc, etc, etc
IT is a cost center and isn't staffed at the level of your revenue generator eng teams. You don't buy SaaS because you don't have other options, you buy SaaS to throw money at a vendor to take care of a problem for you, so your IT people can do the work you actually want them to do and not dick around rebuilding software that you already have.