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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

> They really make awesome products

Oh dear god.

As an employee at a medium sized company that uses Jira and Confluence, I have to disagree.

I'm sure people out there have managed to wrangle and configure Jira into something usable, but it's implementation where I work has been just horrible.

And confluence... Apart from being just slow and unreliable, it's text editor gives me nightmares. I mean, all due respect for building that (it does some pretty powerful and complicated things), but 95% of the time I just want to write an article in Markdown and post it.

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I'll be the first to admit that both of those applications are the source of much misery if mishandled. JIRA especially, considering how many layers deep you can go sometimes. This issue type belongs to this scheme which uses this screen in some issue types but not others, that's designed in another scheme... aiya. It gets complicated.

Unfortunately, that's enterprise for you. Basic human logic is often insufficient to handle the demands...

Those applications are absolutely only as good as the time taken to adapt them to the needs at hand and to the team using it.

And +1 for markdown support. There are plugins out there that add that, but... don't get me started on their plugin ecosystem.

Markdown support is not native in Confluence, but they have definitely delivered some workarounds for this:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.plug...

I was not aware that existed! You've just made a lot of people very happy, thank you!

Try out the new versions of Jira and Confluence which seem much better. The user experience depends on how both these are managed.

I do wish Jira had much more powerful query, and support for deeper dashboard customization. Compared to ClearQuest, Jira is very user friendly, but CQ felt much more powerful.

I agree, I've also been at a company which merged with another company; and both were each using their own Jira and Confluence instances along with plugins. Horrible products.

Do you prefer Fogbugz over the Atlassian bug tracker?

I prefer postits.

Exactly, JIRA's UX was clunky when I last used it in '09, but after using Trac, Redmine, QC, Bugzilla and (God help me) CA USD, JIRA is far superior. Haven't tried FogBugz but I'm a Joel fan, how does the UI compare?

So I think the 'problem' with Jira is that it's the SAP of todo lists. We used to use it for non-tech teams in our org to manage their tasks, tech team or organise sprints (and somehow coordinate that with designers), and as well as for issue and bug tracking.

In the end we just scrapped it all and went with Trello. Yes, it's 'less powerful', but we've found that you don't really need much more. For all the features that Trello 'lacks', it makes up for in speed, simplicity and ease of use.

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