I never hear anyone shilling for them, so now is my chance. Anyone who’s looking for a great JIRA alternative, I love Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse). It’s the best task management software I’ve used aside from the “no task management software” option. Very snappy, updates in real time, notifications make sense, and no workflow-manipulation shenanigans.
Feeling that even they don’t understand what all their epics, stories and milestones do haunted me all the time. Page load times up to 10 seconds and totally unusable on a big screen (just insanely slow after window size bigger then on avarage laptops).
Convincing my company to switch to Linear was better than any holiday.
The concept confusion is the one annoying thing about it. Too many nouns and no rigorous definitions of them. I’ve never encountered page load times, maybe we just have fewer tickets at my job.
I liked (but was conflicted) Clubhouse enough to end up on a sales call. The person I talked to said much the same, “story” is more or less arbitrary and iirc, there’s no real concept of “bug”. We went with Jira on the end. It’s fine, and we’re not that special.
Plus no way to open up issue tracking to the public.
I’m more speaking to people using Jira who hate it but are encountering the “there’s no good enough alternative” argument. I’m glad the Linear crowd is speaking up; I had never heard of it, but whatever alternatives are available, I hope people start using them more, because Jira is just some of the most frustrating software we have to use these days, and there’s no good reason task management should be this bad.
gitlab issues seem fine to me. some of the stuff jira does for managers isn't there i guess, but if gitlab solves the engineers problem, having to find a separate tool that can create artifacts for a manager seems like a better idea anyway, one tool per audience.
I think this strength of Jira is its biggest weakness. Trying to do everything for everyone and failing either miserably at everything, or just managing some.
They do seem to offer generic SAML SSO, so I'm guessing you could hook it into M365 manually if necessary. We use JumpCloud and I'm interested in seeing how Linear might integrate using SAML.
To elaborate, Linear is probably the best business app I have used for software management ever. For engineers it is fast and fluid and simple with outstanding keyboard shortcuts. For managers it is strongly opinionated with an agile methodology that requires no setup and just works. For teams, Linear makes it fun to stay in sync and track progress towards goals.
One of the best features of Linear is that it inspires my team to build better software, not just tick feature boxes.
Linear is awesome. It gets out of your way and let’s you focus on creating tickets really quickly. The integration with GitHub means engineers rarely need to update the board since tickets sync with your pull request. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing and so is the performance. I’d highly recommend it.
Their pricing and feature breakdown across plans is a joke. Milestones, reporting and roadmap are all top tier features? They're base features on a product like this.
Not once have I wanted reporting or roadmap functionalities as an engineer. Those are management functions, and task management software should serve the people performing the tasks (engineers) first and foremost. Milestones, that’s a bit debatable but still doesn’t seem like core functionality when you have labels and epics.
It’s laughable that you think this is an engineer-first product.
Management products are used by engineers LAST. You project management stuff beyond your own Trello/TODO.txt once someone from management tells you to.
That’s the exact misconception that leads to the development of a tool like JIRA. Despite its name, JIRA is a data entry tool first and foremost, and analysis is run a minority of the time. How many engineers vs managers are there at an organization? Many more engineers. So it makes sense that data entry is the heaviest use case.
Filters make no sense? You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing.
What flow? It’s a task management software, not a traffic system. I don’t want it manipulating the flow of anything. It provides swimlanes and that’s more than enough for me. I can move any task anywhere at any time which is exactly what I want out of a software — for it to get out of the way.
It is impossible to tell how many times I tried to filter out something in Jira only to have everything since before the times or absolutely nothing and needed to scratch that and go back to the defaults. Or hunt down the email with an exact link to the issue.
Craft: “to make or produce with care, skill, or ingenuity.” It means to make something carefully, the same thing done when crafting a search query. That’s the way I meant it anyway. There is nothing particularly difficult about searching in Shortcut. You combine a set of available filters to make a composed filter the same way you search anything. The difference is that in JIRA, there are about 5 different ways to search and the operators are not always obvious.
What it looks like is you keep defending a shitty UX/UI by trying to justify it with inapplicable examples.
> You combine a set of available filters to make a composed filter the same way you search anything
This isn't even remotely similar to "anyone who uses a search engine, tries to find an email". Which brings us back to the original complaint, quote: "It's filters make no sense."
If you "have to combine/craft filters to create a composite filter that you then use to search", you've failed. In exactly the same ways that Jira fails at this task.
I don’t care if you don’t use Shortcut. Use Linear instead, for example, since apparently a lot of people like it in this thread. I had never heard of it before. Main thing is, don’t pretend like JIRA is the only reasonable option because it just isn’t (not saying you were necessarily, but that is what I have a problem with people doing.)
I never said whether I was or wasn't using Shortcut.
> Use Linear instead, for example, since apparently
I never said whether or not I was looking for an alternative
> don’t pretend like JIRA is the only reasonable option
I never said anything about JIRA except in the following context: "If you <make things complicated>, you've failed. In exactly the same ways that Jira fails at this task." And you are the one who actually mentioned JIRA first.
So how about: you stop pretending I said or implied something I never did?
You accused me of defending something. What actually happened is I asked a series of clarification questions ("Filters make no sense?", "What flow?"), neither of which was answered by the way. Again, I have no dog in whether or not you use Shortcut. So I am not defending anything.
>I never said anything about JIRA except in the following context
That's exactly why I ended my last comment the way I did ("not saying you were necessarily").
> I never said whether or not I was looking for an alternative
Why are you commenting on this thread? The whole point was to suggest an alternative. You never even suggested another way filters could work. As far as I can tell, the mathematical definition of a filter is that it's composed of sub-filters. So please either admit you're a negativity-spouting troll or contribute something positive.
I responded to this statement: "You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing".
No. No one in their right mind wants to "craft filters". If you require people to "craft filters" or "combine a set of available filters to make a composed filter", you've failed. It doesn't mater if it's Shortcut, or Linera, or JIRA, or any of the dozens of JIRA replacements/wannabes.
That's the thing I'm responding to. An all your examples and allusions only serve to show that you don't understand this simple fact.
For people to want to "combine/craft filters" these filters have to be immediate, smart, autocompleting, and properly predictive. As an example, Youtrack[1] shows how to do that more-or-less properly (though it has other issues). Shortcut can't even complete available states when you type `state:` into the search box.
> As far as I can tell, the mathematical definition of a filter is that it's composed of sub-filters.
Literally no one using project management software cares about mathematical definition of filter. Not a single soul.
> No. No one in their right mind wants to "craft filters".
You should strongly question this assumption because I am a living counterexample. Before I discovered this tool, I wanted to be able to write the filters so badly I even started to develop a tool that allowed this (called Infinitix) that provided only one basic thing: ability to apply filters on a single list of tickets, and then save or share that filter to other members of your org. Regardless of whether you think "you've failed" if you develop this, I'm sure photographers thought the same thing about Photoshop when it was created. (No, this product never fully materialized, luckily I didn't have to build it because I found out about the existence of Shortcut.) It would have been the simplest task management system possible, in a way.
I don't care if the autocompletions are there, what I care about is having control instead of my system administrator or manager having control, and being able to run whatever query at whatever time I want to. In other words, I want to control the tool rather than it control me, and I also want a tool (instead of TODO.txt, the anti-tool approach to task management).
`state:unscheduled` works just fine, I tested it before writing this comment. There's no limit to the variety of analogies you can dismiss if you simply allow yourself to declare them inapplicable. As for control, it sounds good to me. Honestly, not being able to run reporting is a feature from a developer's perspective.
> `state:unscheduled` works just fine, I tested it before writing this comment.
You clearly didn't understand what I showed you. Watch the video again.
> There's no limit to the variety of analogies you can dismiss if you simply allow yourself to declare them inapplicable
Of course. Analogies never work they way you think they work. At best analogies are dubious claims that need to be proven. You equated Shortcuts to Photoshop, and that analogy is not even tenuous. It's false.
> As for control, it sounds good to me. Honestly, not being able to run reporting is a feature
WHo said anything about reporting? Oh wait, no one, except you.
No one said anything about autocompletion either, yet here we are. I'm a bit done here since you are one of these people who refuse to use analogies to inform their thinking. Suffice it to say, many billions of people over the years have found analogies to be a useful endeavor, and nothing about this particular situation is any different. If you really need it spelled out to you, Douglas Hofstadter has a good talk about analogy as a basis of cognition on YouTube.
> No one said anything about autocompletion either, yet here we are.
We were talking about filters, and this is directly related to the filter functionality that you're so intent on defending.
> I'm a bit done here since you are one of these people who refuse to use analogies to inform their thinking.
I don't refuse to use analogies. However, I refuse to use false analogies, and I also refuse to use only analogies to inform my thinking. I prefer facts over analogies.
> many billions of people over the years have found analogies to be a useful endeavor
And once again you're veering into some completely unrelated tangent that no one is talking about.
> Douglas Hofstadter has a good talk about analogy
If only you had the will and comprehension to keep with the topic at hand without resorting to inventing arguments for other people, overusing false and inapplicable analogies etc.
No way is Shortcut snappy, at least for EU users. They used it for my last gig and I mostly avoided it as much as possible because the constant 1-5 second page transitions drove me crazy.
+1, I used it while it was still called Clubhouse and it was very pleasant. Its performance is the biggest thing I miss after changing jobs and having to go back to Jira.
Based on my experience from 2-3 years ago, I would say to avoid it. It would be a decent pick for a really small team without a lot of product management expectation, which would probably be served just as well by something like trello.
Example: We wanted to create tasks from Intercom conversations and the only way was a custom implementation. Using their api was not a pleasant experience.
Also there were annoying UI bugs that made the product feel unpolished. I ended up using tampermonkey to fix and improve the UI.
We ended up switching to jira and it’s 100% an upgrade, we were happy with the change. People shit on it when it goes down, same as github, but then it’s all fine and dandy the other 99% of the time.
I've been semi-tracking them because they're a local NYC Clojure shop and had wondered how they were handling the social network name overlap. Glad to hear they're still around.
I just use todoist. Very simple, you can create a bit of structure if you want it, or just keep it very simple as a to-do list & color code priority.
The primary downside is that viewing history (closed tasks) is complete shit. They have an API, and that's the only way of getting history out in any sort of convenient format to review. A very strange oversight.
I'm also not sure how well it would scale to large teams.
How? It seems responsive to me. Most actions result in changing the UI a bit but showing data that’s already preloaded. So no delay waiting for a server roundtrip most of the time.
Loading an epic may last 10-15 seconds, triggering the buttons to open the pop-ups menu is sluggish, etc.
I think the main problem is that the browser has to render so many elements, most of them are not even related to the page I am opening. For example, opening a story, it loads behind hundreds of cards before opening the "modal" dialog.
These modal dialogs are the most frustrating experience in SC – they close with the ESC key while you are writing, and it already happened the story I was writing was not saved, despite the obnoxious toast alerts saying the contrary. Modals also often breaks "modals menu" in Safari placing them in random places of the UI. They don't use the whole viewport so there's lot of distracting noise in the whole UI.
Some time ago there was some weird cartoonish animations popping out during my work. What a nice idea to consume even more browser resources and get into the middle of your workflow :(
