This looks nice and sleek, I hope it improved upon the pain points of Jira and builds upon new strengths.<p>The thing that kills me about Jira is the inconsistency I experience between projects. Everybody sets it up differently, and work based off entirely different views and contexts. It is exhausting and there's always too much friction. Maybe managers love it cause they got more time to waste on tools like Jira than us engineers, but if I have to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out how to progress forward my ticket, you've screwed up.<p>One <i>really</i> awful thing about Jira: If you create a state for a ticket, and then clone it for a new project, and then update the labels of those states, you're now screwing over the original project because all those states will be updated too.
Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA. Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged.<p>If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run projects, and deliver on that, then you'll probably get some decent traction with SMBs and work your way up from that. Make teams feel like they'll be agile by using Zepel.<p>Great work and good luck!
It starts with "Zepel adapts to the way your software product team really works", which sounds great, but I can't tell what this means. This claim doesn't seem to be connected to anything else on the page.<p>The major selling point / complaint of Jira seems to be that it's <i>too</i> customizable. They're all different, and a bad manager can make your particular Jira instance unusable.<p>Is this one as customizable? Or is it inflexible? Or does it automatically "adapt" somehow? Does it assume that all teams work in the same way? I can't figure out what tradeoff it's making here.<p>The "JIRA Alternative" page says:<p>> "Because when you’re just a week away from shipping your feature, you should be tracking your entire feature. Not user stories and tasks."<p>which makes it sound like Zepel just picked a workflow. It "adapts" to you by assuming you already work in exactly the way it was designed.
I really love when apps like this are free for small teams.<p>Most of the time I work alone or with 1-2 people. We would look for free options anyway. Because it's free, I get hooked up and then I stay with the tool for bigger projects.<p>Looks very appealing. I'll definitely try this for my next project!
As a PM, I've generally used JIRA because most of the people using the product are engineers, and that's what eng management pushes for. I have generally found that most PM-oriented products like this just require me to duplicate all the stuff that's already in JIRA to the point where the additional effort just isn't worth whatever benefit I get.<p>Given JIRA's ubiquity, I would strongly recommend that you build an integration that allows you to sync tickets from JIRA -> Zepel, so people can get the benefits of the Zepel interface without having to duplicate their work. (Unless this is already there, but I didn't see it on the website).
Kudos for a refreshing take on software project management. This hits a nerve with me - taming JIRA is a royal PITA (couldn't help the 4 letter acronyms, sorry). Especially if you don't have time to combing your backlog all day.<p>Nonetheless, we have found that JIRA can scale nicely from simple to more complex workflows if you take the time to set it up/customize the workflows. But a "Feature Oriented" view that allows me to easily track progress on concurrently progressing streams of work (larger than a single epic) is sorely missing. We tried to come by with Portfolio and Structure for JIRA (both are plugins) but they feel somewhat awkward to use as they require tons of clicks for simple things.<p>Zepel looks like a great idea. However, JIRA is already so embedded in our workflow (thanks to bitbucket integration, ticket bots/plugins etc.)... I'd love to have something like "Github Projects" which sits on top of my normal GH issues but allows me to roll them up. Concourse for example is a nice example of using this effectively: <a href="https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects</a><p>Anyone have a recommendation for a tool/plugin that can do this?
I've been evaluating PM/bug-tracker apps lately. I'm in a unique scenario, maybe an interested party could give me some guidance:<p>I build WP sites for a local design agency (my client) who designs the theme for their client. I have 2-3 subcontractors that I work with to build these sites.<p>Building the site needs to be managed like a "project". Once launched, I want to give my client AND their client the ability to create tickets for any post-launch issues. I need these users to be "siloed" into organizations so that they can't see bug trackers for other clients. I need my subcontractors to be able to see tickets from projects they're approved to see.<p>I want the ability to create tickets via e-mail, sometimes from my client, other times directly from their client.<p>JIRA + Service Desk seems to give me everything I want, but the admin menus for their "classic" templates (i.e. Service Desk) are daunting. Lots of settings that (IMO) should be "global" are instead per-project. The only way to share these settings is to clone an existing project.<p>We've got ~12 sites that we're managing, and to make a "tweak" to one setting means having to go tweak that same setting 11 more times.<p>Is there any system smaller/simpler than JIRA that meets these needs?
As someone running a software product team, we've made the decision to get as close to the developer process as possible with our product management tools. We've recently started doing everything in Github using Github projects, which honestly is really usable. It's kind of put me in a mindset where I'm not sure why I would ever pay for a separate product management tool as I can do most of my critical things with Github + Markup + our design stack (Figma, etc).<p>Obviously there's a market for this as I think people are still chasing potential efficiency gains in making tools that are easy/fast/effective in organizing work, but as a product leader I don't see anything here that compels me to leave Github.
It is super hard to switch to the new platform for bugs reporting / tickets. You just do not want to lose all the old tickets and then retrain your team, then there is a big probability the new tool is not that great after all.<p>We switched from JIRA to youTrack[1] and it was one of our best business decisions recently. It is not perfect, but we will switch again, only if a really superior tool arrives and when it is maintained with some larger company that we know will not go away anytime soon.<p>BTW. Zepel looks very sleek.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/</a>
Really like the UI interface and it's a lot faster than JIRA for sure.<p>Feedback: I feel something is off with: Signup for free <b>OR</b> Signup using Google. Do you charge when I signup with Google?
Looks nice, and I really like how straightforward it is to create and work with subtasks.<p>I'm immediately seeing two pain points, though:<p>1. A lot of the text fields seem to have a nasty habit of jumping the cursor back to the beginning of the text, thus causing me to accidentally enter things "islike th". This is a sure sign that y'all are probably overthinking/overengineering the text inputs :) Also, not having a visual indicator of whether or not a text field actually saved is absurdly annoying, especially when the text I enter doesn't get saved when I close a given screen...<p>2. Just because I'm entering something as a work item doesn't mean I'm actually the requestor of that item. Being entirely unable to change the requestor to something arbitrary eradicates one of my prospective use cases for this. I'd assume that if there were multiple users setup in Zepel I'd be able to choose them, but I don't want to have to setup end-users with Zepel logins just so that I can track who's bugging me about a particular feature or bug.<p>Looks promising, though. Certainly a lot more intuitive than JIRA.
First off congrats on launching and thanks for the "small teams eat free" pricing tier!!!<p>I've just tried Zepel out by importing my current project off Trello (loved that this feature was available) so here's some things that threw me off:
- I'd like an easy way to move multiple cards from one board list into another cause I can't multi-select or drag-select. Organising a freshly imported project is a hassle without this.
- When creating a new feature I couldn't find a way to drag existing tasks/cards into it but as far as I could see I'd have to create new ones.
- I would expect tags to auto-complete when adding them to a card but it didn't seem to work.<p>Generally it seems to work well if one is populating a new project from scratch but cleaning up an imported project would require a little more thought and additional features cause the barrier to entry for users of existing products seems rather high.<p>Keep up the good work!
JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?
Speaking from experience, JIRA is just horrible (at least for me as a software engineer and entrepreneur). I’ve wasted way too much of my precious time dealing with JIRA, so I’m all for any software company working to improve that experience. I’ll be trying out Zepel once I have a moment!
I think it looks promising. Just trying to move to Azure Devops and it has a good product/issue separation I think, but it's <i>way</i> too customizable. I don't want a tool that can be made to suit any process, I want one that supports a reasonable process without hours of configuration and plugin. E.g. i Azure Devops it seems extremely hard to get feature progress and time rollups for features broken into backlog items and further into tasks. Everything seems estimated separately and marking a task as having spent 10h on is never seen as 10h spent on the backlog item or top level feature. It's confusing as hell (I'm probably just not getting it - but that's usually just a sign of poor UX instead of missing or incorrect functionality)
Me and my team have been using Backlog for quite a while now and it's truly refreshing
<a href="https://nulab.com/products/backlog/" rel="nofollow">https://nulab.com/products/backlog/</a>
I'm not finding what the feature difference is between Standard and Small Business.<p>BTW... out of curiosity.... how long did it take you to create this and with how many people?
the most important piece of jira for us is the API. How/When do you plan to have an open api that will assist in navigating issues through webhooks? (i didn't see it listed anywhere if you already do)