Why Jira Sucks

To me, what sucks about JIRA (and would suck about any well-designed tool that replaces it) is not &quot;feature x&quot; but the entire JIRA mentality. All of it.<p>It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process.<p>tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it gets taken for the central thing. This is an illusion. Fixing a bug without filing a JIRA ticket is in itself progress. Moving a JIRA card without any other change is not. Yet the second is what&#x27;s visible and therefor what&#x27;s rewarded.<p>Any problem gets solved with &quot;more JIRA &quot; which stops working when the remaining problems are caused by too much JIRA. And yet they keep trying, because it gives &quot;control&quot;. JIRA is a like metastatic tumour that will grow until it kills the host.<p>In case the cancer metaphor didn&#x27;t make it very clear, I don&#x27;t like JIRA much. Yet if JIRA were to die today, the middle management who live by JIRA would replace it with something else equally bad, if not worse.<p>Filling in missing features won&#x27;t and can&#x27;t fix that.

There&#x27;s a hundred small issues with Jira, but there&#x27;s one <i>huge</i> one: It&#x27;s slow. Really, really slow.<p>Atlassian seems to make a lot of money, so I guess they&#x27;re optimising for something that matters to <i>someone</i>, but from my point of view I have a simple process for evaluating tools:<p>1) Can I use it <i>at all</i>? 2) How many of the features I want does it have?<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure Jira would score great on the second question, but since it hard fails the first, I&#x27;ll never know. And it&#x27;s been slow for so many years now, I assume they have no interest or ability to fix it. And their slow drift towards cloud installs over letting people self host isn&#x27;t helping them either since, embarrassingly, their cloud instances seem to be <i>even slower</i>.<p>(Incidentally, there&#x27;s a lot of competition in that space, but I&#x27;ve been pretty happy with Clubhouse. I wouldn&#x27;t mind a few more features, but it&#x27;s good enough. More importantly, the UI is clean and snappy, and that hides a multitude of sins.)

Every bullet point says &quot;Missing...&quot;, but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many features, and that it&#x27;s super slow!<p>The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist &#x2F; simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I like Jira to some extent, but its performance and messy UI are really making my life harder rather than simpler.

I am reading this comment thread and honestly I don&#x27;t know that I agree. I think JIRA, like most tools, is as good or bad as you make it. I&#x27;ve been at numerous companies using JIRA that don&#x27;t seem to have most of the issues referenced here. The only thing I&#x27;ve ever felt like JIRA really lacked in was in a good UX for embedding code snippets or other technical details into issue comments. Native support for Markdown in comments would be a good win.<p>I actually like JIRA and Confluence and have generally had good experiences using them in multiple companies. One of the main things I like is the integration between the two, and Confluence&#x27;s concept of spaces so you can have some things publicly facing and other things private, which allows you to use Confluence documentation as user-facing docs, which references JIRA issues directly for known issues, and can write requirements&#x2F;specs&#x2F;PRDs in Confluence and reference them easily within a JIRA issue.<p>The only real problem JIRA&#x2F;Confluence have is being very very slow. They&#x27;ve gotten marginally better over the years, but they&#x27;re still terribly slow compared to competing offerings.

Jira sucks but it&#x27;s not because of these reasons. In fact if you fixed each item here, it would be worse.<p>Jira sucks because it is unopinionated and infinitely customizable. As a result, everybody who believes they&#x27;ve discovered the perfect project management setup (spoiler: they haven&#x27;t) is empowered to cook up their vision via an inscrutable set of customizations. This leads to a bunch of inconsistencies between projects and endless bikeshedding. I imagine all this dynamic configuration is also the reason their cloud hosted version is so painfully slow.

I also have a low opinion of jira, but I don&#x27;t agree with this list at all. I refuse to use jira because it is over-engineered and is generally used as a crowbar to foist non-technical influence upon technical teams, at least in the sites I&#x27;ve seen. Jira is in my opinion a fatal source of friction to the production of reasonable software.<p>That&#x27;s not what I&#x27;m getting from this list.<p>Worse, almost all of the points (all maybe? Haven&#x27;t checked) declare that something is &quot;missing&quot;.<p>Please god no.<p>Jira isn&#x27;t missing more features. When you make a list like this, some product manager at Atlassian is going to turn it into a bunch of scrum epics and jira will be even worse in 12 months.

What about the burn down charts?<p>Every project I’ve ever worked on, features are finished, apps and websites are shipped, clients are happy and pay the bills, yet the burn down just goes straight to the right and never down. Sometimes right and up if people added more tickets during the sprint.<p>We look at it at the end of the sprint and say ah well and continue on our way.<p>Then sometimes a PM type decides it’s a problem but nothing ever changes it.

1. It is dog slow.<p>2. It is dog slow.<p>3. It is dog slow.<p>...<p>When my team had an important as-quickly-as-possible sprint, we dropped Jira and switched to Google Docs as it was much easier and faster than Jira.<p>My conclusion was that Jira doesn&#x27;t do much for developers that can&#x27;t be done in some Google Docs&#x2F;Sheets.

Sucks indeed. Ended up using the CLI for most JIRA related activities in my previous job. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;jira-cli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;jira-cli</a><p>Some utils to add to `bashrc`:<p><pre><code> alias jo=&quot;jira open&quot; alias js=&quot;jira show&quot; jos() { ticket=&quot;$1&quot; if [ $# -eq 0 ] then jira open else jira open PROJECT_NAME_HERE-&quot;$ticket&quot; fi } jss() { ticket=&quot;$1&quot; if [ $# -eq 0 ] then jira show else jira show PROJECT_NAME_HERE-&quot;$ticket&quot; fi } jqlf() { jql=&quot;$1&quot; chrome https:&#x2F;&#x2F;__PROJECT_NAME_DOMAIN_HERE__.atlassian.net&#x2F;issues&#x2F;?jql=&quot;$jql&quot; } alias jm=&quot;jira mark&quot; alias jcs=&quot;jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10001 --priority 3&quot; # create story alias jcb=&quot;jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10004 --priority 3&quot; # create bug alias jce=&quot;jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10000 --priority 3&quot; # create epic alias jjq=&quot;jira jql&quot; # custom query alias jql=&quot;jira jql&quot; # custom query # example: # jjq &#x27;project = PROJECT_NAME_HERE AND sprint = 158 AND &quot;Epic Link&quot; not in (PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4695, PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4373) AND status in (&quot;Push to PROD&quot;) ORDER BY cf[10008] ASC&#x27;</code></pre>

Unpopular opinion: it doesn’t suck.<p>Let me walk that back a bit - I have no experience of the cloudy version which unanimously seems to be derided as slow. Atlassian - you might wanna fix that. Like yesterday.<p>But server (&amp; datacentre) editions - best in class for my money.<p>In terms of features, the Rally &#x2F; Agile Central (did that just re-brand again?) rollup roadmap view is the only missing feature i crave. Atlassian should just merge the portfolio product into jira.<p>As for everything else - speed is absolutely fine if hosted well.<p>I tend to council people to try to use less features not more - often jira features are used to attempt to work around challenges that are best addressed by talking to people instead.<p>It integrates with everything, no matter what source control, build pipeline or IDE tooling is in use, there’s integration with jira.<p>The REST API is absolutely usable (mostly for workflow automation and analysis purposes).

Every time I upvote a submission by the title without reading it I regret it, and this time is no exception. Some of the items don&#x27;t even make sense as written. The fourth item, for example, has two huge issues. 1. It&#x27;s about Confluence, which is a <i>different</i> Atlassian product. There&#x27;s some Jira&#x2F;Confluence integration, but they are not the same thing. 2. &quot;you have to save the other user changes also and while viewing the confluence, if you want to edit, the user will be redirected to other pages.&quot; That sentence is gore.

As others have said here, the main problem is just that it’s really slow.<p>Apart from that, I think the only item on this list that really puts its finger on a key problem is #1, inability to manage dependencies between projects. You try to work around Jira’s problems by splitting the work into separate projects, but then they’re almost completely siloed, and Jira doesn’t help you connect them up.<p>The other problem I have with it is that it’s too fussy about the hierarchy of issue types. You have sub-tasks, stories, epics, and initiatives. Each one has special semantics and certain supported operations. If you started defining some work at the wrong level of granularity, too bad, because switching everything to a different tier is complicated and massively slow (literally a multi-page wizard, a progress bar and a confirmation screen when making a “mass edit”, i.e. a trivial edit to two or more issues).<p>Hierarchical issues is a good idea, because that’s a very natural way to break down and refine work estimates, but it should just be an arbitrary tree, not a strict and limited set of tiers.<p>Too much complexity, not enough generality. (And not enough speed.)

RT @HackerNewsOnion: California has ruled it illegal to conceal a company’s JIRA subscription for the purpose of attracting engineers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;HackerNewsOnion&#x2F;status&#x2F;981609242221318145" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;HackerNewsOnion&#x2F;status&#x2F;98160924222131814...</a>

What’s killing Jira and the other tools in Atlassian’s suite for us is them killing off the on-premises server products. Some of the companies I work with have defense security requirements and just can’t use it in the cloud (unless they followed a lot of stringent requirements that are not on their roadmap, and I assume they would charge a lot more for that).<p>The cloud versions are also <i>far</i> more expensive and while I’ve always liked the software in general (apart from it being dog slow), a big draw was how cost effective the server products were. So I’m about to start evaluating GitLab, YouTrack, etc. to start moving these companies off Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence in the next year or so.

Great article. As you are likely not native English, just as a tip you can actually simplify a lot of statements by removing the word ‘the’. As one example:<p>&gt; When the users need the features from Jira and request them to configure the plugins for many application scenarios, which contribute to the overall complexity of UIs.<p>Becomes<p>&gt; When users need features from Jira they request plugins, which contributes to UI complexity.<p>Not a criticism - just thought this might help!

&gt; Missing Easy Search Option for Finding Issues in the Project<p>Really? I think search is one of the most compelling features.<p>I find most of the time when I can&#x27;t find something, it&#x27;s because of different terms used, such as searching for &quot;schedule task failing&quot; vs the ticket saying &quot;job run error&quot;. (Usually once I eventually find it I just edit the ticket to have the other keywords I tried)<p>The UI for selecting advanced search is acceptable.. it&#x27;s not the easiest thing - for example searching open vs closed on GitHub is an much simpler - but it also exposes a lot more of the fields.<p>Personally I use the text-based JQL interface most of the time. It&#x27;s very powerful, and as the name implies, anyone that knows SQL will find it familiar. A quick example, an easy way to find bugs closed in the version you&#x27;re releasing but that weren&#x27;t correctly tagged: `(type = bug) and (fixversion is null) and (status changed to closed after 2020-12-02)`.<p>And search you do is updated in the url (easy to share with others), and even better, if you paste that url into Confluence, it turns into an embedded dynamic list. This is great for release notes, or making category pages of certain types of tickets (eg: all open bugs related to feature x, or all bugs older than 6 months with more than a few comments, etc). Yeah you can build reports with this, but I find these are more accessible and used when they&#x27;re organized within a logical structure in the wiki vs buried in a flat list of dozens or hundreds of other reports.

All I want from Jira is to allow me to use Markdown.

The one thing that annoys me is that even after all these years of JIRA they still haven&#x27;t fixed their shitty WYSIWYG editor. I can&#x27;t count the number of times I&#x27;ve written something and then end up with random asterisks all over the place because it failed to figure out what is bold or what&#x27;s in a list or whatever.

What is missing in my opinion? It is consistency between the atlassian products and&#x2F;or adherence of industry “standards”<p>Confluence and JIRA use a different markup language for posts and none of them uses Markdown (in any flavour), which I would also use to write in-code documentation, like in a README file

JIRA is a bit like linux. It only really sings when you have a skilled admin to set it up and maintain it.<p>I have used a whole bunch of ticket&#x2F;project managing tools in a number of different orgs. By far the most useful is JIRA.<p>taiga.io comes close, but lacks the admin interface and multi project overview that jira has.<p>Trello is ok, but terrible for large teams, or large projects. Subtasking is a pain and there is no real concept of a sprint. its ok for replacing notes on a board, but terrible for recording state.<p>Some of these criticisms are valid, but compared the competition[1], I&#x27;d choose JIRA 7 times out of 10.<p>[1] dont get me started on the &quot;clever&quot; people that decided to make their own in house solution, kneecapping the entire planning ability of a 70k person org.

Does anyone here get to use Basecamp? It looks awesome and I’ve read up on their Shape Up process but have yet to find any organizational support for it in my professional experiences.

Jira sucks because middle management wants to be able to look at stats about stuff like estimated vs achieved points to get a fake feeling of control and hide the fact they are useless powerpoint generators.

[Current Atlassian employee here] This might be biting off more than I can chew, but if anyone has tangible ways they think Jira can be improved for non-tech team members I&#x27;d love to hear them. Happy to chat via email or Zoom about them and try to add some of the fixes into the upcoming roadmap.

Um did anyone look at the OP&#x27;s submissions? Clearly they are linked with Zepel.io: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=svikashk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=svikashk</a><p>I sense a lawsuit from Atlassian poised at Zepel incoming.

Is it Jira that sucks or the management methodologies that cause it to be such a dumpster fire? Scrum-style management is the norm now: it is increasingly difficult to escape it now. So this means project managers are chasing burndown metrics and the like, and organizing everything on boards that are tweaked to death.<p>Atlassian is basically the centre of the so-called &quot;Agile&quot; industry these days. Jira is just a reflection of it.

I have more specific problems with Jira:<p>1. When editing a comment, the textarea is tiny and placed in a pop-up, instead of in the page. Can&#x27;t resize that to see the comment better.<p>2. After disabling shortcut overrides, the shortcuts are simply disabled, along with the default browser behaviour for them.<p>3. Refreshing a page resets scroll-status. Seriously, webdevs, stop hijacking normal browser scroll behaviour. You always make it worse, never better.<p>4. If your login session times out when you&#x27;re writing a comment, you can&#x27;t publish it, but the error message isn&#x27;t clear about the reason why. There was some button in the error message that caused you to lose the entire contents of the comment you were writing. Happened to me several times after writing comments 8+ paragraphs long. It&#x27;s infuriating.

I don’t like Jira any longer, too. Slow and overloaded. It feels ancient. So, what are some good alternatives you use?

I&#x27;m old enuff to remember when Jira was brought in through the back door and was forced on management.

The problem with Jira is management shifting overton windows over time and making it into a blocker to work instead of a tracker of work. I just checked, on one of my main work boards, to create a new ticket, there are 33 fields to fill out, at least half of which are mandatory. In the middle of a highsev incident, I absolutely hate the time sink, and have been trying to figure out ways to automate away jira as much as possible. I think Jira can be used correctly, but over time PHB&#x27;s ruin it&#x27;s potential.<p>The other problem with Jira is the Atlassian push into confluence that tends to go with it. Confluence is so infuriating. Oh what, you want to do a simple operation like copy-paste data from one section of a table to another? Fuck you. You want built in markdown? Fuck you. You want to embed github pages? Thats a plugin and an ordeal to get approved...etc<p>People always talk about how it&#x27;s just a wysiwg and so its for the non-techs, but the thing is it&#x27;s so specific and non-standard they are still having to learn how to use it anyway. Why not just get them working on github wikis or something?<p>Also: ffs, stop trying to do &quot;smart searching&quot; for me! It&#x27;s literally the most useless feature ever, and has never returned anything close to what I was looking for. Yay for having to learn JQL just to do a semi-advanced search. How many query languages do we need to know these days?

Why do I get the impression that either Zapel or clubhouse sponsors this domain? :)<p>Anyway, from personal experience of working with large, distributed teams and (later) leading team that included developers, designers (who had no idea what software development workflow is), and electrical engineers, I have to say that still there is no replacement for Jira. And I&#x27;m saying that after trying dozens of alternatives.<p>Now, maybe things got changed in the last five years, but something where Jira still shines IMHO:<p><pre><code> * Self-hosted, free for small teams, you get access to *every* release they made. All these cloud-hosted solutions sound nice until they close the shop. * Almost infinitely configurable. Going from Jira to enter-your-favorite-simple-tool feels like going from Emacs to the chalkboard. Your CEO likes workflow X, sure. Your designer wants workflow Y, no problem. Your plumber used to Z, done. Irreplaceable when you work with the teams from different fields. * Bazillion plugins, integrations, name it. You are still missing something, go and write a plugin in any JVM language you like. It probably will work for all Jira versions with small modifications. * Management, CEOs, even front-end desks like it. Easy to sell, no matter the price. I had a harder time selling Zimbra (which is free) to CEO than Jira, because every CEO knows about Jira :D </code></pre> Right, it got slow over time (I believe the main reason is clunky UI), but you have to pay the price for all those features. If I&#x27;m Atlassian, I&#x27;d probably add some optional light add-on UI, as Jenkins did with Blue Ocean.

Missing... missing... missing...<p>I disagree. What makes JIRA a pain is that it has too much. It tries to be a solution for every possible workflow and ends up being a slow, clunky, and confusing solution for all of them.<p>I personally think the best thing Atlassian could do is spin of JIRA into multiple apps which all use the same core, but have different interfaces designed for different workflows. Of course, that&#x27;s much easier said than done with such a ubiquitous monolith as JIRA.

For some quick catharsis, have a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jiralover.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jiralover.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>

For us Jira became the only option for scaling engineering. Do not bother about if you have less then 3-4 teams. But if you scale, essentially it is the only solution we found which can fit everyone needs, and give deep enough insights about engineering metrics. And obviously Jira can be very light or very complex. It gives you a lot of building blocks and it is your choice how to use it.

It&#x27;s so fucking SLOW.<p>I&#x27;m sure it has something to do with Angular or modern JavaScript development, somehow.<p>I&#x27;d rather poke my eye out than navigate around in Jira.

What I don&#x27;t like about Jira is that eventually everything ends up in a poorly structured pool of &quot;Work complete&quot; tasks.<p>I regularly come across situations of the form &quot;we finished Task XYZ a few months ago, but I want to come back to it.&quot; Maybe the ticket has an attachment we need for long-term documentation purposes or a test detail we need the next time we review the code.<p>Jira search rarely finds anything useful-- the S&#x2F;N ratio is terrible with non-development tasks mentioning XYZ, yet ignoring actual XYZ tasks due to poor naming and heirarchy. I usually instead look at the code itself, see in the git history &quot;This was modified in ticket 345675&quot; and then use that to index Jira back to the info I want. From there maybe I can walk between linked blockers and sub-tasks to get what I want.<p>My pre-Jira experience was on Basecamp v1&#x2F;v2. I appreciated the forum-style layout, because it tends to allow for a few key things: * &quot;Search&quot; and &quot;browse&quot; are both well supported use cases * Old content remains usable and structured, rather than dropping off a cliff after the last ticket closed. * Content can be grouped as it makes sense-- say you get a customer feedback item that touches on three eventual tasks. It would have to be (possibly sliced up and) attached to all three tickets in a Jira model. * It felt &quot;discussion-first&quot;-- the discussion of what to do and how we want to do it is central. This tends to archive some of the subtle choices and gotchas that won&#x27;t appear automatically in a ticket.<p>I always dreamed of a system that basically added lightweight ticket&#x2F;kanban model on top of Basecamp. I can see the value of tickets as a trackable unit of work, but it feels like this would be little more than a few tiny tags decorating a readable discussion flow.

I just want to quickly see the dashboard of my project and the status of my tasks for the daily. Just getting there is a pain every day.

Is there a better product out there that can communicate what the development team is doing to non-technical people?<p>I like Jira when I don&#x27;t have to use it. For example, setting up GitHub automation so that changes from Git will cause tickets in Jira to transition to the next stage. Or, automating a transition from &quot;Pending Estimate&quot; when a Jira user assigns story points to a ticket. The automation features in Jira are far beyond anything I&#x27;ve ever used before (one might even consider it an &quot;IFTTT for project management&quot;), and on most teams I&#x27;ve been on, very much under-utilized. I can even automate starting the process of development when design is finished, as when the design ticket is marked &quot;Done&quot;, the development ticket it&#x27;s linked to will change to &quot;Pending Estimate&quot;, as it&#x27;s now possible for a developer to estimate how long it will take to implement the given design.

We are trying to unsuck Jira for users with an alternative UI, allowing them to manage Jira issues on a virtual whiteboard. [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spartez-software.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;whiteboards-for-jira" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spartez-software.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;whiteboards-for-jira</a>

Jira has two different WYSIWYG fields for issue descriptions. The one in the edit-issue form understands Markdown, but the one in the create-issue form doesn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s been this way for at least a couple of years.<p>Jira could become perfect in every other way, and would still suck if they don&#x27;t fix this.

Co-founder of Zepel.io [0] here. Thank you for giving Zepel a shoutout in the Jira alternatives section of the landing page. Would love to get feedback from the community regarding our App.<p>[0]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zepel.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zepel.io&#x2F;</a>

As a dev working in a team with &quot;sprints&quot; and creating&#x2F; solving tickets, I find the interface awful.<p>I remember 10+ years ago jira had straightforward tables, it was much quicker to add, remove, close issues. I’d open a bookmark to a page with a simple table listing of all issues assigned to me.<p>I don’t know what the heck is going on, now the ui is this awful &quot;modern clean&quot; style with popups everywhere, sidebars, everytime i look at an issue it’s cramped in a tiny column, or i have to open in a new page. The whole ui is so slow and clunky, you have to expand&#x2F;collapse content all 5he time. All in the name of what? Is scrolling down a page so difficult for a user? How does Amazon make money?

When I got my first job reporting to a non-technical executive and had authority to pick the PM tool, I thought this was my chance to find the Tool That Didn&#x27;t Suck. Going down that rabbit hole led me to the sad truth that it&#x27;ll be impossible to make a project management tool that the engineer likes until the engineer stops perceiving project management data entry as busy work. Finding a new tool ameliorates this until the novelty of working in a new UI has worn off.<p>Engineers are an autonomous bunch, and the best coders among us despise doing anything that isn&#x27;t actually writing code. Unfortunately, like doc writing, there is more to being a good engineer than writing code.

I was a JIRA admin for a waterfall-based company (Japanese). They did process <i>hard</i>. Agile was a cussword, and the JIRA workflows were standalone engineering efforts; complete with custom JIRA plugins, written in Java, because even JIRA couldn&#x27;t handle some of the process.<p>I guarantee that it would have had most of the folks here, whimpering under their standing desks.<p>It was the Tenth Circle of Hell.<p>It gave me a sort of PTSD, so that, now I&#x27;m on my own, I try not to write anything down, and, if I do, it&#x27;s usually a small list on a whiteboard.<p>If I never see JIRA again, I will die a happy man.<p>That said, it is like blaming the asphalt for the eminent domain seizures for a road. It&#x27;s a symptom.

As others have mentioned, check out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linear.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linear.app</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;height.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;height.app</a> is also quite good

Don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s mentioned, but actually what I hate most about it is that there <i>are</i> plugins that seem to do useful stuff, but they&#x27;re <i>paid</i>-for plugins that also require the IT department to do something. It&#x27;s hard to imagine a more hopeless prospect that even one of these two things occurring (people agreeing that we should pay for something, and IT doing it in a timely fashion), but both at the same time and just because some lowly IC (or even whole team) wants them to is far beyond the realm of possibility.

JIRA does not suck, it is people who are using it. The same with programming languages and frameworks.<p>We all suck just accept it and try to improve yourself and others point by point in that new 2021!

I got pulled in as the acting sysadmin of an on-prem atlassian suite at my last job after the I.T. dept lost everyone who knew how to use linux. The worst part of doing upgrades by far were the 3rd party addons everyone had added to Confluence etc, they always screwed up the upgrade process.<p>I didn&#x27;t really mind using JIRA to track my daily dev work, it seemed fine to me. It was annoying that each team had different custom fields etc and seemed a bit unwieldy in that respect.

Can someone - anyone - recommend a better product (non-cloud)?

Jira is not all that bad. With Jira It&#x27;s easier to write stories outside of the tool and copy&#x2F;paste in. If you have a side hustle or small team Jetbrains YouTrack is free to 10 users (I think) and it&#x27;s awesome.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;youtrack&#x2F;?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx5iu7O_47QIVYSCtBh02AwWKEAAYASAAEgKnu_D_BwE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;youtrack&#x2F;?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx5iu7O...</a>

When I read the list of reasons &quot;Why Jira Sucks&quot; what came to mine was the Charlie Kaufman movie &quot;Synecdoche, New York&quot;. In that movie, a playwright keeps expanding the scope of a play to more and more encompass the scope of reality itself. Likewise, some of the points (1, 2, 3, 5...) in the writer of &quot;Why Jira Sucks&quot; wants Jira to be bigger, to encompass the variety of ways work can flow.

&gt; Missing Easy User Interface to Edit and Update Confluence<p>There is no “easy” UI for this. The problem to solve is merge conflicts, and Atlassian (rightly in my view) clearly decided that real-time collaborative editing of the draft beats forcing users to do merge conflict resolution when saving changes. Wikipedia takes that latter strategy and it&#x27;s a huge hassle.

We&#x27;re getting off our old ticket&#x2F;wiki project system this coming year as it&#x27;s being sunsetted. Jira is one of the alternatives we&#x27;re investigating, because several staff have used it in other jobs. I also used it for a brief time, and I was not in love with it. I often felt like it was arguing with me.<p>There are <i>so many</i> systems out there. Right now we&#x27;re also evaluating YouTrack from JetBrains and OpenProject.org (which is a fork of a fork of RedMine).<p>We don&#x27;t want to have to move again any time soon, so while we&#x27;re evaluating features we&#x27;re also trying to predict stability and viability. To that end, when available, I&#x27;m including in our evaluation notes 1) when the company making the system started; 2) when the system was launched; 3) how many staff the company has.<p>JetBrains started in 2000, YouTrack launched in 2009, and they have over 900 employees. OpenProject launched in 2012. Both seem to be stable and under active development.<p>ClickUp has a lot of features and <i>looks</i> nice (we haven&#x27;t dug into it yet). But they launched in 2017, and raised Series A funding in June 2020. So they&#x27;re young. That doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re <i>bad</i>. It just means they&#x27;re less known, and have not proved long-term viability. On the plus side, it also means they don&#x27;t have the 18 years of cruft in the system that Jira (launched in 2002) seems to have.<p>In my experience the right project management system can really help developers, so I always want to hear everybody&#x27;s experiences, good and bad.

After months of frustrations dealing with JIRA, our team switched to Youtrack[1], it is more than 2 years now using it and we are extremely happy with this tool. Best yet, it is supper affordable for small teams.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;youtrack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;youtrack&#x2F;</a>

I hate Jira because every company I&#x27;ve worked for that uses it is a feature factory. But maybe that&#x27;s just me.

I haven&#x27;t encountered a bug&#x2F;feature tracker that doesn&#x27;t suck. They&#x27;re really designed for managers so that they have some glimpse into what the people they are managing are working on. Something designed solely for engineering teams would be much simpler I think.

It looks like one of may marketing websites, in this case build by clubhouse or zeppel. And I&#x27;ll be frank, clubhouse does not work at all for complex software projects. Maybe it can fit some web consultancies flows or similar, but it is build for VERY specific niche.

Since many people are also complaining about Jira UI, I&#x27;ve been working on a CLI app during the holidays in a hope to speed up my Jira workflow to some extent: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;38P12bv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;38P12bv</a>

I remember when I was working in a start up we used a simple Excel spreadsheet to track bugs. We eventually transitioned to Jira and it was good. I now work in a much bigger company and we use an Excel spreadsheet to track the Jira bugs. It’s very annoying.

If anything, Jira tries to do too much. It is like Excel, tries to fit every need in its domain. That it still has limits does not mean it sucks. Quite tiring when people reach for that word for nitpicks and personal opinions.

Jira is by far the worst software I&#x27;m forced to use. The fact that I can&#x27;t even reliably find old tickets, not even by search which should be a last resort, is enough for me. It&#x27;s a steaming pile of crap.

Am I the only one who has never had an issue with Jira? Sure, there are some things that could be better. But, overall, I find I&#x27;m content with Jira.<p>My belief from seeing many organizations struggle with Jira is they have process issues that need to be addressed outside of Jira. Jira is simply the place where their process becomes visualized and put into place - so it gets blamed for the breakdowns.<p>Reading through this list, I can picture exactly why this user is having these complaints. Some of these a definitely UX frustrations, but many of these seem to be fundamental process issues or contradictions. For example, the website claims &quot;missing easy setup&quot; - while also listing a bunch of things that demonstrate the complexity of their Jira setup.<p>-----<p>tldr: If you&#x27;re having the issues the author lists, you should probably check your process. Jira is doing you the favor of highlighting where it&#x27;s broken.

Sorry, no; a bug tracking system can be missing all those things and still not exhibit that intangible Jira suckage.<p>Simply adding more things to Jira that are supposedly missing won&#x27;t fix it.

I&#x27;m surprised this doesn&#x27;t mention things like the poor performance, or the fact that some screens expect text in textile format whereas others use markdown

Missing the ability to assign more than one person to a card.

Does anyone else think that Airtable is headed down the same path? Hot mess in terms of trying to do a lot, and never being able to find out what i actually need?

Everyone in our company hates redmine. We were doing great before when we used trello, but managers want to track and feel they have control of the projects.

Completely misses the point. The reasons why JIRA sucks are:<p>1. It is slow

I used to agree, but then I tried all the alternatives. And as others have mentioned, it&#x27;s as good as one configures it to fit the team needs.

Try linear.app and it will clarify why Jira sucks :)

Jira is just fine.<p>But if you find a company where they want to create their own ticket tracker in house, run. It means they&#x27;re pennywise pound foolish

Jira is basically the Excel of task management. As my coworker says if Excel I also attribute to Jira: it is the most abused tool.

1. Unbearably slow. 2 -&gt; n. Whatever.<p>None of the missing features matter in the slightest in the face of the completely unusable performance.

As someone who&#x27;s stuck on Gitlab for ticket&#x2F;issue management I&#x27;d give my right nut for a JIRA instance.

I think, tools like Jira would be evaluated 10x more favourably if they just weren&#x27;t so damn slow.<p>Same goes for Asana and Slack.

I was hoping to find a list of alternatives that are serious contenders as part of this thread.<p>What alternatives are people using?

It always seems to me that Jira was used to produce Jira itself and that&#x27;s why it turned out this way.

I don’t know who the author is, but they clearly have completely different issues with Jira than I have.

Have you measured how much javascript comes down the wire? Jira takes 30 seconds to load on my mac.

I aspire to build a product that has a website dedicated to how much it sucks, in namesake.

I tried to submit one alternative but can&#x27;t get hold o them. Anyone can help?

I&#x27;m no fan of JIRA, but why are we all using it if we hate it so much?

In my job I use:<p>* Google Analytics<p>* Google Search Console<p>* Jira<p>So basically I wait and wait and wait to manage projects to make websites fast.

I think JIRA is just too complex. Same goes for Confluence...

this list has some good items on it but it&#x27;s very poorly organized. don&#x27;t mention 3 different things as <i>one</i> item (looking at you number 11)

No decent dashboards

does anybody use monday.com ? it looks very capable at high level (and addresses some of those observability issues stated in the site)

Jira is a generic issue tracker for any industry, not a bug tracker for software development. That’s why in 2020 it doesn’t work for software any more.<p>And it’s slow. And the UI is awful.

What would you have us use instead? Trello?

Why is JIRA so Outrageously slow?

I have to say the seriousness of coronavirus only hit me when it got a Jira ticket: COVID-19

I really enjoy JIRA.

their tweeter account suspended :(

Agreed it is now far too complex and the cloud version appallingly slow. I no longer recommend it to anyone.

is it ethical to link this without linking &#x27;why skype is bad&#x27; by rms?