Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M(techcrunch.com) |
Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M(techcrunch.com) |
Does anyone know or, better yet, use any good self-hosted Trello alternatives?
There's also a Chrome extension to export a board to a spreadsheet: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-for-trello/....
Checkout zenkit.com.
> $425M / 716 comments => $593,575 per commentSoundcloud - $500M potential buyout
Trello - $425M
I'm not aware of any other. All those 10,000 startups world wide and only a couple gets bought out few IPO. The chances of a payout doing a VC funded startup is marginally slim despite what PG wrote in his articles nearly 10+ years ago.
Coupled with rising interest rates, it seems like the ride is coming to a slow crawl but this is just my gut feeling.
There's no better time to bootstrap than ever. Control your own company with no outside influences. You don't need billions of dollars. If you can double your day job salary with a SaaS then I think that's a huge success.
Here's to a happy & successful 2017 for the rest of us bootstrappers on HN.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats-cust...
Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow, and does not work for Trello (nor Atlassian).
To connect the dots, it's overwhelmingly likely that Atlassian was in fact "the Australians" referred to and Atlassian's tremendous growth (which was foreshadowed in Joel's piece) is why they could by Trello 7 years later.
It's interesting to look at in JOS in retrospect because he literally blogged the birth of company A, its competition with company B and it's spin-off C, which B later bought.
From a strategic standpoint, selling Trello is probably a more favorable way for Spolsky and Pryor to raise $360 million in cash than through venture capital. In hindsight it's not implausible that the goal behind developing Trello was always to sell it off. Unlike StackOverflow, Trello has lots of competitors and it's value in is in integrating with the rest of a project's workflow. Essentially it's a commodity.
Anyway. Not sure why some people want to move away from Trello now. Is it that they don't want an identity connection between JIRA and Trello (SSO or similar)?
I had the same feeling of "oh well, what else can I use in the future" when I read this post.
About the topic: we used JIRA in my last job and it was not that bad. Curious to see what they are going to do with Trello.
> sometimes we have to make very painful choices and pass over some extraordinarily promising candidates.
Then I asked for feedback and the next reply from the recruiting team quoted this phrase.
They didn't give me any feedbacks for legal reasons (?).
Libre open source alternative.
Can be self hosted or self hosted from within Sandstorm
But, what was the $10mil of VC money used for?
Has Trello evolved since taking the money (features)?
Over $300mil in cash for kanban cards? Nice exit.
Google paid $1 billion for Youtube. It's now conservatively worth $50 billion.
That means they could have 50 large acquisitions go to zero and still be breakeven on their Youtube deal.
You can use the same economics for most deals.
(to say nothing about consolidating the large apps in this space -- maybe Asana is next on their list?)
I feel like Trello's focus has been on certain segments, not on the general public. The product, in many ways, has been heavily focused and as simple as possible. It kind of infuriates me I have like 4 chrome extensions installed that augments Trello with very basic features... but I kind of understand their mentality.
Kind of the opposite of most Atlassian's products. So this is an... interesting development.
They started with Jira Agile, which became Jira Software where you could plan agile sprints. Assuming this was the future i was a bit surprised to see Portfolio pop up, but i am assuming this project will be shut down at some point in favor of a new Trello for Jira? Or?
We currently bought Softwareplants BigPicture & BigPicture Enterprise, but also played with TempoTeam Planner.
I see both Trello and Atlassian's CEO being here, please let you loyal customers know what your intentions are so we can plan for our futures.
To clarify: My largest fear is not that they screw up Trello, but that once more developing resources we pay ever doubling license-fees for will be reallocated to making sure Trello works well with the rest of the stack, and becomes a big seller.
It's all about new bells and whistles with Atlassian, while we the end-users are begging for bugfixes or feature-requests for decades. This is clearly reflected in not patching bugs in current version but instead force users to upgrade, while sometimes losing functionality we loved just to keep the application safe.
Jonas
[1] As portrayed on The Wire
Glad they bought trello. I'm hoping they integrate it to the existing issue workflow and make it a better product than it is. And there is a good chance of that happening.
Hopefully they'll leave Trello as it is.
There is now a new market share to fight for
1. Create an awesome ToDo list
2. ???
3. Profit
Or maybe I should not consider the users of a product the primary customers?
HipChat - Small user base and unscalable architecture. Hundreds of thousands of users and loads of resources to rewrite nearly all of it's backend. Still a work in progress but it's been very stable for the past year and the clients, which were all non-native web views, are coming along nicely.
Fisheye/Crucible - Small user base, unprofitable. Now has thousands of users and is hands down the best code search and review tool that lots of people don't know about.
SourceTree - Massive expose for a very small tool that wasn't well known before acquisition. Many new features, has remained stable throughout.
Greenhopper - Was a small, profitable, plugin. Now built-in, completely integrated hundreds of new features and has adapted well to various trends in Agile (scrum, kanban).
Despite this thread, which shows HN's consistent (and ironic) distain for (or is it lack of understanding of?) successful software companies, Atlassian is actually great at creating great products out of questionable acquisitions.
Outside of Atlassian:
Whatsapp is free now, people like free. That's neat. To people crying out privacy, honestly… privacy is the only thing that VC backed b2c companies sell that's actually worth real money. They were eventually going to open that pandora's box.
Twitch gets to continue existing and it's ad-free for prime members now as well. I like free :).
Firebase is better than ever. Let's all cry a single tear for Parse, we all wanted a massive Mongo cluster backing our data, right?
I think this acquisition will add to the Confluence vs SharePoint story and make Atlassian more attractice.
IF (it's a big if) Atlassian are planning to move into the intranet/productivity tools space this acquisition is really sensible.
Atlassian used to be loved before prior to its IPO.
I'm not too happy with Atlassian acquiring Trello. How much of Fog Creek will still be part of Trello?
At one of my internships (Elec Engineering) with a mining company they used Trello to organize the majority of their work.
After that experience I started using Trello to organize all my daily stuff.
I had it to organise my book reading list, book purchase list, Quarterly and Yearly goals, Job application status, plan and execute on my thesis, assignments and side projects.
I can't believe how much value it has provided me for free!
It's good to see them get rewarded with a nice buyout.
It also integrates externally to JIRA regardless of whether it's a cloud or on-premise version.
We have been using it internally successfully since a few months, first in my team and then in others in our company.
Would you guys be interested at Atlassian?
My company uses Jira (correctly) and it is great - for software. I keep all of my personal lists in Trello.
Also - VersionOne <<<<<<<<< Jira
I wonder what the future of Trello is - both as a customer and as a software dev (I loved their remote work policy).
I've moved on to Zenhub instead of Trello, but it's indeed a really nice product that can be used by many, and not just people in software development
On that note, my hunt for good task organization app led me to Todoist! It's awesome! It has great web and Android apps and great API which I intend to hack at some point to create an emacs interface for it.
So glad that Todoist wasn't bought by Atlassian. My biggest gripe with Atlassian is that it natively doesn't support Markdown in Jira. It uses its funky own markup that's really bad.
I haven't been able to find such app so as for now I'm stuck with pen and paper
PS: their pricing page says $10 / year and user
Or Atlassian is using this to go after competitors like A-Ha! which it doesn't currently serve (i.e. non software development projects)
Whining about a for-profit product no longer having a free-tier is odd to me. Either be fine paying for the service (nothing wrong with that) or pickup software that is free; I for instance personally use org-mode and Emacs heavily for all of my personal information management.
I also do not understand the sentiment that every product acquired will slowly begin to suck; that happens for some products sure but the converse is also the case.
To be fair to Atlassian, I used to hate Jira a lot but in recent years had to use it for work and it quickly grew on me; they are putting effort into improving their services / products, modernizing their software development processes and technologies, and delivering updates to their software on a regular basis.
If you're going to contribute here, please be more constructive or detailed. Why not talk about your ideas for a project that is free that anybody could install on their servers that does what Trello does if you do not like that they may begin charging for Trello?
Edit: fixed unintended mistake in the company name
[0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369
[1] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821
PS: Here's a bonus issue that took 10 years to resolve (renaming users!): https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549
Not as old, only 5 years. Yet this is blocking my switch to a new CI server (GoCD) and makes building pull requests in general a pain.
They don't say if it will stay free or not.
Thus, Fog Creek is dead, Long live Fog Creek.
1. Write really popular blog.
2. Create Stack overflow and make it the goto for developers.
3. Create todo list
etc..
The brand was there before they even started the todo list. All it took was a blog post "We are going to create a todo list now" and it was pretty much set.
Somehow the only good things I heared about them came from people who made their money by building stuff they wanted to sell on the Atlassian platform. People less biased always choose alternatives.
I can't say much about them myself. I only used Bitbucket, because of the free private repos. Their UIs are pretty mediocre, but I use it via Git cli, so it doesn't matter much for me.
After Atlassian bought them:
* The service I paid £5 a month for became free
* The stability issues started to improve in a dramatic fashion
Today Stash is a great product (IMO), and BitBucket has really improved from having great Jira integration.
I was actually sad because I couldn't justify paying for the premium features (multi-person private repos) in the same way, because it was nothing I needed. It was the best £5 subscription I ever had :)
I generally prefer Bitbucket over Github now (was a paid subscriber of Github). I basically use Bitbucket now for private repos and Github for my public repos, since Github does seem to be the place to put open source projects.
If my Bitbucket needs ever reach the point of having to pay for a subscription, I'll do it gladly.
JIRA has its quirks but it's very flexible and customisable. Its UX is also quite ok for such a complex piece of software. Keep in mind they're competing with stuff like SharePoint and downright UX atrocities such as HP ALM.
Confluence is among the best enterprise wikis targeting end users (i.e. users not familiar with Markdown), too.
We use Jira since the early days, and are quite pleased with them.
So far, all the other systems I have used were all worse than Jira.
We should celebrate their success because its events like this that create the motivation for some of us to go create something that "stands on their shoulders" or competes with them or creates some new paradigm of how tasks can be managed. Fog Creek is almost the ultimate startup - they keep it small, do things right, stick to their craft. What is the result? Regularly bring fantastic products to the world. Anybody contemplating how to get setup and run a software startup should start by reading most/all of joelonsoftware and then the later blogs about SO and Trello.
Yes Im huge fan - because i applaud geeks that put heart and soul into their craft as well as running their business and getting great outcomes like this. Would love to see more of it.
0.2c
Not just JIRA; I think a lot of people were burnt by Atlassian's management of Hipchat or Bitbucket too.
Historically there's something of a track record where Atlassian is the place where interesting, innovative products go to stagnate. Bug fixes happen glacially (a 1 year turnaround seems to be standard), and new feature development doesn't happen at all. Running Hipchat is like looking through a window back at 2012.
> Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool.
Great outcome for a great team? Perhaps. But I don't really see how this benefits the tool, nor the people who use the tool, because I (and a lot of other people here) are assuming, with reason, that this deal heralds the end of further development of Trello.
If Bitbucket was not bought by Atlassian, it will be able to grow and compete with Github/Gitlab?
If Hipchat was not bought by Atlassian, it will be a serious contender for Slack?
Or perhaps the group behind those products reflected their growth today?
Do you think it is because Atlassian's management or because local's management? Say if Atlassian hold to their words: "we leave them alone".
Or perhaps the issue is Money+Motivation than anything else? Exit => rich => decrease in Drive.
My simple personal guide is: when it has been around for more than 2 years, has found a viable business strategy or is certain to be around for 4 more years.
There is a discussion on this question here: https://www.quora.com/When-does-a-startup-stop-being-a-start...
Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.
Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub (which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.
1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a 40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.
2. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.
TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be happier for them (and as a user).
Edit: typos
Trello are an amazing team and an amazing product, and what makes the product so amazing is how domain-agnostic it is. They refuse at all costs to add any feature that helps use Trello in one specific way over others (e.g. lists = stages in task lifetime, cards = tasks; lists = assigned people, cards = tasks; lists = dates, cards = events, ...), and that made Trello equally useful as a Kanban board, a CRM, or for a beer microbrewery tracking its different barrels and the stages of brewing they are at. The best thing about Trello is when you start organizing your board one way, then organically drift towards a more natural way to organize them, sometimes without noticing as you do. Trello is for processes that you're not sure yet about the right way to manage.
Atlassian is all about development team collaboration. Trello can be used for that, but not anymore than it can be used for brewing beer. Trello shines when you don't know in advance how you will want to manage a project. If Trello became a dev collaboratin tool, I would stop using it for dev collaboration because there are better specialized solutions for that. Keep Trello general. Please.
Hopefully Atlassian can learn from what makes Trello so wonderful instead of JIRA-ifying it into oblivion.
We've have been exposed to JIRA through external suppliers and that has been enough to make him on his edges now.
Personally I don't think much will change, at least in the first year or so until the contracts of the original developers lapse and they can move on to new things.
https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-ann...
I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they got their money out up front.
My words of advice to anyone looking is to stay away from Atlassian at all costs. Once your in too deep you probably are trapped - which is what they count on.
So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?
Jira and Confluence are epitomes of corporate red-tape molasses. Not only the process tends to get tangled to death in all the features everyone gets a bright idea to use, but even without them it wants just too much hardware.
A measly company of 30 ppl|3 years history and you're scratching your head to blood keeping the basic actions not taking more that 5 seconds while attempting to not pay 10x license cost for the hardware.
Too bad there aren't many alternatives.
And thank god I'm not using Trello. It's dead, people it's dead.
Edit: I guess the spinning-out doesn't say anything about ownership (though the article does say Trello did a round of funding after the spin-out)
Cloud: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket-cloud-5-mill...
- Merge checks - Bitbucket Pipelines (Continuous delivery service in Bitbucket Cloud) - 2FA - Universal Second Factor (U2F) - Improved SSH - Support for multiple SSH keys - Build status API - Smart Mirroring - Git LFS (including the embedded media viewer only in Bitbucket Cloud which allows for better large file uploads) - Smart Commits (allow repository committers to process JIRA issues using commands in your commit messages) - reviewer status on pull requests - Code search (Server only currently) - 0 downtime backups - code review at commit level - default review in pull requests - pull request merge strategies - Deploy Bitbucket Data center with AWS - iterative reviews for pull requests - pull request focused dashboard - Bitbucket Connect add-ons (deploy from Bitbucket with AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean)
Restyaboard: http://restya.com/board (open source, self-hosted)
Phabricator Projects https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/projects/ (open source, self-hosted, or paid hosting)
Kanban: https://kanboard.net/ (open source, self-hosted, or paid hosting)
Wekan: https://wekan.io/ (open source, self-hosted)
And no doubt, lots more not listed here...
Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello only raised $10 million.
Here's the migration docs: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Migrating-from-Trello
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=taiga.io&sort=byPopularity&pre...
Not many todo lists have millions of users, including some that pay actual money for the service. Having looked at many project management tools, Trello has absolutely nailed certain aspects of the user experience that many of the others get wrong. Try pasting an image into a card, for example.
It's not a perfect tool, but if you tried to recreate it yourself, you'd probably start to realize why they netted $450M.
I'm glad that now they've acquired another company, we have the opportunity to soon look forward to this.
>> We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA).
No, but many have been users of companies that ended their beatiful journey soon after being acquired.
I'm cautiously optimistic that Atlassian don't want to waste half-a-billion dollars.
Bitbucket may still be less popular but I don't see it being shunned. That's what made me wonder. I wouldn't mind if you said that it was not given enough attention or even that it was being ignored (Although I'd still disagree). Maybe bad choice of words?
FB has 3 orders of magnitude more value than Trello with 2 orders of magnitude more users.
Logging in from multiple places has always been terrible. I'll be logged in on Mac and available but randomly get emails as if I'm offline. I'll be online on my phone and get e-mails. I wan't emails of messages when I'm actually offline and not logged in but HipChat doesn't seem to care and emails me anyways sometimes. The option to turn off email notifications isn't very configurable either. Its off or on.
Look at the release notes for windows and mac and search for reconnection. Just about every release has a fix for reconnecting going back to 2014.
https://www.hipchat.com/release_notes/mac https://www.hipchat.com/release_notes/windows
Ha, try using it in Linux!
edit: Yes right now there might not be an exact competitor but in a few years it could easily match everything Jira does.
I'd think Trello and Asana are much closer competitors. JIRA is like an over engineered spaceship with more features than anyone could learn in a lifetime. Comparatively Trello functions more like a Prius. Priuses and spaceships don't compete.
Trello covers a market that was not really served by any Atlassian products (or rather, market segments that weren't well treated).
Trello has a huge active following, and a lot of users who would otherwise not know Atlassian products.
Getting any sort of proper cross-selling going on would be great for their ecosystem long-term. People might start at Trello, but go to Atlassian products as their team scales and need other coordination tools.
I don't think you spend $425 million to kill a "competitor", especially when that competitor has a lot of paying customers anyways.
I feel like about 30% of all Github features have been released since the last major point release of Jira and Confluence, which themselves were buggy, poorly tested, crud as well.
How does Atlassian move "fast"? Has Atlassian done.... anything worth noting in the past 3 years?
I think that Atlassian's pace matches their customer's wishes. I believe that Bitbucket is more or less on ice, functions as a free GitHub for private repos, and provides an outlet for Atlassian to try to convert people into enterprise clients, and I think this is their intention for Trello too.
Enterprise clients do _not_ like rapid change, so I think that JIRA/Atlassian is on track. In the last 3 years, JIRA has integrated GreenHopper as JIRA Agile, and I don't know what/if anything else they've done, but I don't follow JIRA closely.
In addition, Atlassian's services are spread out across many products, which can increase mobility. GitHub has only one product, so while they probably have many teams working on many features, there is still one product they can push releases to.
Trello wasn't "smart" for only taking $10M in funding (and only in one, late, round, which means it only gave away probably 20-30% equity.)
Trello happened to be spun off from an established company, which took care of financing initial product development and growth. This is equivalent to the founders financing maybe a $1.5M round and a $4M round from their own pocket.
Don't try to beat Trello's benchmark in funding strategy, unless you happen to be able to finance the first few rounds from your own pocket.
> 2. Atlassian now has a product that [.] will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.
Atlassian would be wise to keep this integration from being too tight. Trello shines as the most general project management tool out there (except maybe a spreadsheet, although that is the one thing I can't bear to do with a spreadsheet), and if it became a developer-centric collaboration tool I for one would probably stop using it, even for collaboration among developers.
Will it? i use both Bitbucket and Jira at work, and i'm constantly finding myself wondering how two products from the same org can work so poorly together. They use their products to market their other products, but as far as actually integrating things into a seamless experience it doesn't seem like that's atlassian's strength.
In many ways that will be a good thing though, trello will likely remain trello instead of becoming something else to fit atlassian's ecosystem.
I suspect Atlassian could easily create some Jira/Botbucket addons that would make Jira a very useful choice for some Trello users for a more structured backend.
I promise you Atlassian understands why Trello is so successful. You described Trello's core strength perfectly - and this one of the reasons they are committed to keeping it as a standalone service.
(disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Trello)
In meeting with Michael, and discussing how we could work together, Michael could not be more clear that Trello's success is predicated on is breadth and its appeal to many different use-cases.
This is most clearly displayed in their inspiration page, that includes many, many use-cases:
https://trello.com/inspiration
Scott, CEO Atlassian
Why, you ask? As a recently public company Atlassian knows it'll need to grow beyond developers if they want to continue growing at a healthy rate, and Trello offers that exactly. I believe that's why they paid such a hefty price for it.
It just wouldn't make sense to throw away all those users...
Why is that? Why does a company that is good at something NEED to expand beyond their area of expertise? Is is just me who sees this as American Capitalism™? Wouldn't it be better to try to make their products excellent and attract the many developers who are not using their suite? Why the always constant push to grow at any cost?
I'm saying this as someone who has been using Atlassian products for a while. They seem to focus on JIRA and Confluence only, and letting all the other products be 2nd or even 3rd class citizens. Why expand if you cannot keep the software that you already own up to date?
On the bright side, this might pave the way for a new product in this space, or some open-source tools which replicate the same basic funtionality.
Jira is so customizable and has so many features that it can be made into a sort of bureaucratic prison that's actively counter-productive for everyone except higher-level managers who just use it to generate countless reports. In the worst case, Jira can be used to institutionalize mistrust in employees/developers.
On the other hand, a minimal setup with kanban boards can feel a lot like Trello integrated into a bug database, which can work and scale quite well.
I will say that even a minimal installation of Jira can be overly complex for small teams of 2-5. This is where Trello can really shine.
If anyone here has ever been confused by the expression "damning with faint praise", I hope this is an illustrative example.
This my experience as well. What are people using that works so much better than JIRA?
JIRA has problems, but it's far better than any other project tracking/management tool I've tried. Managing projects (especially ones with large or multiple teams) is impossible without tools like this, and I haven't seen anything that makes the process painless.
If you have more than 5-10 people using each of your task boards, the problems may be more than any productivity tools can really fix.
Why would they JIRA-ify it? They would lose their audience who sought a JIRA alternative in the first place. From their blog post on the subject https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/ they seem to acknowledge this
I happen to use, and like, both products. JIRA at work (where I want a lot of the features) and Trello for personal/small group projects and even family/household stuff where I just need _simple_
They will kill trello so everyone is stuck with JIRA. Someone please make a trello clone with reasonable pricing, now!
And yet, Hipchat is a bloated, unreliable mess.
Edit: I guess you mean these three blurbs? http://web.archive.org/web/20160505012250/https://trello.com...
Response: what a silly notion, no
Or another one I found recently: we'd like to comment on code that isn't within 10 lines of a changed file. You know, because one line change in file a can impact stuff elsewhere. Or even in another project but the chances of that happening are more slim than a tachyon hitting an atom as it passes through earth.
Response: Good idea, here's stuff we did this year, and here's other stuff we do. (aka the non committal middle finger)
It sucks because atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final 20% polish never seems to arrive. And its been years.
I really hate that we can't say yes to every feature suggestion, and what we _are_ able to talk about seems to come across as non-committal to some. The fact that a suggestion is open means we think it has merit too (we close "silly notions"), it then becomes a matter of priorities.
- Roger, Bitbucket Server PM
This was kind of my synopsis when I looked at implementing them back in 2009. My take was that they built out 80% of the platform and then expected the customers/users to build out the extra 20% for each other.
Trello, amazing because of it's small size and limited, elegant feature set. Atlassian, awful because they won't implement everything that their customers ask for. Oh and the only feature that you've pointed out that's missing, 2fa, it's not missing. It's been in place for literally years.
The open issue tracker that Atlassian maintains is there so that you can see things that they've said no to. You can actually dig in and find out if someone else has asked for a feature that you want. You can see, completely transparently, whether or not they might implement it. The things that Trello has been asked to build but has quietly and privately said no to? No where to be found (and reasonably so given comments like this one).
Using a companies transparency against them is gross. It shows a lack of empathy for the people who build these systems, the trade offs that they have to make and the responsible decisions they make to not implement every single feature request. JIRA is enterprise software, it's incredibly extensible and configurable. The fact that some people configure it poorly isn't entirely their fault (though sane defaults can solve for some of this problem). Trello is for small teams. It's compact and simple in ways that JIRA was never intended to be. The $425MM? That means Atlassian understands that Trello has captured a part of they didn't.
BitBucket has had 2FA since Sep 2015: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/10/two-step-verification-...
Do some research, unless your goal was to slander.
The actual content that's in Confluence though, much more portable than anything you're going to get out of another enterprise software vendor.
Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview.
"During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn’t ruin Trello." http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel...
(disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)
1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassian.
I'm skeptical. I've yet to see this work out with a company I worked at or followed (yes yes I know, Instagram but I never followed them so I wouldn't know how or if they've changed). I'm sure it can and has happened. But you have an uphill battle :)
The (Startup)ists made (Startup). And the (Startup)ists are going to
keep working on (Startup) at (Acq. Company). (Acq. Company) understands
that (Startup) is unique and beloved and they definitely do not
want to mess that up.
And... "Trellists?" They're just people.
Don't be that guy and spin a Jobs-esque reality distortion field.
If things were so perfect to begin with at Trello, you wouldn't be selling. The fact that you did indicates something needed changing.
You hope things won't change for the worse, as do your users, but assuring people that won't happen makes about as much since as guaranteeing you have the winning ticket for next week's lottery.
Because the obvious parallel is Hipchat, and while I know Hipchat has a lot of users and even fans still...well.
Being the anti-Jira is what made Trello great. If feels like Luke Skywalker just got bought by the Dark Side while claiming that nothing will change -- I'm still with the rebels.
I remain a happy trello user until that happens to your product as well!
Background:
I didn't find a competing product a good match for how I tried to use it, so I pitched that competition (your closest direct competition) on specific improvements (that they should make) but they didn't see my vision. (I was in touch with the CEO and exchanged a few messages back and forth.)
-> Do you have an email address I can forward the same thing to you to?
if you want to after reviewing my forwards you can reply by email. You can also reach out to me at my email in my profile. At the moment I don't use either Trello or them, anymore. (But I do use Atlassian products actually, which as you correctly state in this thread, are orthogonal.)
Thanks - I'd love to use specifically Trello products in the future.
-
EDIT: Why would anyone downvote this? (Let alone 2 people now.) I didn't have trouble getting in touch with the competition... Since mhp is active in this thread I don't see the harm of asking. I could probably find it out myself but I'm not going to waste any more time on this, since it was a waste of time with the other CEO.
You can get a better wysiwyg wiki just by sharing a folder in Google Docs and having them link to each other. And I'd take Trello over "greenhopper" any day.
(That of course, or you suck at empathy for your managers, and you're the problem).
The place I work at, Jira is used pretty reasonably. Our devs, in 2 different teams have setup the workflows to show our progress and deployment flow in ways we prefer. The project managers use those workflows happily, they just want them to reflect reality.
I'd rather use Trello, but honestly I'm trying to communicate the work I've done to my proj. managers, so the right tool is basically whatever works for them, not me.
Product owneres tried to force developers to use Trello, while we wanted to use Jira with greenhoper.
I really didn't understand what was so fun about Trello, I prefer Jira any time for product planning, Trello for me looks like another sticky notes app.
Pretty nice story if you care to read it.
All these negative comments and hand wringing about Trello being ruined sounds like whining entitlement.
Atlassian is a fabulously successful independently run company that you should be happy bought Trello.
For goodness sake all you haters in this thread make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire or something.
After that, SourceTree has been slowly starting to suck. It has a bunch of annoying new bugs that don't get fixed, now requires logging into Atlassian to use it on every machine you use, and has had almost no useful or compelling feature additions in recent years. It is basically a good indie app from several years ago, with the Atlassian taint slowly being applied to it.
I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.
As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me. There's so much focus on 'control' that I feel like a victim every time I use it. For example, if I want to move a card from In Progress to the Backlog, Jira has an option to restrict the non-anointed from moving cards. So I have to get 'permission' from someone with the right privileges to move a card. Jira is a micro-manager's wet dream.
Trello was the anti-Jira and that's what made it great.
For a wiki especially, our team spent ages searching for one that was hosted, private and searchable. Confluence seemed like the only thing with a decent search.
Major drawback of Confluence I've found is that Markdown is not first class, and only supported via some shitty plugin, that renders badly to boot. But the rest of the company (and half my tech team for that matter) doesn't really care about that (the default wysiwyg stuff looks good if you stick to the guard rails).
Still, we're not aware of a better thing we could move to?
If you compare SourceTree to other halfway modern git clients (like Tower or GitX-dev), oh boy does it suck! The layout is completely disorganized, the diffing is super lousy. It's slow. It sucks up lots of memory. It's literally the last GUI client I'd use before just going to the command line.
Yes, I often long back to the days when you could just put software on a floppy disk and be sure that it would never change. That this isn't practically possible anymore is one of the biggest downsides of the cloud.
About the only thing that has had massive longevity is VIM, and at least for me, its throne was taken away by SublimeText. Maybe Atom will replace it or something else, who knows. But in the end, just enjoy the ride while it lasts.
At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.
(Yes you could buy the Bamboo self-hosted thing, which they're still supporting, but it's clear where their efforts are going at this point).
EDIT: Also, I should add some opinion here. We used to use Bamboo for 2+ years and ditched it (for Jenkins). Bamboo has a horrible UI, and everything basically has to be done through UI.
Jenkins meanwhile has an ugly UI, but you can do everything via config/Jenkinsfile, which is what these newer CI things incl. Pipelines are aiming at also, basically the `ci.yaml` file in your repo idea.
So yeah, avoid Bamboo!
I have yet to use another ticket system for software development that is as decent to use as JIRA. I'm not saying I love it, but I've done my time with all the usual suspects and I CHOSE JIRA for my company. I found most people who have really hated JIRA for a good reason actually hated the borked workflow that their administrators put them into.
BitBucket has been a great private hosted Git repository for us, we have at least 150+ repositories- the addition of 'Projects' has adequately solved my biggest complaint.
Confluence is fine as far as intranet wikis go, the fact that it's somewhat integrated with JIRA and BitBucket makes it work fine. We tried using Google Pages- never again. Our documentation is easily discoverable and content authoring is easy. We don't try and run anything publicly so our use case is dead simple.
Hope to be wrong though!
I am far from expert when it comes to startups, their evaluations and acquisitions, but isn't >1million daily active users [1] not enough to make Trello a billion dollar unicorn? What Trello lacked to reach this? Is it all about the user count and it does not matter they pay or not or you have monetisation strategy or not?
We also used and liked Crucible (their code review tool), but it didn't yet offer some features of Gerrit that were very important to us, so we moved to Gerrit.
Luckily there are free software alternatives to trello you can self host that are not going to sell out such as wekan[1], taskboard[2], taiga[3], kanboard[4], ...
[1]: https://wekan.io/
[2]: https://taskboard.matthewross.me/
[3]: http://taiga.pm/
I like Jira but I understand why others aren't fond of it. I'd argue it completely depends on how you configure/use Jira. Administering it is annoying regardless though.
https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap
I know a lot of smaller dev teams use it for lowercase-a agile projects and I currently use it for all my personal projects. It's basically the antithesis of heavyweight tools like Jira.
What was your experience like?
I've yet to see a project manager or anyone outside hardcore development get anything positive out of at Asian products.
Their tools typically complicates everything to the point of slowing production by as much as 150% compared to projects where management is done with post it's on a board and physical meetings... I know because we did the business case, which today means we're actively avoiding companies that want to tunnel projects into things like JIRA.
I get that atlassian produce excellent tools for tracking development time so companies can bill me more precisely. Unfortunately the side effect is that everything gets produced slower, more expensively and ends up confusing the shit out of our project managers.
Then I remembered my difficulty with finding a proper to-do app. Yes, it will have millions of people make a clone, but it will also have thousands publishing crappy versions.
Bitbucket has released some pretty major stuff in just the last 6 months or so. Built in Pipelines are an example. We've got some other stuff coming soon and there is always more in the pipeline after that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11759733
Bitbucket added support for large files and went a step beyond GitHub and Gitlab by adding file chunking to speed things up in a big way. Bitbucket added file previews to help those working with large files like gaming devs. Smart mirroring to helps remote devs work faster. I could go on but I don't want to spam this thread with a feature list.
There's a nice little post here with some things. https://blog.bitbucket.org/page/2/
Do you use Trello instead of JIRA? If so, awesome! It is a great product. We love it so much we spent around a full year of revenue to acquire them so rest assured that big of a bet isn't so we can just convert it into a lead gen tool. We believe Trello can be much bigger that than. (Alas, I can't comment on that right now as it is in deal closure period)
If you don't use JIRA LMK what you use and what you like better. I'm always up for listening to what we are doing well and can do better.
Caveat- if you can't tell I work on BB and JIRA. If you are in SF, I'll buy you a beer & a cookie for the answers, if not I'll just keep following this thread.
The rarer definition, which is that a company actually shuts down the product and doesn't make an attempt to migrate its users, strikes me as something more typical for a small startup that has not yet reached real market validation, but which has very impressive R&D.
http://www.cgchannel.com/2014/03/softimage-died-to-make-max-...
https://www.change.org/p/autodesk-save-softimage
http://web.archive.org/web/20140519212219/http://e-roja.com/...
The biggest problem JIRA has is tons of legacy that nobody needs (like subtasks, a pain in the ass to work with).
Configure the tool properly and it's actually quite nice to use, especially in combination with Confluence for specs.
We can debate counterfactuals all day, but the potential was absolutely there. Consider:
Hipchat was purchased by Atlassian before Slack even launched. (Slack launched August 2013; Hipchat purchased March 2012.) And back in 2012 Hipchat was almost exactly what it is today: A functional chat app with searchable logs, native clients for many platforms, a somewhat clunky UI, and some persistent issues with syncing and reliability. Further, when Slack launched, it wasn't nearly as good as it is now: They've made significant improvements over the years. Back in 2013 the Hipchat/Slack race was still pretty close, and that's after Hipchat had spent the last year doing nothing.
Slack launched into an opening that Hipchat created by stagnating. It's not that Hipchat could have potentially competed with Slack; it's that Hipchat could have easily crushed Slack. Slack exists now because they built the stuff that Hipchat didn't.
Have we ever looked the discussion from a different perspective?
This is fact: Atlassian tend to leave the acquired product alone.
This is question: These products that Atlassian left alone, why are they not growing according to (_yours_ assumed) potential? Have we ever asked that perhaps the people behind Hipchat maxed out their potential? Or perhaps the drive is not there anymore?
What I'm asking is this: Did Atlassian do something destructive after they acquire the company? or perhaps the acquired company just simply can't live up to their potential (for any reasons except Atlassian pushing their management to the acquired company).
It can't compete now anyway.
> If Hipchat was not bought by Atlassian, it will be a serious contender for Slack?
Hipchat is not even close to being a serious contender for Slack.
This goes right to the core of all of the issues/conflicts bundled into this acquisition from UX details up through to target users and culture clash.
Time tracking is a manager-oriented feature, not a producer-oriented feature. The users producing the work usually resent things like fine grained time tracking and comparitive producer reporting because it distracts from actual work, treats creative or complex processes as though they are part of an assembly line, encourages micro-management, pits quality against time, and emphasizes wage servitude.
Managers can use Trello to stress out their employees too, but not to the extent that JIRA-ish tools enable.
The problem is you are selling to managers who love to micromanage their employees and have nothing better to do than fiddle with configuration, reports, or have meetings with the people they hired to do that.
This is why developers who are smart will probably try to protect themselves by pre-emptively replacing Trello with one of the dozens of free or inexpensive clones before you can start corporatizing it and their company.
JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable processes across a number of people.
Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes.
In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks, HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow.
Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) require ad-hoc semi-structured data.
In small teams, even if repeatable process would help you, it's not worth the cost of setting up a system - you achieve it by social means.
Trello also has many, many use-cases where you want to start something quick, or personal. In this case it really shines, with near-zero friction to get started.
Scott, CEO Atlassian
But the folks who have a working process and a large number of people and teams are usually complaining the other way round: that no tool supports their workflow. Which is where JIRA shines. I don't know another tool that can be configured to such ridiculous detail.
The Trello acquisition makes total sense because it fills in that gap that JIRA is bad at.
You might not view them as that, but they are, well were.
Don't get me wrong – I like them both. When I have to plan out personal projects, Trello is great. During the day, we use JIRA. The use cases are different, and the products are both suitable. I'm madly bemused that people look at the very, very surface layer of the UI (oh look, it has cards in columns!) and assume the products are the same.
In the Innovator's Dilemma sense, absolutely.
Adding things like large file storage support is cool, I guess, but when you never use it its rather a case of appearing to prioritize certain market segments over others.
I know I've read the article that states how you prioritize, with a major one being usage patterns. But I wonder just how accurate a metric that is given in my specific group, we've started to avoid using the review tooling in bitbucket because its almost impossible to use to accomplish the goal.
Unless the idea is for Bitbucket to have a completely minimal set of features and for anything useful to pay license fees for plugins I can't quite make sense of how the priorities are decided.
Those features should take at most a month and cost at most $25k to build.
Yes there are other things that make Trello stand out but I don't see a justification for this purchase if not just to hire the team.
"Startup" is a nebulous term with no firm definition, so these kinds of arguments are bound to happen. Some people still say Facebook is a "startup" because it has the fast-paced environment with the normal superficial cultural trappings of a tech startup (food perks, no dress code, casual interpersonal culture, etc. etc.).
Ultimately it's probably just a dumb semantic argument that's best avoided.
I obviously have no idea how Trello is structured and whether Michael has any real ownership or not, given its unique history, but in the case of most SaaS founders, when their golden handcuffs expire, they call in rich, because duh, why wouldn't they? Especially after watching the bureaucracy at the acquirer kill their baby.
The "least-worst option" means it's not good, but all the alternatives are terrible. That's not damning.
> Damning with faint praise is an English idiom for words that effectively condemn by seeming to offer praise which is too moderate or marginal to be considered praise at all.
Which seems about right to me.
It's like writing an employee a letter of reference, and only saying that they're very punctual - meaning that there's nothing else good about them, other than the bare minimum of bothering to show up at work.
It seems to me that saying it's only good by comparison to how awful everything else is falls into this.
Saying that one employee is the least worst employee you have when someone calls you for a reference means they are the best employee. It also means you aren't particularly happy with any of them, but that's just adding a flavor to the sentiment that this employee is your best.
Now, if I asked you to recommend a bunch of project management/issue tracking software suites, and you absolutely floored me with praise for one, but said good but forgettable things about JIRA, that would be be damning with praise.
Coming full circle, saying that JIRA is the least-worst option means it's the best option and you just have an ideal in your head that isn't being met.
They're utterly different things, really.
I once, over a beer, told the development team of a ticketing system that I'd never used anything I hated less than theirs, and they all grinned and said that that was high praise to them.
If you believe you can produce such a system that people actually like to use, rather than finding less hateful than the alternatives, I genuinely invite you to try, because I'd love to have such a thing available to me. But I'm afraid I'll remain skeptical until I see it :)
For example: https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS3MZ-jira
But when I look at the landscape of tools that I've used that compete with or compete with a part of Jira, I just prefer Jira over the rest of them by an not-unsubstantial margin.
That said, Trello was great for a small team bootstrapping a new product without a lot of external dependencies or parallel release cycles and I hope they let them run independently.
If a security vulnerability happens on the public Fogzbugs instance, we'd be bitten by it badly in this sort of situation. In our setup, we protect against that by exposing the JIRA webserver and git servers only inside of our private network.
It's not about perfect security, but it does greatly reduce the attack surface when the server isn't even accessible via the internet. I can't prevent anyone who wants to from signing up for the free trial of Fogzbugs and exploiting their publicly running system - even logged-in-only exploits are possible in such a case.
Not to mention the issues with downtime on these cloud providers. My provider has had 1 sizeable, noticeable outage in the last 5 years. It spanned about 20 minutes. Look at a big, popular cloud service like GitHub - they've had several in the past year alone, spanning hours at times.
I find these sorts of compromises where I'm offering my code and server configurations to a 3rd party company (where basically any admin there is free to read it, or anyone who can compromise their admins) to be rather poor. I'd rather keep the blame within my own company and be in control of our data fully rather than having to worry about whether Fogzbugs operations follows proper security precautions, I only have to worry about whether we do.
Call it paranoid if you want, but I think it's a more than reasonable precaution to not just throw your data around to anyone who asks for it. Especially data which could lead to compromise of servers and customer information. I value my customer's information much more than I value any gains from some easy to use cloud service.
Ehh...
I think buying Trello was great move for Atlassian. No way could Jira compete with them in the long run. And now they are even safe(r) from new Trello-like competitors. Brilliant move for Atlassian. Too bad for us users... :(
With ~350 employees and many mixed teams using only Trello would be chaos. In key areas we need fixed workflows (-> JIRA).
Right now we are planning to add Wekan (FOSS trello clone) to our toolchain for workflows which are more dynamic (less "C follows B follow A" + smaller teams - e.g. innovation and some planning).
Your comment just illuminated that for me and I think you're right. It's the micromanager's dream, but for good managers it doesn't seem to offer enough over the competition to draw them in. The best I've worked with considered PM tools essentially fungible, and therefore weren't likely to invest in 1) paying for the Atlassian suite or 2) the overhead of getting it up and running.
After taking a class and reading up on project management and trying to get more organized about my own projects, it's basically that. People have been able to orchestrate large projects with nothing more than pencil and paper and then typewriter. The best PMs don't need to force a tool choice.
This acquisition makes total sense; Trello and JIRA target mostly non-overlapping market segments and there are some easy low-hanging integration fruits to be picked. I'll also bet Trello becomes a deal-sweetener going forward. License JIRA and for +15% you also get Trello for your whole company.
IME, this is most teams. If you get out you are likely moving into another team that's much the same.
Even WoW doesn't really do that anymore :)
Because you can as and because there are big rewards for doing it right and you're in a good position to that.
It's true for any company, and even more true for tech companies. They have to continue to grow for many reasons, including keeping their existing products better.
I personally am not a JIRA fan. We used it for a while and it just really didn't work out for us. The entire experience was too cumbersome and unfriendly. However, that has nothing to do with them growing. If anything, they're doing an amazing job growing with a product that isn't fun to use at all.
I disagree with this completely. Atlassian is in the business of collaboration tools. They've done that for developers, but it doesn't mean they're only capable of making developer tools.
Also, where's the risk here? Other than the inflated price I don't see any risk. Trello isn't just an idea but rather a real product with a massive team and a ton of users who love it. They've iterated on their platform enough so I imagine many of both the technical and experience aspects are polished enough. What am I missing?
Atlassian is not Oracle. I had fears for BitBucket when they bought it, but they seem to have left it alone for the most part.
Sourcetree, on the other hand, got fucked up. How much of that was a strategic decision and how much just plain incompetence (either by Atlassian or the original team), I don't really know.
An example of this was the integration of HipChat in confluence. Product was fine but now requires HipChat X amount of plugins to be installed (to be able to insert Emojicon's in Confluence, using confluence own menu's).
Better tell the Wekan team they're wasting their time then. ;-)
Big difference.
A tool that could save all employees of a company dozens of hours a month for $10 is expensive…
Hacker News, what the actual fuck. The total and complete lack of respect for the art of design, programming, hacking, making, building, leading and creating software around here astounds me.
Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.
Most things in our JIRA deployment are configured to just allow anyone to change anything, with only a few exceptions.
Locking things down like that is the project manager's way of making sure people are constantly blocked and work isn't getting done. Not sure why some project manager's try so hard to create this state of affairs.
These can be ignored, used to enforce very simple house-keeping things like filling out a "fix version" or "deploy date" when closing an issue as "fixed", or to exactly codify all the rules in a complex development process based on a bunch of flowcharts someone with "project manager" in their credentials spent two weeks painstakingly creating.
[1] What word you choose here will probably depend on if a PM or developers have admin access in JIRA.
@i386 used to work on Bamboo for Atlassian.
Good luck James, I really want to try out BlueOcean but might depend on stuff[1] at work.
1. GoCD (blah) CircleCI (not used yet but frankly looked better)
But based on what you said, I guess I can try Jenkins over the weekend on a pet project to see how it goes and then compare if it really is too much of a hassle. Thanks!
* Merge checks
* Build status (finally...)
* Audit logs
* Inline editing
Nothing that keeps it above Github, but they always seem to maintain feature parity.
/not a bitbucket shill
//just don't like inaccurate comments.
If you do a fair comparison and compare the entire Atlassian suite to Gitlab, then you see that the Atlassian suite is far more powerful for most enterprise use cases, which typically involve highly customized workflows and reporting in Jira. The integrations with Jira, making it incredibly easy for higher ups to follow overall progress on software projects that are tied to complicated business processes with long lifecycles, to help understand where the enterprise is in its lifecycle on any given issue and reprioritize resources to prioritized tasks as needed.
Nobody has an issue tracker that really competes with Jira in this space, least of all Gitlab.
It has eight zillion features, all of them overlapping. It has so many fields, dimensions, views, and reports that I despair of ever getting a setup that usefully matches an actual workflow. The point of a work tracking system is to bring everybody together, but I regularly see people dealing with Jira by having their own separate tracking methods: docs, emails, spreadsheets, sticky notes on the wall.
I like Trello better because it's more straightforward. Less complexity means less chaos and an easier time getting a workflow representation that matches actual workflow.
But personally, I like things that are more straightforward still. E.g., my last company ran almost entirely on index cards, and we were very happy with that:
In other words, like most enterprise software, the experience is highly dependent on how well it's implemented.
Alternately, JIRA as a team board, particularly with remote teams, can be pretty great if you take the time to set it up so that it works for the team (rather than just for the managers or PMs). It can be no more (or at least not much more) cumbersome than Trello, but has a lot of features that Trello lacks.
Your experience will depend on the plugins you've installed, how you've configured custom fields and workflows, your org's SSO policies, the hardware you're deploying it to and how well you keep it up to date (if you're deploying on-prem), etc.
The purpose of software is to specialize hardware to perform a required function. The more configuration is required to do this, the less overall value the software provides for that function.
As a software designer your job is to maximize the sum of that value across all functions that you support. As a software consumer, though, you just want the least possible configuration to perform your required function.
Truth is both tools are just fine. The rest is just people defending their choice as the superior way of doing things.
Besides, a disgruntled employee of your company is far more likely to be malicious than a disgruntled employee of some random cloud services company. What would be their motivation? They probably don't care about your code at all -- but your employees -- they certainly might. Has there ever been a case of a disgruntled Github employee hacking a customer company's production code ever in the history of Github? Has there ever in the history of SMEs been a disgruntled employee that harmed his own company? All the time.
So what risk is more realistic to mitigate? The hypothetical disgruntled employee at a vendor that probably has never heard of you or employees sitting right there in the office with you?
We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.
In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate, add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_ happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't want to be too spammy here.
just wanted to address my hugest complaint about the Atlassian suite, in the hope someone here can use it for improvement: please unify the administrative UI/UX of JIRA and Confluence (and the other tools). Stuff is named differently, and placed in different positions. Even as a sys-op, it is not always possible to claim access rights to a space that another administrator created. And why does Confluence use JIRA Crowd for LDAP authentication?
I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure.
Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.
At that same company, we switched to Jira from 6 or 7 different ticketing systems (a mix of in-house and third party systems split up by department). It was a herculean effort to transition, but the result was much better than any of the individual ticketing systems with the huge benefit of just opening a ticket anywhere and moving it to where it needs to go while preserving the history.
Now the cons I've seen are; I have no idea how much it costs and it seems to require a small to large team to manage and deploy it for maximum usefulness. For ad hoc deploys I've heard/seen performance issues if the server isn't beefy or configured correctly and the UI can be inscrutable if users are just dropped into the default. That's about (the best case scenario of) what I expect for enterprise software, though.
I have used GitHub Enterprise and haven't used BitBucket. I might not be using it correctly, but I don't see what's so great about GitHub Enterprise (especially for the cost). We still have to use a separate ticketing system for non-project related things (same with documentation).
I've used different ticketing systems since leaving the place that used Jira/Confluence, but have been disappointed at what they were using and what else I could find out there. What have you found out there that has worked better?
I am mostly used to command line Git during my daily routine, but the designer/manager was happily using Sourcetree. But as far as some products that are kind of worthless, yeah Hipchat would be one. You are way better off using Slack or even WeChat mobile/desktop app (if you are in China)
As for ticketing systems, they all suck. All of them. Even Trello. The basic problem is that the amount of information you need to put into a ticket in order to be reasonably useful is more than the users are (time-)comfortable providing. No ticketing software will solve that.
My major problem with Atlassian, though, is the licensing subsystem. It sucks hard. Getting support for it sucks. You can have the account that owns a license, and still be unable to access parts of your own account. They have support for multiple contacts, but only the first one receives relevant mail. The owner of the license can't control the order of the contacts, the contacts themselves have to log in and move themselves to that first position (no potential for abuse there!). Getting support through their support wizard process regarding licensing is painful. Ugh, they need to flog whomever designed that setup... I get the feeling that they used to work for the Windows licensing team....
Their lack of popularity also seems to translate to a lower attack profile, so I feel that my private projects are safer on BB than GH.
I've evaluated many issue trackers too, and none of them seem to come close to Jira. Yes it is slow, but the depth of features (and plugins) are great, and BitBucket works seamlessly with it.
Once you have these services running they're fairly stable and hands-off, especially if you have them firewalled off enough to not have to worry too much about remote exploits. A little bit of docker experience can do the job here, we're small enough that we don't need a fancy high availability configuration or anything, so it keeps things fairly simple.
Of course a disgruntled coworker is a bigger concern, but one which is easier to control than outsiders are. And that's not to mention the many times in the past that I've seen 3rd party companies hacked to do things like steal Bitcoin wallets via their providers. If it's an easy risk to mitigate, may as well do it.
This would basically resolve my biggest problems with it I suppose, if used fully and properly. Currently comitting with your SSH key basically resolves this issue in the same way, assuming our internal-restricted server isn't compromised of course.
I'd still be a little uncomfortable putting code on 3rd party servers and having any data there at all for stability reasons, but this does make it more viable. I'll definitely be commit signing everything I have on cloud services from now on.
Atlassian's product range today includes unstructured (Confluence) and structured (JIRA) products.
Trello fits right in the middle. It has a myriad of use-cases[1] and is loved by the millions who use it daily.
[1] - https://trello.com/inspiration
Scott, CEO Atlassian
AWS applies the same trick with some startups in China (like they did with us) and I guess Silicon Valley as well. Bunch of free credits, free for a year. After you have your infrastructure with them it will be hard to switch to somebody else.
If we have built a product that is a (we think) great fit to the Atlassian customer base, who would we speak to in order to create a partnering arrangement with Atlassian? Does Atlassian do such business partnering arrangements?
It's not an addon for an Atlassian product so does not seem to fit to the Atlassian marketplace.
I would have thought that making business connections on HN is just exactly the right thing to be doing.....
Also, the might include it or leave it separate. They might even include it and still keep it a great product.
My guess is they'll keep Trello running for a while as-is, and slowly rework it to become "JIRA Lite". It will likely have Trello-like functionality with JIRA branding, and some sort of migration path to the heavier JIRA for companies that have grown a lot.
Except for when you run into a bug that requires disabling of the Hipchat integration with Confluence... You'd think a company could make its own products work together better.
Slack has more speed, better integrations, better search, reliability. (For example, getting notifications on iOS.
I hate HipChat. Apologies to those that love it, but it's likely you never used both side-by-side during normal working days to compare.
So if Atlassian tried to put their mark on Trello, I have little confidence that it will still be Trello.
HipChat is certainly not perfect, but I don't agree about Slack being faster. It definitely has its issues.
Well ;) https://twitter.com/sreuter/status/818614016801009664 ...
Disclaimer: I work at Atlassian.
What Git GUI do you prefer?
Lightning talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ccCNQaTJ10
also, if you are a vimmer use spacemacs to get out of the box, nicely configured vim.
Definitely my favourite client, and OSS to boot. I can't really think of much I'd want changed to improve it.
Not really a fair comparison: SourceTree targets professional devs while GitHub Desktop caters to making git + GitHub simple for beginners. I like the client personally, but it isn't a daily driver. Beyond absolute basics the feature set is totally different.
No problems with paying for a product, but the way they went about the switch left a sour taste, so I went back to SourceTree.
We have quite some exciting features and additions on the roadmap!
In combination with GitUp, it's still a great tool, but it could need better QA so that even edge cases are solid.
EDIT: now that I think about it, there are a few buggy things about it that are frequent but are just an annoyance, not a hindrance.
It is incredible slow for many operations.
My solution is to use command line git for most operations and SourceTree just for visualizing the repository. It's pretty fine for this.
Not trying to start the classic hg vs git debate, just saying that it's great to have the option.
Check our RhodeCode for Enterprise SCM tool that supports Mercurial too.
Nice and simple.
I suppose that what they are buying, among other things, is a significant paying customer base. These customers can be sold more products, e.g. Bitbucket / Bamboo, provided that Trello integrates with them well enough, or will in the future.
Just curious as to what you think Github could do to fix this. I have a list of wishes and I'm always curious what other people have.
* ZenHub - Agile GitHub Project Management Software || https://www.zenhub.com/
GitHub + Marker for bugs.
* Marker - Visual Feedback & Bug Reporting Tools for Web Professionals || https://getmarker.io/
GitHub + Unito + Asana even... for clients to get some pretty dashboards without getting bogged down... this works great too.
* Unito - Connect your project management tools and become your team's collaboration hero || https://unito.io/
I love how many things play nice with GitHub now.
It also means that someone submitting bugs, say from customer support, must try and figure out where the issue is in order to log it. It's a huge hassle and most just give up and ping an engineer on Slack which is incredibly inefficient.
Trello gets around this by letting you create a "master" issue and link to the individual repository issues. It means engineering can have a bug inbox and triage from there. Still a huge pain and not ideal.
Github also has the "Projects" feature, but it is useless IMO due to the above issue - I wish projects would work at an organisation level.
https://github.com/blog/2272-introducing-projects-for-organi...
Until recently I would've said there wasn't at all much difference between Github and Bitbucket (aside from Github being the de facto home for open source).
However, I'd now argue that Github is significantly better value than Bitbucket for projects, rather than code. By that I mean, Bitbucket is just a component in the greater Atlasssian ecosystem, so it's not a huge priority to add and improve upon project management tools, as you're encouraged to use JIRA, Confluence etc. Even simple things like Bitbucket's Markdown README's not supporting HTML (in particular anchors for same page links) makes the project organisation experience a whole lot less polished.
Where Github shine these days is that they offer a pretty cohesive experience for an entire project's management. Code reviews have come a long way, as have issues and pull requests in general. More recently they've added support for Projects, which for the most part is a Trello clone with built-in integration into Github's issue tracker. Free hosting of Jekyll websites, previews and diffs for all sorts of non-text file formats etc. really put Github in front. Combine this all with the recent change to bill per user rather than per repo (which provides huge savings for small teams) and I don't at all see how Bitbucket are supposed to compete.
I still use Trello for management of clients' projects simply because my clients don't care about the code. However, I can definitely see myself transitioning entirely to Github Projects and the Github issue tracker in the near future.
Frankly, Trello did really well out of this deal from Atlassian. I know Trello have a lot of users, but I'm a bit doubtful about their ability to generate significant funds (paid stickers...?) With Github Projects maturing Trello were likely to lose a lot of users from the tech industry. Atlassian and Trello actually seem like a perfect fit, so it's a saving grace for Trello who couldn't have timed the acquisition better.
To my mind, the UX of Github makes it worth the extra expense.
Github UX is weird. It looks nice, and there's lots of nice functionality. But it often takes lots of rummaging to find the things I need, unless I do them every week. Bitbucket and Gitlab seem to be laid out better. Github is the only site I use regularly where I need to refer to notes.
A large enterprise that's fully exploiting Jira will set it up for non-developers, indeed they'll set up Jira primarily for their non-developers. HR will have an HR project with the following issue types: New Hires, Employee Disputes, etc., each with workflows with statuses like resume received, contacted to set up a first interview, first interview set up, offer extended... etc. And then you can use all of Jira's existing reporting schemes to help management figure out, if I need to hire someone new for some type of position, how long does that take? Are there differences between different positions? How long does each stage in the process take? Why? Does the aggregate data show some kind of bias - gender or otherwise? How do I make this faster? And so on. The kinds of questions that you can ask when you're an enterprise with established process and not a start-up with the entire company fit into one room.
Internally, even within our engineering division, we've been using issue linking to other projects to get better visibility into why various work items get stuck. If I'm dependent on some internal service for my work item, and that service becomes unavailable for some period of time, I can grab the Jira support issue tracking the unavailability, mark my work item as blocked by that issue, and then that's visible all the way up the enterprise hierarchy. Similarly, I don't have to ask the people responsible whether they've fixed their system yet, my own item updates automatically to show that my item isn't blocked anymore, and I can go back to work.
The main difference between Jira and Gitlab is that Jira is a workflow management tool and Gitlab is a software management tool. Gitlab looks fantastic if I want to start a new software company and have everything be right there in one window for me. But if you put all the software parts in front of all your non-software teams, they'll balk. It's just not relevant to them.
Microsoft has a tool much like Gitlab called TFS, which has been around for far longer than Gitlab has. TFS is also designed to have this one-stop-shop UI, and TFS also never became an enterprise workflow management tool, even though it too has issues and workflows and customizations up the wazoo. It's a product that's targeted to software developers and it knows it, and that's why hardly any large enterprises actually use it unless they have old .NET projects that have been on TFS forever.
This is the benefit of Atlassian's multiple-product model. Jira is management-first. Bitbucket is software-first. Confluence is customer-first. In an all-in-one UI, you have to pick who's first.
The real problem Gitlab faces is how to retain software projects in growing companies once those companies expand and become large enterprises, and need to start to track more generalized workflows. Because if you had to ask what's most important in the Gitlab UI, workflow and reporting is definitely not it.
With GitLab, one of our goals is to put all the pieces together. We are building out the integrations, step by step, from idea to production. We believe in a world where everyone can contribute to projects. In a large organization, this means diversity in workflows and individuals. Again, I mention that we are focused on really understanding who those users are as part of this exercise. Our UX design team has begun that work and we have already started research on personas. This will further drive our development of GitLab and make sure to nail those other use cases beyond the narrow scope of software development, into allowing companies to leverage GitLab to create software and processes to run their businesses.
In particular, here at GitLab we use GitLab itself for some HR operations too. So we recognize the potential there. And we even want to ship a simple feature for operational support tickets (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/149). So we definitely recognize the breadth of opportunity and the gaps we still have.
Thanks for bringing up this very relevant discussion. We definitely recognize the shortcomings and we are working hard to improve in these areas. GitLab started out as a software management tool, similar to what you describe. But we are definitely looking to expand in multiple directions. One of them is definitely to make it a tool that is useful beyond just engineers. One of our major thrusts in this area is issue boards. We are considering who the individuals are in a large enterprise that would be interested in issue boards. And we can't solve every use case right away. So we are starting with personas like engineering managers, product managers, and designers. These are folks that may not be very technical, but still are important in the product development flow in a large organization. See this as an example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/24686
We definitely have our eye to expand beyond these use cases. So we anticipate getting into areas like road mapping, Gantt charts / swim lanes, etc. But again, we work iteratively at GitLab, so our very first stab in this area is burn down charts to get feedback on how a software iteration is performing. And then we build on that to bigger scopes like roadmaps for business managers, etc. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/91 for burn down charts.
In addition, we recognize the rich nature of teams and the multi-faceted of different roles in an organization. For lack of better term, we've called it "team-centered collaboration" in this issue, we start the discussion that we want to go beyond just software-first projects: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1295
I guess one way to explain it is that Hipchat feels like an enterprise product, and Slack feels like a consumer product. The difference being that enterprise products get used because some high-level person says, "Lo, all my vassals shall now use Hipchat." Which means that user experience is secondary. Whereas consumer software has to earn each user, meaning that it works harder to please and support those users.
JIRA's BDUF approach to ticketing/bug tracking pleases middle managers whose job is to spend all day clicking around arcane interfaces and finding a way to generate a report that shows their team is highly productive, but it's painful for actual doers to get in there and move stuff around, which means it rarely gets done, which means that the tracking is not very reliable, which means that the value of the bug tracker is dubious. The most important feature any bug tracker can have is that it's low-friction enough that most people will actually use it.
JIRA has tried various things to make this less onerous, including GreenHopper/swimlanes, an attempt to remake JIRA into a Trello-like drag-and-drop interface, but it just never seems to click the same way. For example, today, when I tried to move a ticket in JIRA from the "New" swimlane to the "Done" swimlane, I got a "WORKFLOW EXCEPTION".
Product managers need to learn a simple lesson: if a user wants to use power user features then you should let them because there's a good chance they know what they are doing.
For ticketing systems, trello or youtrack.
I like Trello, I use it all the time for personal projects, but I just don't see it scaling for large groups. I was surprised to see Unreal Engine using it[1] even if they're only using it to communicate their roadmap (and using something else internally). I thought using Trello was creative and interesting, but I have trouble actually finding and following things.
I use YouTrack at my current job. I guess it works fine for our needs, but it feels clunky and crippled compared to Jira. I'm still using 6.5 (looking to upgrade to 7), am administering it myself, and haven't read too much of the docs, but was surprised it couldn't do some things I expected when I've tried to customize it.
Atlassian abandoned HipChat's bug tracker, and put up a fresh JIRA that they discourage you from using at several steps. That's one way to get the bug count down without fixing any bugs.
I still remember, and have nightmares about, the day ~300 users lost all private chats, private room membership, and chat history, all because of braindead design.
Hipchat is not my favorite atlassian product. The only reason they have any traction whatsoever is because Slack doesn't offer a behind the firewall product.
Why can't HipChat message editing be as easy as Skype's? If HipChat is at all targeted for devs, why is pasting/sharing code a pita? Where is bold/italics on linux? Your own hyperlinks (instead of pasting raw urls?
I only use HipChat because the alternatives at my company are worse. Even IRC seems better at this point.
No doubt they'll sell someday though so w/e. Temporary / replaceable is the new norm for productivity tools. Beware lock-in! Might end up back on IRC next.
The editing function is embarrassingly bad. I get it, I've been on IRC when Perl was cool, but I can't believe they're shipping that. I don't think I've seen a non-programmer use it, ever.
I've also never felt so unwelcome in a bug reporter as in HipChat's. It really reminded me that Atlassian sells to suits, not to users.
Is there some joke in the middle that's passing right over me?
https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/2874/ability-to-sea...
That's incredible.
Why would you want to use such a limited diff tool at all? Personally, I use the best diff tool that I can find and so far that's BeyondCompare from Scooter Software.
I wonder if they were slow on updating their site because of Sourcetree, which I personally love (especially since it is a cross-platoform [Mac/Win] GUI client).
We've added 4 big features just in the last 12 months
+ Pipelines + Git LFS + Smart Mirroring + Merge Checks
More here just from Oct 2016: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/10/12/scaling-in-bitbucket-c...
Not to mention other features like 2FA, Projects, Snippets, Bitbucket Connect, etc. in the last 2 years
The takeaway here is that project management and software tools are inherently complicated by what they have to solve. There's so many different ways to build software and run projects. How do you create the tools to support those workflows so that a new user is not crippled by the complexity? At least in GitLab we are iterating quickly with small improvements every month. But we also have a UX team to design intuitive interfaces and workflows that make sense. We dogfood GitLab ourselves so we understand the pain points (and the complexities!). And of course we develop out in the open to solicit that constant user feedback. As GitLab further matures and we add more features, we are hyper aware that we do not build another JIRA. There is so much configurability and complexity there. It's very heavy. So are iterating quickly, but carefully.
At GitLab we'll work very hard try to have on product that is pleasant to use for simple cases but still allows you to handle the complex ones.
This is a huge UX challenge but it will allow our users to use a single product for all their needs, so they don't have to move projects between tools when they 'graduate' to the complex one. And it will allow us to ship more features in the single product we work on.
I frequently pick through dozens of lines of code for a granular commit history, sometimes backing up a commit, saving a commit as a patch, (then) amending some lines to a previous commit, staging/unstaging non-consecutive additions and deletions, etc. and I've not experienced problems.
Renaming repos is straightforward but doing so does not rename the directory in the filesystem. It only renames it in the Tower UI.
To rename the repo root directory, one should copy the origin root directory naming it to the new name and then run
git init --bare name_of_directory
The only trouble I've experienced is deleting branches and tags from Github. Not sure if it's Github or Tower, but deleting those items and then recreating them often yields an error that the item still exists.
(In my defense, the process established at work requires a deploy of a tag to STG once every 2 weeks, but the tag must be deployed to STG every week, leading to a situation where the STG tag must be deleted and recreated. Come to think of it, I'm going to suggest we change our process.)
I'm not affiliated with Tower except as a satisfied user.
EDIT: grammar, formatting, readability.
My biggest gripe is that Tower 1 use to display all your stashes on the side (expanded, not collapsed) by name/date. Tower 2 hides all that information from being easily viewable. I use to use stashes quite a lot, but since switching over I've significantly decreased my usage of it.
Personally, I pay for the best tools because they're worth the money. For that tool in particular, I paid $60 over 3 or 4 years ago. It's practically nothing compared to some of the other tools that we use.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b0b9b3df27d100a975b...
syntax highlighting would be like this, where keywords, function calls, and variables are all different colors.
I just checked our Bitbucket. There's no syntax highlighting for any of our used languages for diffs. There is no option to enable or disable it. When you do a search for it, it's still an open issue in BitBucket's public issue tracker[0].
If you've got some wizardry working that isn't an external script, hook it up.
[0]: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/8673/add-syntax-hig...
Bitbucket Server is written in Java and bitbucket.org is written in Python.
I was dumbfounded when I found out they were two separate codebases.
(hate it when companies do this)
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/
Mercurial is very important for Facebook, Mozilla, Google, and others. The disparaging "legacy" monicker might be a good way to feel justified to not have to learn about it, but it's not dying software that is no longer getting updates.
I also feel like (and I realize many disagree) that YouTube largely kept its "feel" and didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0.
Of course there are plenty of examples of exactly what you describe. I feel the same way about Java, Hudson (lol) and plenty of other acquisitions.
Years ago I was talking to a Melbourne dev who said they've made very little (Jira and Confluence I think?) and the rest of it they've just bought and rebranded?
Yahoo likes to kill apps and take devs, like Astrid Tasks.
It really isn't. VirtualBox was always mediocre compared to VMWare, and ever since the Oracle acquisition, I haven't heard of any major new features or performance improvements coming out of the VirtualBox team. Though, given what Oracle has done to its other acquisitions, benign neglect is a pretty good outcome.
Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
Yeah, agreed, I was going to say the same.
YouTube was used as leverage to boost Google+. They backed off soon enough to save things (or perhaps YouTube is just too big to kill with such a mistake) but it was badly messed up IMO.
Truthfully, unless you are being acquired by an aggregator like berkshire hathaway, I don't get the "nothing will change attitude" you often see. Of course it will change. They bought you to change something (usually about them).
The number that stay truly autonomous is ... very very very low.
It's not hard to find "______ is being acquired by ________" headlines on HN, where everybody involved promises not to change anything, and then find the corresponding shutdown post on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ sometime a few months later.
Unfortunately, even if Jira were really serious about not changing anything, it's not entirely up to them. No doubt there are some Trello employees who don't want to work for Jira, and a lot of them will eventually leave.
Even if everybody at Trello honestly believes it, in a few months it's not going to be their decision any more.
Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch
of stuff as we assimilate this new company."
I just assumed Trello was too big to be an "acqui-hire", but I really have no idea how big they were.
And if it goes down a different path, there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too.
Good for someone willing to take advantage of the market opportunity, maybe. But is it good for users that have to deal with their company churning from one enterprise to-do list to another?
Familiarity (or lack thereof) with software like Trello can be the difference between enjoying your day to day and finding it endlessly frustrating.
A lot of the time, the executive team that grew a startup into something big are not the best people run that new big company.
Nothing is forever, change is the only constant, cherish the time you had, and so on...
Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story
http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-...
It always starts with good intentions and fine words about nothing changing and ends with an incredible journey.
Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.
http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...
Fog Creek always pitched Trello as a general list app, not a bug tracker, and refused to add features that would've geared it specifically toward bug tracking. I would venture a guess that Fog Creek kind of accidentally shot FogzBugz in the foot with Trello.
My impression is that Atlassian sees Trello's userbase as a strong opportunity to upsell to the enterprise-style tooling in JIRA and recruit more people into the JIRA ecosystem. If this is indeed the value they see, then it wouldn't make sense to change anything about Trello's fundamentals. They'll probably just create a JIRA plugin and plaster JIRA ads all over the place.
On the contrary, it went in a good direction under Atlassian ownership.
Would you devote your resources to an Android or iOS app if it isn't backed by a service which is useful in and of itself?
What about desktop Windows apps? Every time I see others interact with a Windows 10 app, I feel like throwing up. Mac apps seem to be doing slightly better, but that might be because it is an inherently tiny market.
Now that everything has moved to the web, people are trying to outdo each other with the creepiest possible tracking analytics. If you wish to develop useful, paid software which is mostly unobtrusive to the users, I would say you are already about 5 years too late.
If you want to see the "major new features" implemented, you need look no further than the changelog. [0]
And FWIW, I've tried VMWare Workstation several times and even own a copy of it, but VirtualBox has been and continues to be the most reliable, simple method of virtualization for me (and several of my colleagues). The VMWare drivers/tools are frequently broken by kernel upgrades, the interface is clunkier and more demanding (including requiring hosts to run a couple of background daemons; VBox operates fine on hosts with just the drivers installed), and the performance, while better in some areas, is much worse in others, making it a wash for general use.