Show HN: Portabella – privacy friendly project management

Show HN: Portabella – privacy friendly project management(portabella.io)

41 points by alex_portabella 5 years ago | 17 comments

Hey HN!

I've been working on Portabella during my weekends for the last six or so months. The idea is to compete with tools we all know such as Trello/Asana/Jira while being end-to-end encrypted and as privacy preserving as possible.

Let me know what you think!

Terretta 5 years ago | |

I love this privacy first approach, and it makes enterprise use easier when I don’t have to trust you. More SaaS should take note.

alex_portabella 5 years ago | | |

Thank you thank you! Similar thought process.

I _do_ think that enterprise isn't our target market. Any large enough entity should probably self host their stuff, in that case e2ee isn't as appealing, assuming you trust your own company.

In my perfect world all tools would e2ee where possible, however it's a lot of work and until lately I'd argue consumers don't care. Hoping to be part of the change

jitl 5 years ago |

How do you handle collaboration and search? Does the browser need to load all the records from the server to search them?

alex_portabella 5 years ago | |

Yup, no searching across projects right now but for the current project that's loaded you can search it.

Collaboration happens via websockets if that answers your question. Payloads are encrypted and broadcast to everyone subscribed to the board.

antpls 5 years ago |

Just curious, did anyone ever complain about Trello/Asana/Jira not being "private" enough ? They respect all the privacy standards you would expect from a Saas

aviditas 5 years ago | |

I think this is a good segment to move into as Atlassian is moving away from the on-prem products starting next year.

alex_portabella 5 years ago | |

I'm of the opinion that if stuff is not private, people will look at it and exploit it. In 2020 there's no reason we can't offer great UX while being encrypted, so this is my attempt at that.

orliesaurus 5 years ago |

Hey Alex, I made a landing page breakdown video of your project, highlighting what I liked and what I didn't like about the way you present your product. I think there's invaluable feedback that you can get from my "first" time impression of it. I try to be concise, honest and quick. Let me know what you think? Here's the video -> https://youtu.be/XeG62ZKRc20

alex_portabella 5 years ago | |

Thanks for the video! Was really interesting, I agree you've highlighted a bunch of improvements I can make.

Good luck with future reviews! Will definitely be watching

ffpip 5 years ago |

Portabella looks like a great product!

Some thoughts I had was that you should focus a bit less on privacy (at least on your home page). It is already the differentiating feature. Put features like 'Assignees and deadlines', 'Knowledge base', dashboard at the top. You've got a fast, private product. Make sure it doesn't miss out on features.

Wishing you luck!

dhimes 5 years ago | |

Write them as 'benefits,' not 'features.' That is, how having 'Assignees' helps the user.

alex_portabella 5 years ago | |

Thanks! Hope you give it a go. I agree I'll rework that a little and focus more on the benefits.

Silhouette 5 years ago |

Just FYI if you're still reading this, your homepage is unusable here. The gimmick with the text that keeps swapping out is making the rest of the page content jump up and down every few seconds. I was literally getting a headache just trying to look at the screenshot.

alex_portabella 5 years ago | |

Hey thanks for the feedback, will jump on this and get that fixed. I agree that is super annoying when it happens.

drcongo 5 years ago |

None of the images on the site load for me here. Safari 14.0, latest macOS.

alex_portabella 5 years ago | |

Fixed, I had my webp fallbacks setup wrong.