Ask HN: Are you using a Pivotal Tracker successor? Which one?

2 points by antfarm 59 days ago | 3 comments

In my opinion, Pivotal Tracker was the collaborative planning tool with the best feature set, usability and presentation. It was highly opinionated, but on the flip side gave you a baked-in process that just worked (at least in my team (1 product owner + 3 developers)

A while ago, there already was a discussion on HN [1] about a list of projects that implement PT clones [2].

Does anyone here use one of those? Which one did you chose and what are your experiences, what is still missing?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378925

[2] https://bye-tracker.net

izajahmad 58 days ago |

Linear for anything engineering-focused. The keyboard shortcuts and speed make a real difference when you're context-switching constantly.

For smaller projects I've gone back to a simple GitHub Projects board — sometimes the overhead of dedicated PM tools isn't worth it when the team is under 5 people.

prxtl 58 days ago | |

+1 to Linear being fantastic. At this point, my biggest gripe with it (in comparison to Pivotal Tracker) is that I cannot put a limit on how many issues can exist in a certain state. Tracker used to do this very well with velocity.

I'd be very happy if I could set a max limit of 5 on the "todo" state of a certain team. Helps a lot with prioritization and poorly done planning.

muzani 58 days ago |

I just ended up making my own highly opinionated tool, based on my workflow, but it's designed for 1 developer/owner. It exports into markdown for easy communication to AI agents. https://mandate.run

Since the future is AI agents, I'm thinking this works better than trying to retrofit an existing flow. I can just plug it into a MCP or something later to delegate the tasks to AI and track.

I feel like the problem with a lot of paid tools is that the money is in medium sized teams (~30 or so people). Solo types like Workflowy and Pivotal Tracker aren't very profitable and there's a strong pull to enshittification.