Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool. Seems lots of JIRA-haters in the comments but lets get back and look at this event. The folks at Fog Creek brought us FogBugz, Stackoverflow, Trello.
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.
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 Hipchat was not bought by Atlassian, it will be a serious contender for Slack?
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).
Trello is more than Kanban. I would imagine their strategy is to use Trello as a beachhead to get less technical teams into using their expanded suite of tools
How on earth is this a good "outcome" for anyone who is not an equity holder? So tired of that word, it's the worst possible one because the outcome is terrible 99% of the time for the real people who actually care about the "outcome"
Do all start ups have to grow at all costs? I know it's standard for most start-ups to accept as much VC money as possible and find ways to spend it, but there are also young companies that don't need VC money and are successful. Don't know why those shouldn't be start-ups.
I work at a company that considers itself a startup -- we're seven years old and completely bootstrapped. I've had many people tell me that we're not a "startup," we're just a "normal company." Usually this comes down to people saying that unless our priority is maximizing growth in the short term, we're not a startup. (We are obviously still focused on growth, just not at the expense of our stability, our product, or our company culture.)
"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.
Because we already have the terms "small business" and "ISV" to refer to small companies which are happily making small profits and not trying to take over the world.
> How long does a company have to be around until it's no longer considered a start-up?
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.
I think a good definition of what a startup is would consider rate of growth (now and projections into the near future) rather than length of time since inception.
This makes sense. Atlassian is good at making money from its services and it is increasing its overall ecosystem here.
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.
Thats about all Atlassian is good at. HipChat has become an abomination of a client across Windows and Mac. Every new release is about fixing functionality they broke with the previous release and even then it still isn't fixed.
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.
Really? I'm pretty happy with it. Definitely better than Github desktop, and more full featured than the light git extensions you find in most editors.
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.
GitKraken looks promising, and introduces some new UI concepts (drag and drop merging, for example). It's still fairly young but could be a competitor.
I've been using Fork (git-fork.com), and it's fantastic. Similar UI to SourceTree on the surface, but more obvious in other ways. It's blazing fast, and the author is super responsive to requests and to make fixes.
In case you missed it, Tower (https://www.git-tower.com – not affiliated) recently got a Windows version. It doesn't have the same level of quality as the Mac version yet (which I've been using for years) but it's improving rapidly and I expect it to be production ready within a couple of months. It's taking relatively long to port because thankfully it is made a native Windows application. Not free, but well worth the money.
Tobias here from the Tower team! I'd like to confirm your assumption: we're indeed working full-steam on improving Tower for Windows (and Mac, of course ;-)
We have quite some exciting features and additions on the roadmap!
I like Tower on macOS, but version 2 is significantly worse than version 1. UI/UX and the number of bugs has been a major pain-point that has made me consider switching to SourceTree. But I still haven't gotten use to SourceTree and GitHub Desktop isn't a great client either as a substitute.
Staging, unstaging, and discarding line-by-line has been extremely flaky for me in v1 and v2. Often discarding a deleted line will insert the line in a completely unrelated part of the file, so instead of a deletion, you now have a deletion and an addition. And so on.
In combination with GitUp, it's still a great tool, but it could need better QA so that even edge cases are solid.
This is different than my experience of Tower and Tower 2.
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
to create a new repo.
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.
Yeah, my intent is to rename them in the UI only. For example, if the dir is "my-repo", I might prefer to call it "My Repo" in Tower instead. All of my repos are nested within one or more groups in Tower, which may be relevant.
I've had similar issues with staging/un-staging causing crashes or just hanging Tower.
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.
Agreed. Instead we can see tags in the sidebar, which is awkward once you have >20 of them (tagged stable versions). I wish tags and stashes swapped places.
Are you seeing the lines get inserted into the file itself or that that's just what the diff reflects? I have experienced the diff in Tower being wrong (getting stale), and while a minor nuisance, it's always been fixed by a restart.
Yeah, the lines get inserted in other places. Usually at this point I just unstage the whole file, fix all errors that Tower introduced in a text editor, and start over.
Is Trello really a competitor though? JIRA and Trello couldn't be more different.
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.
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.
This. I hear a lot of whining about JIRA, which is fair since it's a huge pain to configure and learn all the quirks of, but usually it's overkill for those folks (perhaps myself included right now).
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.
I totally agree. Trello is not a competitor to JIRA.
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.
I think Trello fills a niche for people who don't need all of the features that JIRA provides, but they need something to track tickets/cards/whatever you want to call them. The products are pretty different but I can envision an overlap of users. I use both currently and if I didn't have Trello, I might have to use JIRA for everything.
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.
In the context of discussion about mergers and acquisitions, I believe "killing a competitor" almost exclusively means purchasing a company so that it's no longer a threat. In the course of doing so, you assimilate the acquiree's users, or at least try to. This is the meaning I interpreted from the comment you responded to.
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.
JIRA + Bitbucket (and now + Trello) is a very effective competitor to Github among enterprise companies. Github's issue tracker sort of sucks and this hurts it tremendously -- I know as I live with that shitty issue tracker in an enterprise situation.
Personally all my own projects are on bitbucket. They were the first to provide free unlimited private repos and just has a great set of tools. So my personal preference is bitbucket over github.
My experience with hg-git has been that it is not always a great citizen with git repos and it can cause something of a mess. (This is a few years old now, because like the rest of the world I switched to git; it may have improved in the meantime.)
It's because mercurial is legacy, like darcs, bzr, monotone, and the other zoo of "git-alikes" that were big in 2008. Now it's just like MacOS Classic in 2000: there are a few die-hard zealots who claim that the interface is better in some indescribable way, and everyone else has moved on.
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.
Speaking as someone that works with Mercurial on daily basis, and also makes/sells software that supports Mercurial. I can tell you it's far from beeing legacy.
What determines if a technology is considered legacy is not if there exists someone out there using it, but rather whether there are people actively adopting it at present. In this regard, Mercurial has slowed down and Git has clearly won the game.
Bitbucket server is written in Java while Bitbucket.com in Python. Those are two different products. That's why the Enterprise version supports only GIT.
Check our RhodeCode for Enterprise SCM tool that supports Mercurial too.
And I hope GitHub stays incomplete! I don't need hierarchical access control to decide who can add, remove, and list issue labels, or whatever, just because some pointy-haired enterprise boss came up with that idea five minutes ago.
Yeah, and Bitbucket sucks in any other conceivable way, so I don't see why it should be a competitor other than that they shove it in your face once you want to use JIRA or Confluence.
Jira apparently has a reasonable set of Agile tools, with card decks and all.
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.
Personally (and I'm not sure if JIRA fixes this, but Trello gets around it), the biggest issue I have is that Github treats repositories as the only possible context. Say a bug comes in that covers multiple repositories (e.g.: requires a mobile app fix and a backend fix), then you need to create two completely seperate issues and remember to link them manually. This breaks down very quickly. I would much rather issues to optionally exist at an organisation level, with per-repository sub issues stemming from that organisation-level issue.
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.
Where I work you put a jira id in the commit message and it will automatically put a link to the commit in the jira ticket. And a jira ticket can link to multiple commits across multiple repos.
I agree with you, to me it looks like BitBucket hasn't evolved at all in five years. The only change worth mentioning is that they made me transition to an "Atlassian account", which was as annoying as when Flickr made me create a Yahoo account.
It's okay. It's just that I tried to use it a few months ago and saw they still don't even have syntax highlighting for diffs. It's pretty depressing and it makes it look like they have abandoned the service.
I've been using BitBucket for years and the lack of syntax highlighting for diffs has never even occurred to me.
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'm sure guys who have paid for the enterprise version of BitBucket would rather not have to pay $60 for every developer for BeyondCompare on top of what they pay for BitBucket
Yes, nobody would rather pay for anything though - so what kind of argument is that really? It's like saying "Who would pay extra for higher quality tools?" - the answer is: Lots of people would.
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.
we need to make the web ones get the same experience level then. It's great to have it all there. Were you leave your inline notes, there's a live communication part, all feedback from automated code checkers etc.
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).
Hmm, they show up for me [1]. That screenshot is an HTML file but I also looked at JS, Python and Markdown and all were showing syntax highlight in diff commits.
Thank you for clarifying. I'm not sure why I didn't initially associate 'syntax highlighting' with what it is. I can see how this would be useful when dealing with a lot of information, especially when reviewing another's work.
You can't claim that Bitbucket has syntax highlighting and then post proof that isn't actually proof. Well you can, but why bother?
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.
If you're only comparing Bitbucket by itself to Gitlab then you'd be correct.
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.
I remember being in a pitch meeting with an engineer who sells to various other enterprises and he said that what's changed for traditional enterprises over the last few years is that, no matter what their industry, they've all kind of woken up and realized that they're software companies too.
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.
You're right that large companies have many different workflows. Currently GitLab's is tied very specifically to issues and merge requests, with additional features like labels and milestones. This is a great foundation with which we plan to build on top of. Issue boards is our current area of expansion. But we do plan on further enriching issues themselves, introducing some structure at some point (e.g. "epic" in the language of Pivotal or borrowing from the ideas of JIRA with their many powerful issue relationships (parents, children, clones, etc.), but of course aiming to significantly reducing that complexity. Part of that discussion is here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4058.
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
There's lots to consider and analyze here. But one area of note is that JIRA is already used by many enterprises. But many folks find that despite it's many powerful features, the complexity is crippling. There's a lot to configure. And it's not an easy app to use with all that complexity. This is in stark contrast to Trello, which is essentially a digital agile board. (JIRA has an agile board too, as one of it's many plug and play features.) So if all you need is a simple board and you don't want the heft of JIRA, Trello is great. And now Atlassian can offer that.
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.
Atlassian now has two products that do the same thing. Jira for the complex cases and Trello for the simple ones.
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.
It indeed is hard. I'm happy that we don't have to get it right the first time but that we can iterate. As you've shown with your great work for Jenkins Blue Ocean it is possible to keep improving the simplicity of an interface even for a mature product.
Thanks! We have swim lanes. Your request as I understand it is for detailed swim lane progress reporting (from application to hiring by gender) and linking with a status (blocked). I'll ask our product team to have a look.
I very much doubt big enterprise clients use the services at bitbucket.com. Standalone is where it is at, and BitBucket (previously Stash) is a worthy competitor to GitLab (which was pain to setup just few years back). Big companies usually don't move at the speed of javascript frameworks.
Hate to be a crotchety old man, but seeing people recruit heavily for JS just makes me like the company less. Really sick of seeing the increasingly-silly bandwagon jumping that goes on in the tech community.
I don't use it much, or rather at all so I don't have much to say. GitLab has a more appealing UI than BitBucket (likely more features too), they have a great team who hang out here on HN and respond to feedback very quickly, they are actually focused on just GitLab while Atlassian has a lot of projects to work on, and their rate of development is much faster.
I find it amusing that someone thinks Github moves slow in comparison to Atlassian.
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?
Atlassian is a bootstrapped enterprise software company. That alone should earn them a lot of respect.
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.
Mr..Mrs. Cookie! I love Ice.... In my drinks but not for Bitbucket.
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.
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.
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.
Atlassian provides a whole gamut of enterprise-geared software development tools, whereas GitHub has only just recently started actively pursuing enterprise accounts and providing the features they want.
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.
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).
> 1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding
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.
Also, I'm pretty sure that investment wasn't for 100% ownership, so it's not like that $10 million turned into $400 million. The return would have to be proportional to ownership percentage.
>It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.
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.
Trello, however, is designed for integrations. There are a ton of 3rd party integrations into Trello (some using the API, some Trello blessed that show up in the add ons list).
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.
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.
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.
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
Keeping this strength alive will be key to Trello's long-term success.
Hello, you received a reply in another comment about adding more time tracking and reporting to Trello.
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.
Be it for the general use cases or for the software team collaboration, time tracking and reporting features are always useful. As a user of both JIRA & Trello, I hope Trello soon gets all the time tracking and reporting love that JIRA team could add. Congrats and good luck!
I wonder what founders who have sold their companies for a significant amount end up doing in the days after. It would be really interesting to know what's going on in your head right now.
omg, I'm going to have a boss! I'll be working at Atlassian. Lots of stuff to still do in the future to reach our (and my) goals. And now we're going to have a lot more fuel for our engines to get there.
SAAS founder here. Firstly congrats on such a great exit, you and your team certainly deserve it! I would love to know what "more fuel for our engines means"? How much cash you are you looking to burn? From most listed SAAS companies spend upward 80% on sales and marketing. Are you planning to do more enterprise sales?
I'm sure it doesn't mean anything. He just has to sound excited to keep everyone happy.
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.
I completely agree with the sentiment, but my gut says this acquisition isn't about Trello becoming a part of Atlassian but rather Atlassian trying to venture away from their set of dev tools.
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...
> As a recently public company Atlassian knows it'll need to grow beyond developers
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?
Why do anything? Why should Intel care about mobile or Nvidia care about compute? Why should apple care about phones and why should Google care about cars and email? Why should Amazon care about cloud storage? Why should Microsoft care about Linux? Why should BMW care about electric cars? Why should Toyota care about hybrids?
Because you can as and because there are big rewards for doing it right and you're in a good position to that.
"Because you can" is the easiest answer you can give to anything. My comment was written because I feel like people say that Atlassian MUST expand beyond developers. So it doesn't feel like they WANT or they CAN.
Because their shareholders expect the biggest return for their money. This isn't a problem for self-funded companies (they don't have to live beyond their means if they don't need to), but if investors don't see growth they'll sell shares while it's still at its peak. That's business for you.
Yeah, the insatiable need for growth is definitely a function of the way we've structured the investment markets. Public companies depend on shareholders for capital. Shareholders buy your shares because they think you're going to be worth more money some day. Generally, companies become worth more money by increasing sales and developing new, diversified assets and product portfolios.
"If you're not moving forward you're moving backward."
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.
The set of shareholders who would prefer a company return profits / invest in existing products vs risky investments in non-core-competency areas is certainly not empty. If I wanted to invest in a dogfood company I can- I invest in Atlassian because they make developer tools.
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?
I think Atlassian is indeed acquiring Trello to fit it in with the rest of their suite. This is probably going to be done to the detriment of the other use cases.
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.
Open source alternatives are already out there. Wekan is one of the more popular ones. I'm not sure if it has all of the features of Trello as I haven't used Trello extensively.
https://github.com/wekan/wekan
Looking at the screenshot it looks more like a ripoff than an alternative. I am an open source advocate in almost everything, but that kind of ripping of / stealing ideas leave a bad taste.
This was put perfectly. I didn't realize that this was the reason I used Trello to organize much of my life until I read this. I would find it a bit confusing if they started making this more developer exclusive since they already have their Jira software, which already fills that role. I'm hesitantly optimistic that they see Trello for what it is.
Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.
My experience with Jira is that it depends very much on the managers and executive team who set it up and create the precedents on how to use it.
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.
True. I had to setup Jira for our team and must say it was an awful experience. Too many options, hidden in unintuitive places, awful (too verbose) documentation... Everything is just so difficult. Horrible UX. But it was still the best on-premise solution I could find. Trello on the other side is a delight to both setup and use.
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... :(
Had to do the same thing but had a different experience. It was hard to dive in and took some time but now I understand and appreciate the core concepts. There are many abstraction layers ("[...] schemes") and IMO that is a good thing. When you customize workflows etc. you can do that without leaving supported areas. Creating and changing a workflow is very easy. Plus, JIRA has a good pricing.
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).
JIRA is so customizable that it brings out the personality of a micro-manager, even in people who are usually not micro-managers. It's interesting to see how a tool used every day can shape thinking and behaviour patterns.
I consider JIRA a code smell: if an organization uses it, I probably won't be satisfied working with them. I don't think it's because of anything especially bad with Atlassian (although I was furious when they removed the ability to edit Confluence in raw mode), as that the managers I least want to work for seem especially attracted to it.
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.
>The best I've worked with considered PM tools essentially fungible
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.
Yes, but to my point, as you scale up you have to take into account people's varying skill levels and styles. If you can manage a huge project with pencil and paper, you'll do fine with Jira, too. If you are good but borderline, the structure Jira offers (and can be shared between teams/cascaded down) can help.
Exactly. Once a product meets the basic requirements, everything else tends to be complication and frippery. That doesn't mean there's not room to innovate on those basics, but it does suggest you focus on nailing them perfectly.
yeah but their lives sucked while doing that. Good tools don't get the job done if you don't know what you're doing but make it a hell of a lot faster if you do.
No it's really not. "Damning with faint praise" is when, say, you've just effusively praised something else, and then say that the alternative is pretty good.
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.
No. If someone asked you to recommend two employees, and you absolutely gushed about one, but then said the other is "always on time" and "reliable worker", etc. that would be damning with faint praise.
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.
I just wanted to tell you that you hit the nail on the head for what I was conveying. I'm not an Atlassian employee, and I'm not out to evangelize Jira. I'm not happy with every decision they've made lately, and I have particular things I feel are mistakes where they delineate between core product/marketplace.
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.
"Damning with faint praise" is a pretty subtle English idiom. In my experience, it's only used to refer to an instance where someone is socially obligated to offer praise, e.g. a doctoral adviser writing a reference for their student, who gives such faint praise that they intend the recipient to infer that, were they allowed to, they would have been explicitly critical. Since the comment author in question was under no such obligation, I don't think the idiom applies.
I think in this case it's meant to mean "project management and task tracking tools are basically always hateful, but I find this one the least hateful".
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 :)
This has been the case for >5 years. Nothing at the enterprise tier is half as good as JIRA (some prefer "least awful") and nothing that's built for small teams gets close to the features needed by large teams.
> I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.
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.
I agree, we abandoned Trello because of how poorly it handled a team of mixed users. It seemed like all the solutions for our problems had to come from browser plugins, which is just a bad proposition when you need a mix of users of various technical capability.
I don't disagree with this, but very small teams (or sometimes just myself) is exactly what I use Trello for. We use it at home for shared to-do lists, idea boards (way better than Pinterest for us), etc. I realize this doesn't make them much money, but I hope they don't ruin that use case because I haven't found anything I like as well.
Fogbugz seems to really be pushing their cloud stuff though, so I basically ruled it out instantly when I was researching options - it's unacceptable to have to host our code and tracker off-premises on hardware we don't control. Whereas even a small team can run JIRA or GitLab on their own hardware for a very reasonable price.
(I'm the CEO at Fog Creek.) We've updated the on-premise version of FogBugz to be completely in sync with the hosted version, so all the latest features are on both now.
If you're willing to talk publicly, what's the pricing like for a very small, self-hosted group? I'm talking 3 normal users, might scale up to 5 or so.
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 want to confirm - those prices hold for the self-hosted "On Site" version too, where you don't have to provide any management of the data and hosting?
Unless there are regulatory constraints (can't expect logic there...), I don't understand this attitude. Are all your dev boxes air-gapped? If so, how do the devs use google, stack overflow, etc.? If not, how is your on-prem setup so very different than one that used SaaS?
The attitude is simple - don't give your code, and especially don't give access to your devops repositories to 3rd party companies who simply don't need it.
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.
Thanks for the detailed reply. The downtime issue is certainly understandable. I hope you're keeping customer data out of DVCS, but it's true that flaws in your code might be more "discoverable" if an attacker had that code. It does introduce another step into the attack, however, to have to hack FogBugz before reading your code and discovering the flaw that hacks your services. You know your threat model better than we do, but I doubt most carders would bother with that...
I'm not too concerned about someone getting the code, reading it and discovering a flaw allowing for exploit. I'm much more concerned about someone being able to modify code that will be pulled onto production systems by build and deployment scripts (not to mention the build and deployment scripts themselves) which would allow direct access without any need to hack anything beyond the external cloud service. Even a disgruntled admin at Fog Creek in this case could do something like this without the need to hack anything.
Does anyone care enough about your product to actually go to the trouble to do that? It seems that in terms of actual risk management, managing an on premise version of everything is mitigation out of scale with the actual risk.
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?
> managing an on premise version of everything is mitigation out of scale with the actual risk.
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.
Hmm, code signing might not help us due to some specifics of how we do deployments and builds, but thinking a little more about it - what could help in an even bigger way here is PGP signing at the commit level. Git supports this builtin and recently there have been a few pushes for it's support on services. Probably have to hack together a little custom verification script, but I know of no reason that wouldn't be viable.
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.
As someone who frequently works on teams of 10 or less this is exactly what I'm worried about. Trello is a great tool for our needs. I've been in bigger orgs that used JIRA and understand why that made sense, but I'd resent having to use it on a small team.
I used JIRA in very small teams but took great care to configure it sensibly (it took quite a bit of work, I'll give you that). Everyone was happy and even commented on how it made life a lot easier than github issues or whatever other tool they used before.
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.
trello can be used to any kind of project you have in mind, I have my reading list there for example which would be hard to replicate in jira. there are cases were you can use trello and jira for the same puporse and I agreed that in those cases jira wins
Trello is a JIRA competitor based on providing simplicity to task boards.
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 JIRA-fy it or kill it. I use JIRA and pay for it, it is hell on earth for teams of 2-5. We looked into switching to trello to reduce overhead but... It cost more for less features. So we stayed with JIRA.
They will kill trello so everyone is stuck with JIRA. Someone please make a trello clone with reasonable pricing, now!
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.
Bitbucket has been a bit Atlassified a bit.. Hipchat plugins are at the root of the system and it's just a question of time before they require hip-chat to be there for some functionality to work. Don't believe me?
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).
Trello, the head-and-shoulders best project management software for individuals and small teams no matter the type of project and despite the literal hundreds of competitors, is "very basic"…
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.
...it should only need to save you like an hour of one person's time per month to pay for itself for five users. Products can be extremely basic and still be worthwhile in that price range.
They don't care about selling it to you though when they can sell it to the IBMs. To be fair we probably own licenses to everything. I know we have used github enterprise on the watson side.
I was a Trello Gold user before they added the Enterprise tier. They seem to have completely forgotten Gold exists because all of their new features are Enterprise-only. I ended up just going back to a free plan.
JIRA is awful, although admittedly we were a small team when we were using it for a project, which apparently makes it not the best fit. But I really like the other Atlassian products we use. HipChat works well, it's not quite as polished as Slack, but it does the job and it's been a lot more stable the last few months than it once was. Bitbucket is excellent. We moved from Github to Bitbucket a few years ago and never looked back.
I've always thought that the "white boards and post notes" approach to agile work management is the ideal, it's just difficult to achieve on the 'mortal plane' with remote workers, bad handwriting, inability to query / archive etc. With that in mind I really like Trello because it feels very close to a digital version of that ideal. https://cardboardit.com/ is another product in that vein (I am unaffiliated with both products).
Like most software companies, Atlassian products are a mixed bag. I've been pretty happy with their FishEye + Crucible tools for source code search and code reviews.
It has been used extensively in our organization too, and our CTO is now searching replacements after the announcement.
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.
Just gave it a shot, and it seems pretty good. It does not have all the features, and scrolling is a but clunky, but one could always submit a PR, right? :)
We tested it out at my company, and for the most part, it worked pretty good. Very Trello-like, and overall just a simple / easy to use Kanban board. Though, we did have problems 'viewing' the details of a card. Depending on how much data was in the details, it could take around 5-8 seconds to load.
This is really bad as Atlassian is like a prize winning show pony -- great marketing and webinars but once you get deeply into the product usage you find all sorts of problems and open issues. BitBucket has been waiting for 2FA for 5 years! Bambo was recently semi-retired going against a lot of users investments. And these are just recent.
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.
I love their response to open issues like: we'd like to be able to delete pull requests.
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.
We appreciate the frank feedback, but I have to disagree with the interpretation.
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.
That may be the case. However when such tickets are open for 6-7 years with no update the general viewpoint everyone I know that uses Bitbucket has is that it will never be a priority to Atlassian.
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.
I think you've hit on a really important point. In isolation, a particular suggestion might be something of a papercut with a workaround. An unwanted pull request, for example, isn't going to stop others from getting their work done. But, if there are enough of these things that happen to affect a team together, it all adds up. It sounds your team is in that boat, and people not wanting to use the review functionality is a serious concern. Whether or not that's uniquely the case, I'd love to discuss further to make sure I properly understand your experience. If you're willing, please email me (rbarnes atlassian com) and we can set up a call.
>atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final 20% polish never seems to arrive
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.
I quite like Confluence (as in, better than Sharepoint as Wiki in enterprise gigs). But I'm always wondering if Confluence customers are aware that they're creating a huge data silo for their knowledge base documents that can only be accessed using proprietary Confluence software for years to come.
The XML created by Confluence is _very_ portable. If you're using Confluence plugins create buy propriety vendors (Gliffy, Balsamiq etc.) then perhaps you're doing some of what you describe.
The actual content that's in Confluence though, much more portable than anything you're going to get out of another enterprise software vendor.
I spent quite a few hours trying to set up Atlassian's dashboard called Atlasboard, it was pretty awful. It relies on git submodules for extensibility. All of the plugins I tried were horrible, both 3rd party ones and the 1st party Atlassian ones.
This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.
The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up.
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.
To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda.
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 :)
Well I don't really use Trello, though I tried it for a while (wasn't my cup of tea). But the difference between WhatsApp and YouTube and Trello is that the latter is used by a different crowd than the former which is more conscious of and partial to their tools. Thus if Atlassian messed up Trello they'd certainly create lots of bias against the company as a whole in the Trello community, but that can't be said for WhatsApp or YouTube, where the majority of the users don't even care which company owns these services (I guess most wouldn't even know), let alone hating that company for changes to acquired products.
I think Atlassian does a good job of not killing off apps it acquires (anyone have examples?). They just rebrand them and smoosh them into their whole suite of stuff they've bought.
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.
All of them are Oracle now and Virtual Box is pretty good?
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.
lol? VirtualBox has been maintaining its release cadence since the Oracle acquisition in 2010 (almost 7 years ago!), including 2 major-version releases. It seems to be one of the few parts of the Sun family that hasn't been mucked up yet. I keep waiting for Oracle to give it The Oracle Treatment(tm), but heretofore, that hasn't occurred. The VBox guys must have their cubicles hidden really well. ;)
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.
Virtualbox... good? I don't think so at all, it's networking and disk IO performance is horrendous, as much as I dislike VMware - Fusion is miles ahead of VirtualBox in all ways IMO except price. But now we have Xhyve & friends which is truly fantastic.
It just really depends on whether the scale/revenue of the acquired is immediately and clearly accretive to the acquirer. WhatsApp and Waze were pretty far along that path (and their prices reflected it!). Younger companies are more vulnerable.
And the legacy seems to be a comment system that's impossibly hard to follow. Reply button implies some kind of threads but I just see disjointed fragmented comments that just end up in more confusion, and more worthless comments. I wish they'd pull comments from besides videos.
I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them.
Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
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.
Given that there were lots of companies that abandoned Window's phone, I'm not convinced it's related -- I suspect Waze would have abandoned it either way.
You know, the entire installed app economy has turned into a big mess.
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.
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.
Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company."
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."
What about FitBit's acquisition of Pebble? Fitbit was pretty clear that they were going to shut down pretty much everything that Pebble was doing, and fold the Pebble team into FitBit. More generally, don't pretty much all acqui-hires work this way?
Atlassian is trying to own the migration path here, IMO. Trello was never really meant to manage software products, and I've been part of two separate teams that moved from Trello to JIRA when a PM who wanted more enterprise-y management features came on board.
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.
I get where you're coming from but the guy above was straight up declaring Trello's death. Even with skepticism you can agree it's being too pessimistic too early.
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.
> 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.
I've not been a part of acquisition but I've seen many from the outside, take the exame of Whatsapp, when they sold off to facebook they were like "we will never add calling to whatsapp, it will always focus on text messaging", " we care for privacy very much, never will we send your data" et al, less than one year after the acquisition, they do everything that they had promised not to do!
I was a longtime Slicehost user and while Rackspace eventually phased them out, they were not competitive with the new crop of VPS providers anyway. I was paying $70/mo for my slice. I don't remember the specs, but when they went away, I switched to a Linode that was about half the cost. (Linode has now also been outmoded for my uses, and I just have Vultr and DigitalOcean servers (+ 1 dedicated server in a rack somewhere) now).
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.
I'm sure you made quite a large sum of money off of this deal, but Atlassian doesn't have a great track record of purchasing non-Atlassian products and not messing them up.
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?
What about HipChat don't you like? I know it can be buggy at times, but from a strictly functional perspective, I feel like it's ok, or at least sufficient for me.
"Barely sufficient to stop people from switching to Slack" seems to be Atlassian's target.
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've logged a number of tickets against their product, their solution seems most frequently to be "we're merging this with another ticket that's about 50% related, fixing some other issue, then closing this ticket and opening another one for other issues since merged into this ticket, elsewhere." If you follow the ticket trail around long enough, you may see your issue fixed, but I haven't been that dedicated yet. Their support process is certainly pretty crappy.
As an enterprise user: Just about everything to do with LDAP/AD integration. Disabling an AD user from the app and re-enabling them later converts their account into a local account, for one. If you have it connected to a Crowd server, and the Crowd server loses connection with its directory, it returns an empty user list to Hipchat, resulting in EVERY USER ACCOUNT BEING DISABLED. And as we just established, when it comes back, Hipchat sets up the users as new.
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.
I'll mention one point: editing your sent messages sucks. Afaik, using s/foo/bar is the only way in the Linux client. If I mess up the /code command (very easy to do) the. Fixing it is such a pita that I might as well not bother.
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.
We switched to Discord and are pretty happy. Path we took was: HipChat (buggy, server outages) -> Slack (resource hog) -> Discord (gamer focused, but works well).
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.
It is okay on my Mac (except ugly and slow as molasses), but my Windows coworkers have been complaining about crashes, HiDPI problems and missed notifications for ages.
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.
Having recently switched from a workplace that used Slack to one that uses Hipchat, my first answer is "everything". It's less reliable, and reliability is my number one desire in a communications tool. And there are just so many little UI and UX details that Slack gets right that it's a pleasure to use, whereas Hipchat is generally an irritation and a disappointment for me.
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.
This is actually a great description of Trello v. JIRA, as well. Trello may not have the burndown charts, but what it does have is dead-simple list management, and it turns out that's what's most effective for managing tasks.
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".
What's funnier, in an attempt to make things easier Atlassian is alienating power users. I liked Confluence's mix of html and their own markup well enough to write all my pages that way. Then an update hit and WYSISWYG was pushed down everyone's throats hard. To the point where you had to jump through many hoops to use even a limited subset of the markup that was previously available.
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.
Same here. I'd written a Markdown-to-Confluence converter so that I could use a local toolchain to autogenerate project documentation. It worked brilliantly until I came in one Monday and found that the editing mode I'd used to upload my documents was gone. On purpose. For good. I invented some profanities that day.
Not sure if you're playing dumb, but Confluence is a wiki. When I was using it, it was much better than any other I've tried (with or without live view). People at my company seemed to gravitate towards Google Docs when that came around--which is much better for creating and updating content, but isn't as good about searchability, linkability, versioning, or pulling docstrings from code.
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?
Do you have any specific criticism or alternatives to Confluence? I get that you're probably venting, but I'm honestly interested in alternatives and just calling it "rubbish" or "awful" isn't useful in any way.
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.
I would never say Github is superior to Bitbucket. I haven't checked if they have changed the rules, but on the startup I was working on, Bitbucket provided superior value by far. They allowed free private repos for teams of up to 5 users. After 6 months we ended up paying for the basic plan to accomodate about 10 users.
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)
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.
> 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.
Bitbucket is better for companies than Github, though of course Github is supreme for open source collaboration. Github has improved recently, but Bitbucket had things like better user management more suitable for companies, and didn't have utterly brainless things like not allowing two repos to use the same deployment key (and deploy keys had full write access!). So everyone ended up making a 'fake human account' for their buildservers, which is Just One More Thing To Manage.
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....
Github has nothing that comes near what Jira offers. Comparing them is like comparing a car to motorcycle factory. Sure they both deal with some comparable things, but the car gets me from A to B. The motorcycle factory cannot do anything that comes near it for me.
I infinitely prefer BitBucket to GitHub. I guess GitHub is great if you are working on public or open source projects, but BitBucket seems to be much better at handling internal (private) projects to me.
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.
David Karp (as just one example) said virtually the exact same thing re: Yahoo! acquisition.
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.
Congrats! However, I'm still pouring out a little wine on the ground for my fallen homies who died a slow death from being Jira'd and Bitbucketed and Confluenced to the point that their will to live was crushed.
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 feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional. Why does everyone hate on it?
Personally, I hate it because it is too functional.
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:
Yes, the same here, I came into a company with JIRA set up like a trello board, and all this awesome integration (stuff gets moved from "in progress" to "code review" automatically on a PR on that feature branch) and I got to work on top of the shoulders of giants.
I think this works only if your process is standardized across your company. Which I think is generally a terrible mistake in software, because a) team needs can differ, and b) you can't improve process unless the whole company changes at once.
I agree with you, but I suspect that your experience with Jira/Confluence as a developer will depend on the quality of your project and management team. If your PM team use it as a way to distribute their work down to developers, then Jira will quickly become one of the litany of things that you hate. Meanwhile, if it's used well, it can vastly reduce the burden of upwards communication in a way that Trello never will.
In other words, like most enterprise software, the experience is highly dependent on how well it's implemented.
Strongly agree. JIRA can be made to work a lot of different ways, and by allowing managers to restrict the workflow in various ways they can use it to enforce a lot of cumbersome process.
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.
Bear in mind that Jira is hugely customizable. So, saying "I use Jira" is more like saying "I drive a Ford" than like saying "I drive a Mustang."
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.
"Customizable" is a two-edged sword. The ultimate in customizable software is an assembler - you can configure it to perform the function of literally any software possible! But its utility at solving any fixed problem is very low.
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.
Trello is way easier to use though, and free to boot with paid extras. It's kind of like PHP vs Ruby on Rails all over again, where PHP is old and customizable, with RoR you get a cookie cutter workflow that is an industry standard, so people tend to gravitate towards that. Well, that and the fact that some people seem to be allergic to semicolons and C-style function calls :-P
Truth is both tools are just fine. The rest is just people defending their choice as the superior way of doing things.
This is the same thing that is said with every acquisition. It's basically boilerplate at this point. A better vector is how the parent product is doing, and currently, Jira is too bloated and swiss army knife in approach that it can't innovate or do anything well anymore. This bodes poorly for Trello and comes off as a play to funnel their users into Jira after they rip the basic superficial look and functionality into Jira as an update to its agile board, and kill the standalone product.
We will continue to support integrations with all kinds of other tools (regardless of the fact that they may compete with some other Atlassian product). Let the people use the tools they want to use - if they don't want to use your tool, then make a better tool.
I heard the same thing from Microsoft about Sunrise, but here I am still waiting for many features from Sunrise to get implemented into Outlook. Of course they also said they wouldn't get rid of Sunrise until all the features were implemented. That of course was a lie.
tl;dr: mhp, since you're active in this thread, how can I quickly get in touch with you?
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.
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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.
Nearly every company I've worked for eventually brings in the Atlassian bullshit despite my protest. It usually begins with hiring some project manager who likes Atlassian and forces the hire of an Atlassian shill to configure Atlassian products full time, but it never becomes any good. They pry us off our existing issue tracker and wiki (github, trac) and force us to use that awful content-editable-based wiki that destroys the document differently in every browser, then tell us not to use Chrome because clearly Chrome is the problem. Witch-hunts begin about who screwed up the wiki formatting. Everything breaks if you press the back button. And then inevitably somebody forgot to give somebody permission for something and now everyone with permission is out of town so nothing can be done.
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.
This probably doesn't need saying, but seems you work in toxic teams. Your first paragraph suggests a ton of blame is being thrown about. If you work at a company like that, get out.
(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.
Yep. I tended to get into a bunch of early-stage startups. They used to be cool, then they brought in some new management. You never know what things are going to turn into.
I've been in a similar place but with Trello and Jira/Confluence switched.
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.
I once wrote a plugin that copied a Jira sprint into a Trello board and created all of the cards and labeled them to try to find the best of both worlds.
JIRA interface blows. However you're looking at it from a very selfish standpoint. The Trello team has probably been working on this for years with the explicit goal of an exit, better to get bought by likeminded product people and make a big return than to be bought by Google and have the product killed entirely.
Dude, go read the dev docs. Trello is not vaporware to make a quick profit. They kind of started that as a pet project and even them were impressed that it picked up that quickly. To the point where they had to fall back to some polling code because their webhook stuff was failing.
If they are smart, they'll pull a Facebook / Instagram and just leave it to continue working. Also, I'd say a large percentage of Trello users are outside of the classical Jira camp, so Atlassian should be really careful with the new baby. I believe they will be.
But, how are posters on HN supposed to get upvotes if they don't say something alarming/negative? Positive comments are explicitly discouraged in the "community guidelines." Perhaps we should consider whether sama or pg had a greater influence on that.
I don't blame Trello for selling but I'm not looking forward to whatever Atlassian could do to the product. I use Atlassian at work and I dislike their software, though it's not all bad.
JIRA can do anything. LITERALLY. The configuration of a new JIRA server, projects, etc is insane. It just doesn't do anything explicitly well IMO. It's also crazy slow and their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages which, as a software developer in 2017, I find absolutely appalling.
The fact that JIRA is so configurable is what's annoying. I spend way to much time fiddling with options and settings when I want the damn thing to just work so that I can get on to important things.
Yeah. I would just add that Atlassian didn't make SourceTree either; Steve Streeting did, and they bought it. He worked on it at Atlassian for a while, then left.
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.
I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close.
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.
"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."
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.
Furthermore, if the PM didn't have JIRA they would find some other way to micromanage your hours. The team I'm on uses a spreadsheet with a hokey gantt chart to pretend like we're meeting our deadlines rather than filling in timesheets in our JIRA system. Micromanagers are going to micromanage no matter what tool they do it in.
Ah, another reason I like JIRA more than people on here criticizing it.
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.
JIRA is _____ [1] because it has a ton of customization options, allowing it to be setup with a simple or complex workflow with user/group/value-based validation rules (among other things).
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.
That depends how you set it up though. In our team at a big telco everybody has normal usage rights. In my experience it never gets abused and doesn't give people this powerless feeling.
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?
SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.
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.
I switched to SourceTree after GitX (not dev but another fork) kept crashing. I haven't looked back. It's a great client and I haven't had any problems with it. I'm working on decently sized repos but keep a pretty clean flow.
Did not know about GitX. Will still rely on the command line over here, but it is nice to know there is a free tool to give to less technical people that is faster.
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.
The one thing I have learned in the computer world after almost two decades on this stuff is that you should never rely on things being constant. Tools will keep changing, and it will be a repeating cycle. I saw it with Delphi, VC6, VB6, QuarkXpress (sis is a designer), etc.
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.
I'm happy - I use both Trello and Bitbucket. Atlassian bought Bitbucket years ago, and it's only got better since then. If the pattern persists, I think we'll see Trello remain largely as it is, but with added hooks to Atlassian's other products.
Don't know what kind of stuff you are using over there, but Bitbucket has been fantastic for us for over a year already. About to start trying their Bamboo service.
At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.
Bamboo (cloud) is end-of-lifed so you might want to reconsider that purchase! (Pipelines is their new alternative).
(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.
I hope you don't think our (Jenkins) UI is ugly now ;) We've recently launched the Jenkins Blue Ocean project that aims to modernize the developer experience and UI https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
Hehe, thanks for replying. We're pretty hyped about Blue Ocean, and have it installed already, just eagerly awaiting for it to have all the functionality of the Jenkins of old, best of luck to you with it :)
Thank you! I've had the pleasure of designing not one but two of these products. I'd like to think I know where the pitfalls are the second time around ;)
Was trying to avoid self-hosted devops as much since after hosting my own Gitolite server before using bitbucket, I learned to not try to do everything ourselves. The gitolite setup proved to be very functional and nice, after everything was setup that is, but it is a bit of a hassle in the maintenance department and definitely something that took its sweet time from other pressing matters at the time.
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!
I don't get this. Except for HipChat, (and I'd argue SourceTree), how exactly does Atlassian kill/destroy things?
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.
Companies create software that reflects their structure and culture. The software that Atlassian makes is radically different -- and opposed in spirit -- to Trello. I think Trello will inevitably lose its Trello-ness.
Whatever you do, just make sure you always keep a functional free tier. I can tell you that for for us, as far as Bitbucket and Trello is concerned, the free tier is what got us in before purchasing a plan several months later.
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.
@farkas I know this is off topic - but whilst you are here can I ask you a question?
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.
Atlassian isn't Google or FB that they can buy something for $425M and then sunset the product. It is more likely that they will probably provide Trello as an option for their users to better manage their projects.
They don't really have a history of doing that. Greenhopper was acquired and integrated into JIRA as JIRA Agile. Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products (JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, etc).
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.
> Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products
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.
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?
I really don't understand all the hate on Atlassian. We're a small company (< 20) and we like Jira. There's nothing that offers near the same functionality. It's worth every penny.
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.
Sadly this is more often than not the destiny of service and software you can't host/run yourself. At least this is not google or the like buying something to can it. Though it would not be surprising if trello got merged or integrated in some way in jira.
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], ...
For sure they won't change Trello to become like JIRA, and there is a little hope the JIRA UI will become more like Trello. So IMHO nothing to worry about.
I can see the clunky from Jira seeping into Trello over time. Especially if some of the devs weren't part of a package deal.
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.
Surely this is not an issue though, if they do, some teenager in there bedroom will make a clone in a fortnight or less, Trello is great but it's very simple software.
Trello has apparently about 19 million users. And I would bet that the majority of them are not the typical target audience of Atlassian products (i.e. software development teams).
So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?
Trello is hugely popular amongst software developers, but I think the point being made is that it's also popular outside that niche. At work it came in through the back door being used for software planning, but quickly became the preferred tool for managing any sort of project. There's a similar story with me showing it to my wife, who just finished managing her PhD in history with it.
I'm a data scientist and I've been using it as an informal Kanban board because JIRA is way too complicated-looking for me want to even try to learn. Trello is about as dead-simple as it can get. There's already too much in my brain.
Bingo... that's the whole idea here. Small teams within larger companies and small companies can use Trello. When they grow up (or need to interact with the rest of the company) they use JIRA. In fact I would expect JIRA integrations that make it trivial to convert a Trello card to a JIRA task, probably with an option to automatically convert a checklist into subtasks.
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.
Very well said, the larger the company, the less flexibility it has in choosing the right software for the entire company. Smaller teams can move quicker, faster, and tend to find their own solutions within larger corporations.
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.
That is true - a lot of software developers use a variety of tools so they can do more advanced things like track burn rates, project velocity, and such more quantitatively. Trello, on the other hand, is so easy that I've seen it used for everything from managing speaking arrangements to writing books. It has more of a mass appeal.
I doubt they can. I work in public digitization from an it-architecture and programming background, and because municipaliies work closely together on a national plan I interact with quite a few teams.
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.
Yeah, that's exactly what they say in the article. Their goal is to get to 100MM MAUs, which they can really only do by expanding to non-tech industries, and Trello is extremely popular amongst marketing and finance professionals.
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.
We're definitely investing in Gomix and we'll be revitalizing FogBugz this year, too — especially for folks who don't find Jira a satisfying or delightful way to work.
On a side note -- I don't know if they still do it (I believe they do), but Fog Creek used to give out free Fogbugz cloud accounts (2 user limit) to startups and students.
- 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)
Can we all start using Trello clones as the tutorial substance? So in case Atlassian screws it up, we have 100s of developers that know how to re-create it? :D
I've used http://lavagna.io for a while on my own servers, but recently I've started using and enjoying https://www.favro.com whose free version has less limitations than the free Trello version.
Never heard of it, but this actually looks as if it could replace Trello and Airtable, two products I really like, and then some. Thanks for the suggestion.
Besides being a good one, it also didn't sound like a terrible idea at first. Boards with cards is a suitable simple application for beginners (or people that are just learning a new environment/language).
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.
Some of Atlassian's previous acquisitions have turned into products mostly shunned by the developer community (Hipchat, Bitbucket) - I hope they've learned what went wrong since then, but my gut says Atlassian isn't very good at integrating external teams and supporting their products. Hopefully Trello won't go down the same path.
Why are Hipchat or Bitbucket shunned? Hipchat is a slimmer version of Slack but pretty much does the same things. Bitbucket is just a github with a Atlassian skin.
Hipchat's on premise version doesn't work in an air gapped network with certain needed features (video chat is one). You do not want to know how much they ask per year for the on premise version (for greater than 10 users).
It never comes up in the same breath as GitHub and GitLab. The major differentiator for Bitbucket that's the primary reason many people I know have Bitbucket accounts - that they offered free unlimited private repos when nobody else did - doesn't differentiate them anymore.
GitHub neither offers free private repos nor Mercurial support. For me and many others, Mercurial support is a big thing.
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?
Even prior to its acquisition. I seriously disliked finding projects on Bitbucket, the UX just seems to be wrong for how I want to interact with codebases and documentation. It's only gotten worse since they were bought.
They are hardly shunned, just not preferred. Besides, I don't think Atlassian is interested in competing for heavy users that don't pay anything. They are pretty content with the enterprise IT market.
"In July 2014, Trello spins off from Fog Creek and becomes Trello, Inc. naming Fog Creek co-founder Michael Pryor as its CEO. The company raises $10.3 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital and Index Ventures."
Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello only raised $10 million.
All depends on what valuation they got in at. Trello was pretty well on it's way by July '14, so it's possible the valuation was already pretty high. Even so, I bet it was a 3-5x multiple, at least.
Wekan is really a copy of Trello, it's awesome. Installing it through Sandstorm.io makes it very easy, but I don't have production experience with Sandstorm.io.
Taiga is alright, but I can't say I fell in love with it either. Then again, I didn't like Trello any better. Still ended up just using plain text files or spreadsheets.
I've been using the Github Project board functionality which looks a lot like Trello. I doubt there's an integration where you'd be able to port one to the other though.
"I like Facebook, I use it often. $365B... for a message board. Yes, I use it. Yes, I think it is useful. Yes, I think this valuation is absolutely crazy."
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.
There's a halo effect here. If Atlassian can drive powerful integrations with its current products then it can increase the value proposition for those products among Trello customers, driving sales for its own products. Not that there was anything to prevent them from making those integrations before, but now they can go to Trello customers directly and ask them, "hey did you know you can create a Confluence meeting notes document, create a bunch of action items during the meeting, turn them all into Trello cards with the click of a button, and see the real time status of all of them straight from the Confluence document?"
I've said it before and I've say it again: as a community we are not only poor at evaluating startup ideas but shockingly bad at appreciating actual business successes. You know the saying that hindsight is 20/20? Does not apply.
Not sure if I fully agree. The potential and momentum is there for Trello, they can very well grow their sales team and expand their product lines into multiple sectors with this acquisition.
What we really need from Atlassian is yet another syntax or markup to learn for a product in their suite that is different from all of the other products.
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).
So that's all well and good as far as it goes. But e.g. I currently rely on integration between Trello and Discord, which is in competition with HipChat - is there a risk of them killing that off?
Great acquisition for Atlassian and I'm super pumped for the Trello team. The people here who are concerned that the culture will change are ill informed and likely haven't gone through an acquisition themselves. This makes perfect sense and look forward to seeing what's next for both companies.
It's good point and a valid concern (Parse). But I think there is value there for both Atlassian and Trello. I don't think this will be a bad thing for end user.
I've gone through an acquisition and understand the fears, but I think Atlassian's track record doesn't warrant panicking in the way Oracle's or Yahoo's would.
Looks like too many customers decided they JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS! So many that "the Australians" bought the team. This is poetic and this is why I'm glad blogs often stick around.
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.
Why did Fog Creek approved this acquisition? With products like Stack Overflow, Trello and GoMix I thought they want to become a big player on the market of software development. Why sell our own assets?
My sense is that Fog Creek is more of an incubator than a traditional software company now, albeit one which is incredibly selective about what they invest in. Stack Overflow and Trello are both independent companies which started out as side projects for Fog Creek, and I imagine GoMix will eventually go the same way.
Fog Creek and Trello are two separate companies that share cofounders (and an office here in NYC!) so we at Fog Creek are happy for Trello but it's not an asset of ours.
Fog Creek's model tends to involve spinning off their runaway hits into separate companies. They've done this with StackOverflow and Trello. Trello has been an independent company since 2014. (Although I'm not sure what kind of ownership position Fog Creek had).
Pryor and Spolsky have been running Fog Creek for sixteen years. That's a log of 'everyday at the office' to go without a big payday, particularly considering how much StackOverflow could have been sold for years ago.
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.
Trello had super ambitious growth plans but didn't have the leadership team in place to achieve them. They built an incredibly valuable and wonderful product and Atlassian is an appropriate partner to take it to the next level.
I'm a big fan of Trello and Atlassian both. Personally speaking, if all they do is take away the crippling "add on" restrictions in Trello for solo users, this will be a huge win.
I am a big JIRA fan, but lately they have dumbed it down to be very much like Trello. So I hope this gives me old JIRA back, built-in. Currently I have the "classic" workflow as an export that I can import. I wonder if they will try to push Trello users to Atlassian hosted JIRA Software with the simple workflow, or if they will combine the two like they did with Bitbucket and Stash.
Yes – Just like Bitbucket Issues didn't marry JIRA. One core difference between Trello and JIRA Agile is, in Trello you can't hide tickets that you don't want right now in the sprint – In JIRA Agile, you only put a few issues in the sprint so the board looks clean.
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 think it's likely that people who use Trello appreciate the simplicity and Atlassian aren't exactly known for creating simple software (speaking as a past Jira user/admin).
I had the same feeling of "oh well, what else can I use in the future" when I read this post.
I'd say the user base is as or more important than the product, from Atlassians POV. If they are able to convert a few hundred thousand JIRA accounts from this, they could turn Trello off and it'd be a win.
Sounds like a move to capture the lower bound of the market. Right now, lots of teams leave Trello to something more robust like JIRA after crossing somewhere between 5-10 people, but with this, they're on Atlassian from the beginning. I also think the JIRA team could use some UX help from Trello :P
Not related at all but I interviewed for Trello in 2016, the meeting was super cool (video call in the browser, nice RH girl apparently very excited about my profile), the job was full remote, they needed help to move from Backbone to React and they have millions of users (!) so I was quite hyped. Then I received an email of refusal from another guy containing only a quote from the CEO. I asked for feedback (probably my spoken english was not good enough but I wanted a confirmation) and the guy replied me that he couldn't say anything for legal reasons... and the same quote from the CEO. Cold shower experience.
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.
I just looked at my emails and actually my message was not exactly accurate. I received the refusal from the CEO and this email contained the following phrase:
> 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 (?).
Yes - that's very typical for US companies, because they're afraid of being sued. It definitely shouldn't be read as cold or uncaring on the part of the people responding to you; the worst that can be said is that they were paying too much attention to their lawyers. :D
I suspect this is as much about getting a dev center in New York, away from a tapped-out Sydney startup scene that is hostile to bringing in overseas talent, and having a brand with a reputation as a good employer; as it is about acquiring the IP or user-base.
If I was the Atlassian CEO reading this thread, I'd be really worried. There are a lot of comments from developers with zero faith in Atlassian's ability to create (or even preserve) a great product.
What Trello has needed since day-1 was a self-hosting option. Many companies won't allow their customers to use it since there's no formal agreement on data protection.
I have a hard time understanding how Trello is worth that much money. Does it really cost 1/2 billion to get 19 million users and a Trello like app built? Is the Trello team really worth that much? Was Trello that threatening to Atlassian? There are a lot of there other successful collaboration SaaS out there as well (e.g. Asana). This is not like social/content services where there can only be one (or very few e.g. instagram, github, whatsapp).
Trello has a lot of vendor-specific integration that is not immediately visible to most users. Their Salesforce integration is huge in terms of user numbers, but it's not something the vast majority of HN users care about, or have even seen.
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.
Not the biggest fan of Atlassian (but an admin for 10 years). I am trying to figure out what product to use for project management, and what path Atlassian will take.
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.
Atlassian has supported me with educational tools and discounts. Their git services and customer support has been the best for me and I became a paying customer.
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.
Jira is by far the worst and most convoluted application that I have used. It's slow a d very horribly designed that I even wonder if they did tgat on purpose. Heck you have to shell out $3000 for your team just to learn how to use it.
I hope they can learn from Trello to improve JIRA Agile. JIRA seems much better for software projects with organised sprints and large numbers of tickets, but front end performance is terrible and the overall UX feels like it could be improved significantly.
Microsoft Planner was released as a free add-on to Office 365 at the backend of last year, which seems to be a direct "good enough" competitor to Trello's business & enterprise plans. Wonder if that was a factor in the sale?
I just hope they leave the design alone and don't try enforcing their hideous design philosophy upon it. (Why do big tech companies think that making all their software look the same helps anyone or makes them more money?)
I think most of it is about the brand; about buying a name which is already imprinted in millions of minds. The technology alone is probably only worth 1-5% (?) of the price.
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.
Atlassian:
Confluence - Went from very small user base to hundreds of thousands of users. It's a great tool for internal content management (think HR docs, decision documentation, meeting notes, etc.).
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?
You are correct. I thought that Conf was an acquisition of a very basic wiki product that Atlassian built into a enterprise content collaboration suite but I was remembering incorrectly. The story was that Confluence's main development line was maintained by contractors instead of in-house developers and after launch dev was pulled in. My mistake.
Confluence is starting to move in on SharePoint's turf, I've witnessed it first hand. The two products really don't compare, but for Digital teams who just want to get something going Confluence is way easier.
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.
Why do you say that? They just sold Trello for half a billion and still have Stack Overflow. I'm sure Fogbugz is profitable although it's not anything stellar and it looks like they have a new product
They shared an office with Trello, but it spun off long ago, so they made no money on this sale. Same goes for Stack, totally separate company. AND now their closest ally, Trello, has been sold to the direct competitor of FogBugz.
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.
one of the largest players in the project management game acquires another tool and it's a-okay because there's loads of competition; but realistically, trello was one of the competitors to JIRA that actually could hold its own when being reviewed for use by non-developers. JIRA has been the default choice of many companies and while not a monopoly I'd say it's approaching that status.
Well, since Atlassian is in the mood of acquiring, I have made an analytics and data processing system that plugs into JIRA to create custom reports in ways that are not possible currently by JIRA.
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.
Makes a lot of sense although I expect at least one of my former co-workers is really is really irritated because they hate Jira and were feeling "forced" to use it. Perhaps with this acquisition there will be a 'local server' option which is something some companies really look for.
Similar here. I don't see Trello and Jira overlapping for the majority of users. For simple tasks, there are still alternatives like wunderlist and taskcade.
wow! I had recently decided to go all in on Trello for my personal use and I was in the process of making a Trello-Gitlab powerup (just like Trello Github powerup).
I wonder what the future of Trello is - both as a customer and as a software dev (I loved their remote work policy).
Such a shame, I wonder how long it will take Trello to turn into heavy 'enterprise' bloatware like the rest of said companies products. There are a few good open source alternatives out there now so I'll personally move to one of those.
What's wrong with it becoming a service you pay for? This is, in-fact, what you get when you entrust someone else's Software As a Service with your data and workflows... You do not own it, they do and it is their right to charge for it just as it would be your right to charge for some service you developed and maintained that people found useful. It is also your right to move your workflows elsewhere or to a desktop / laptop resident piece of software that's not owned by anyone!
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?
The fact that Trello got a lot of users by promising it would always remain free, for example? If I'd been a user I'd be rather upset about this sell-out. Fog Creek made it look like some nice side-project that others too could benefit from without ever worrying about having to pay for the basic version at any point. Sure they didn't owe anyone anything, but for me it confirms once again that no company can be trusted on their promises, ever. Now, of course we don't know yet whether the free basic tier is going to change, but we do know that (unless it's in the agreement) Fog Creek gave up control over their promise, which is prerequisite to keep it. Furthermore, I have the experience that few products survive an acquisition to keep the simple, successful formula they used to have.
Edit: fixed unintended mistake in the company name
That's been my experience working with JIRA the past few months. Bug after bug and always a bug report with someone begging for a fix and being ignored.
Right, but they don't have a good reputation to start with.
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.
So as a counterpoint. I used BitBucket a lot before Atlassian bought them. They were great, but toward the end suffered significantly from load issues.
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'm in a similar boat. I kinda disliked Atlassian because of my experiences JIRA.
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.
As far as ticket / issue tracking systems and wikis go their products are quite decent.
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.
HP ALM is awful. The biggest issue is that you needed to install it on the client machine to be used as a plugin. I would rather have Atlassian products than HP ALM and Clearcase!
Trello is about to become an add-on for Jira that won't work 95% of the time and be jammed down your throat by a scrum master as the only tool for the job.
I am really glad I never started using Trello for my task organization. It lacked the basic act of marking tasks as Done. I needed to manually drag the done tasks to a 'Done' board.
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.
my experience with Atlassian products tells me that this will likely become a "third project type" to JIRA: Scrum, Kanban, Trello (or whatever generalized name is given). They feel like different products.
Or Atlassian is using this to go after competitors like A-Ha! which it doesn't currently serve (i.e. non software development projects)
They need to get Teams right before they are attacking anything except the coffee maker. I hope they do get it right cos we use s4b at work. I really want them to make that a capable product so that i dont have to use a basket of products to get communications done: yammer, s4b, email, FTP, sharepoint, internal systems (that really just need a bot to chat with instead of a app UI),....and many others.
Is it just me or the acquisition amounts decreasing?
Soundcloud - $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.
Kinda makes me happy for trello's founders. Have been using it as a reference site for HTML and CSS development. I really liked those buttons! :D I hope atlassin doesn't make it bloated and shitty. Hope it stays good for the small teams as it has ever been!
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.
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