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!
