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.
