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[flagged] Jira is awful, welcome to AJIR (ajir.app)
19 points by liow4s on Feb 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 84 comments



Am I missing something here? I click 'Try it free' and I'm taken to an almost blank page that says 'Welcome' with a link underneath to 'Jobs'.

I click on 'Jobs' and am taken to a completely blank page.

The only other link is 'Login'.

Can I suggest you provide more user feedback as to what they're expected to do to break out of this unhelpful first experience?


That's the most clear signal to just close the tab and forget about this site forever.


no please haha be kind and helpful.


So they managed to replicate the Jira experience.


Yes, sorry for the rough onboarding.

Click login and you will receive a magic link.

Then you can try the tool.


Press Login. There's no registration you just get a "magic link" to your email.


yes :-)


They could save the effort and just link to an "about:blank".


Someone is just doing a cheap market research.


nope


Let's say it's a fully featured MVP.


Welcome :)


You can do anything at AJIR. Welcome. Welcome to AJIR. The only limit is yourself.


> you can do anything at AJIR

that was the exact same problem Jira had...


haha yes !

Joke apart and like said on other answers, onboarding is rough but will improve it.

Once you are in, you can use all the features.


Same, no idea what to do


Hi, sorry again for the rough onboarding.

Just click on login and you will receive a magic link.


Same.


just click on login :-)


I haven't used Jira for 5y so my opinion might be off, but I think it's a case where the tool takes the blame for the organization that buys it. Jira is extremely configurable, it simply becomes a materialization of bureaucracy and micromanaging. If you remove Jira, bureaucracy wilk still be there.


Aside from the argument that it's enabling terrible practices — which I could go on about for a good few hours — the tool itself is awful. I mean it's criminally bad at what it even tries to do, putting aside the fact that what it tries to do is wrong in the first place.

I want to change an "issue" to an "epic", and I'm presented with a workflow more becoming a database migration, which of course, isn't far from the truth. They've made their poor design choices your problem, so when you want to do something like this, what you're actually presented with is all the complexity of migrating data from one database table to another with different fields.

That's just one example, but I can tell I'm ranting already. I hate Atlassian _so fucking much_ though.

It says enough that it's not marketed to people who do the work, but those who "manage" their work, where no management is needed. May it and Atlassian burn in hell for a long time. Amen.


Ok so we agree on that.

Hope you like AJIR then.


And that's the problem with Jira. It tries to be everything to everyone. Allowing every middle manager to hand craft their own little snowflake dev process. That's almost always a bad idea.


JIRA is still awful separately from that just in terms of implementation quality. It's SO slow. Just clicking around opening issues has a noticable delay, and typing in the textboxes to edit issues is laggy!


Exactly. Out of the box Jira is pretty usable, but if you go wild with defining crazy workflows and screen, the experience can become awful.


Absolutely, that’s why we need opinionated tooling.


Exactly, and that's what I am trying to build.


Ok guys, thank you for the feedbacks !

So onboarding is shit, I understood and will improve it asap.

You actually have to click on login, and you will receive a magic link in your inbox.

Please refer to the blog to discover AJIR, specifically this article: https://www.ajir.app/blog/ajir-in-a-nutshell/

It is still very early, I will improve the blog, the documentation, etc. over time...


Potential users are not going to register for an account in order to determine if your app is the rare and possibly mythical great task management app, or if it is instead the statistically far more likely not great task management app. You know and believe it is in the great category. Potential visitors do however need to be shown that greatness.

Your landing page needs to communicate enough value for visitors to be willing to invest their time in it. Your "Get started" button seems to offer the promise of revealing that value, under the possibly over-optimistic assumption that the visitor will immediately detect that greatness without it being explained or shown to them first, something that only happens in the most extreme of cases where the greatness is immediately obvious in the first few seconds of interacting with an app, and which is rarely the case for task management apps.


Yes, very hard to show the greatness in a few seconds, I agree.

Will improve the onboarding and the landing, for sure.

Btw, you don't have to 'register', just click on login, you will receive a magic link in your inbox, then all of AJIR's feature are open to use for free.


You missed the bit where we have to enter our email address. What do you do with it? Do you have a privacy policy?


Incredibly small and unhelpful nitpick about the landing page.

Under "Only what you need to manage products" you have 6 boxes that describe features. The boxes are. in 2 rows of three for my screen size. The second row's secondary text is 2 lines long for the first 2 boxes and 3 lines long for the last box. Because of the box size, the last box is taller and the grid is thus uneven. Either making the copy in that box 2 lines long (maybe lose the words "your code") or setting a min height on the boxes or something would make the grid even.

Other than that, and much more importantly, I have no idea why I'd use this over any other project management tool. Maybe a feature comparison between the major players would help. Or tell me why you're simpler, faster, more novel, etc than other options.

I also don't know your pricing. It says "Try for free". What does "try" mean? Does "trying" end? Then what happens?


Yes, thank you very much for your feedback.

It is still early and like mentioned in other comments, onboarding is quite bad at the moment and landing page needs improvements as well.

I focused on the app itself so far :-)

To answer your question about pricing, it means it's entirely free at the moment, didn't even implement payment !


Hi all !

I was tired of using JIRA, Confluence and co so I built AJIR as a better alternative to manage product building.

The platform is built around 3 main object types: Product, Feature and Task. The first two are here to stay and organized as tree. You can document each of the Products and Features, so your documentation is always organized following the exact same hierarchy (that you can change anytime, by the way).

Tasks are here to come and go as they are executed.

Around these 3 main objects, you will find different features to track time, time sheet automatically, build roadmaps, track budget consumption, and more.

You can track commits, tags as well (Github integration).

AJIR also has an API that you can use to track bugs, user feedbacks and help request. AJIR's API can also be used to track deployments of your apps/products across different environments.

Looking for users and feedbacks ! It's free.

I plan to improve AJIR of course, but also to build better documentation on how to use it, as well as a few Looms to present different features and use cases.

Lionel


The Try For Free link is a bit awkward. It points to a page that just says Jobs, that in turn just points to a empty black page.

I assume the intention is to use the Login link. If so then I think that should be at the forefront instead of the empty pages.


Yes, sorry for the rough onboarding.

Yes, the intention is to use the login link.

Once your logged in, you can start using all of AJIR's features for free.

Please refer to the first blog articles explaining the app's concept and some of its features: https://www.ajir.app/blog/ajir-in-a-nutshell/

Like I said in the initial post, I will improve the doc and try to make Looms.


If it were possible to go back in time, I'd advise testing that the "get started" button works before posting this.

Given that it's already posted to HN, fixing that button so it shows a page containing something other than the words "jobs" and "home", and/or so the links under those words do something other that point back to the same page, should probably be top priority.


Hello and thank you for your message.

What didn't work with the get started button ?

Yes, I didn't work on onboarding yet. You actually have to login to start using the app.

I will fix the onboarding to avoid this kind of bad first impression, sorry.


The get started button successfully redirects to another page, but the page it directs to is not useful because all it contains are apparently self-referential links to jobs and home. There is no way to actually "get started"


Shipped a small onboarding improvement !

Should be clearer.


yes there is, just click on login.

And sorry for the rough onboarding, will improve it asap.


You mind telling why you think Jira is aweful and AJIR does better?


Yes, you will find an article in the little blog that I started: https://www.ajir.app/blog/why-ajir/

Don't hesitate if you have other questions.


Page load times.


What if two or more products share the same feature?


A Feature belongs to 1 Product only but Features can 'use' other Features across the tree, so you can track dependencies easily.

By the way, you can track dependencies at 2 levels: Features, like described above, and Tasks.

Then, your dependencies are display in both ways (uses, used by)

Was my answer clear ? Happy to help.


Always nice to see something that isn't Jira ;)

Is there any plan for Jira Server/Cloud import? I think the major roadblock for a lot of people moving away from those platforms is that most competitors either don't support project import at all, or don't correctly deal with custom fields, workflows, etc.


Yes, that's a very good point.

No plans at the moment but it should be feasible.


Added a feature to upload Tasks via an Excel file.


The more alternatives the better.

We've switched from JIRA to Linear.app more than year ago, and never looked back. With JIRA our team members were getting blocked in the flows quite a bit, now with linear we're much more efficient.


Interesting, I looked at Linear as well and no doubt, it's a very polished product with food UX/UI, etc.

But still is very much Issues oriented, no ?

What i wanted to do with AJIR is create something that has both Task management and Product/Features documentation in a well integrated way, i.e. having a documentation that is 'self-organized' in the very same hierarchy than your Products/Features tree.

Was I clear enough ?


I am about to open source a web-app in the field in about two months.

Been in the making for 7 years, is in use by famous big-corps for few years already.

Bi-directional Jira integration built-in.

I am not mentioning the name of the tool simply because the landing page is really not where I want it to be at the moment

If you are looking for a solution in the field can DM me and I'll give you access to the code before we complete all the open source preparation.

Our speciality is that the tool solves both the communication problem (Trello, Asana) and the planning problem (MS Projects). Typical client will have 50-400 active users.

-Daniel


Maybe let's share ideas


My experience has been most JIRA replacements drop a lot of key features. Yes they are simpler. But a few weeks in you feel the missing features.

Best of luck with this and hope you solved that problem :)


Then they slowly start to add features until they are near Jira's size and we're all back to square one.


And then they had a chat program


Will try not to ;-)


Thank you, I am very open to feedbacks and will try to solve it.


This seems like vaporware.


It's not.


Ok I'm not here to defend Jira, I suffer with the rest of you.

But something that got me off my high horse ... someone said Jira is a mirror and you are a corporation. When you look into it, and you think it's ugly, you're looking at your own red tape reflecting back at you.

It doesn't forgive all of it. It just makes me pause a second.


Not buying it.

The tool itself promotes terrible ways of working. "Agile", with a capital corporate A. For arsehole.


Yes, maybe it's part of it.

But still, I think it's possible to do better/clearer/simpler.


"Try it free" -> "Welcome. [jobs]." -> *empty void*. Good game, grandpa. I'll check back in later, though, because I am indeed tired of JIRA.


Come check back ;-)

I shipped a small onboarding improvement.


login please !

Will improve the onboarding that is quite shitty.

Got harsh feedbacks :-(

Sorry for it guys !


I can't help but notice the "app" redundancy in https://app.ajir.app


I'd guess it's a separate server, hence the subdomain. I have a similar issue with a client project where I'm building an AI version of an app that started out being non-AI despite having AI in the URL.. so now the URL is ai.example.ai...


Exactly, landing and app are on different subdomains.

Is it really that annoying ?


Why is it flagged ?

I don't think I broke any rule...


Hm, there was also ifuckinghatejira.com but seems like it's gone.


That website is still up.


haha yes it is and still very funny.


Need to leave my email for trying.

Case closed.


haha okay okay, but we actually don't send you anything annoying.

Authentication is just based on magic links sent to your email.


(1) You already admit that you keep my address for future use.

(2) Whatever you consider annoying is most certainly different from what I would consider annoying

(3) I need to trust you which I don't because of (1)


Since email is used for authentication, how would you want the system to consider you as a user without keeping the email ? Come on, be serious for 2 minutes.


I thought I would get a magic link without need for authentication?


The magic link is used to authenticate you but we have to tie your user to your email so you can actually use AJIR’s features :-)


> ...we have to tie your user to your email...

No, you don't have to. You want to.

The concept of tying email addresses to user accounts came Google to better track their users. Of course thankfully taken over from everybody in the industry.

Especially when you offer a "free" trial for your software you should not ask your users to pay with their data. Even first before they see what they'll get for in exchange.

You literally ask me to pay the price first before I see the product


Like I said, since the auth system is based on magic links sent to your email adress, how would you go about retrieving your user without storing your email ?


Using email addresses as login ids is a bad design because makes it virtually impossible for your users to change their email addresses. Talk to people who used their office email and later changed their employer, people who want to abandon gmail for privacy or other reasons, or whose email provider simply went out of business.

I would be surprised if your app would have a "change your email/login" function implemented.


1. Generate a user account ID and password for me. 2. Email them to me. (Format them as a “magic link” if you wish) 3. Delete my email address.

Easy.


Try gitlab or gitea




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