I love the confetti and easy tech (just PHP and MySQL) for self hosting!
But browsing the marketing site, you have a lot of AI tools for prioritizing lists. This is 100% the place where I don’t want things to move without me knowing. My biggest complaint with JIRA/Monday/etc is they have some entity representing “tasks”, that’s displayed in a million different perspectives. Finding a thing is usually what I want to do and I hate it when stuff disappears or changes in a view I was using.
No matter how good your tool is at prioritizing, it will be wrong some percentage of the time and while it’s a little annoying to skim a big unsorted unchanging list, it’s even worse when it changes ALL the time.
Thanks for the feedback. This may have not come across clearly enough on the website. The AI prioritization is an optional mechanism (toggle) to help individual users prioritize the tasks that have already been assigned to them using signals like task sentiment (how do you feel about a task), priority etc.
The priority field is not changed as part of that function. I agree that AI cannot be the primary prioritization mechanism. All it can do is augment existing processes and help individuals be more effective.
I find that the AI is better at prioritization and triage than the human support.
But then, for some reason, whenever support fails to read their tickets, they just dump the ticket on to my queue. So I could just be being salty, or seeing fewer misses because the ai is better at failing the triage.
You're preaching to the choir with Jira alternatives. For devs, Jira more often gets in the way than helps. We're ok with a minimal set of features. In order to really get traction, you need to sell PM's and leadership types.
I agree, there is a real challenging disconnect between messaging for PMs/Leaders vs individual contributors and it boils down to organization size. Small companies and startups tent to be a lot more democratic about their choice of tools where as large organizations tend to be more pm/leadership driven with input from ICs.
Right now we are targeting the smaller companies that don't have a lot of PM experience or resources available. The dream being the slack story of IC driven product adoption :D
To each their own. HN users prefer light sites like HN itself so Leantime with material styles is not ideal for lightness. Pivotaltracker and Redmine are really nice with basic-looking UI.
Though I've just set up Leantime in my homelab for todo list/calendar.
The license on this is curious. They claim AGPLv3 and position themselves to be open source, but it's really Open Core with them being the only party who can make privileged non-AGPL plugins. Or, perhaps, if you fork it and add your own non-AGPL stuff only to the app/plugins/ subdirectory, you might also be in the clear? The exception is poorly worded.
And then the README and the LICENSE files list different exceptions to AGPL. I'm not even convinced that mishmash of exceptions constitutes a valid license.
The current "kanban board" looks basically the same as JIRA's and it's what a lot of people are familiar with. I would love love love to see a visualization that puts all current planned stories into a single vertical column and groups them by status. Done at the top, ready for review underneath, then in progress, and not started. It's a way more compact view of stories and better use of real estate.
Thank you for the feedback! Our table views as well as the list views allow grouping by status and will show the vertical groups as you described. Is that what you are looking for? There are a couple screenshots on the repo. (Though they show the group by milestone, status is possible the same way)
What I'm hoping for is beyond what I currently see on the repo - I want a dense view of story information. 'latchkey got what I meant in the other comments below my top comment. Definitely recommend you look at PT and see what it does. I'm not suggesting you make a carbon copy but there's a lot to learn from the PT model.
PT is the gold standard imho. Mainly around the fact that it does such a great job tracking velocity. The primary issue is that outside of developers who've worked at Pivotal (I have), most people don't understand the process of using PT.
"We take the WTF out of managing work" -nice. I love the animation with this. The UI of the product looks pretty good too. Glad to see you have row grouping on the table view.
Another good open-source Jira alternative is https://plane.so/ . They also have a free cloud plan with unlimited users.
We feel like the free cloud plan is the way to go -- by keeping our core features free, we think it's the "level up" PM features that start to bring value worth paying for.
I see marketing-speak for how this is so much easier than other tools like JIRA (which we use.) However, I'm not finding details about how this is accomplished.
What are the key differentiators in how this is easier specific to those that use JIRA?
Great question and thanks for pointing it out -- we'll make sure to address this on the website.
In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up -- each work function already has a home. The thing you have to decide is how you want to see the tasks.
Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards either.
The other approach we do differently is to work to engage ICs in the value of the work and we do that by making the goals and work more clear. Some of this is still being developed out and rounded out better by our AI features -- which can be better read about here and how we view it in relationship to our own ADHD and the features behind it... https://leantime.io/2023/07/30/the-top-digital-planner-for-a....
Lastly, for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards. Some of which will be coming out in plugins to OSS here soon.
> In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up
I'm not sure what this means entirely, but across our projects we have some with different workflows than the others. These are necessary in that we have certain workflows that must meet compliance requirements, and those workflows are the best way to ensure we execute those. In other projects, they are less onerous and apply to different kinds of work (so, different workflows.)
> Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards
This is good, but we generally keep our exec leadership out of JIRA (they don't really have the context for the details.) Our users can design their own dashboards, but that's a personal preference. We use the standard views.
> making the goals and work more clear
I would prefer to see more fall-into-the-pit-of-success for the equivalent of JIRA stories to be more oriented toward the outcome or feature or capability, as opposed to the accounting/I-got-receipts feeling I get from JIRA. While story points are fine, I prefer a focus on clarity and a better measurement for effort than the subjectivity of a team's interpretation of the fibonacci sequence.
> for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards
So, Leantime includes a markup engine as well as a whiteboard feature? If I already have a deep investment in other tools that do those things, how do they integrate?
I keep looking at various JIRA alternatives, but no good finds so far. This is definitely not it.
I don't really like the idea of bug tracker as a sort of a GUI program that acts like time management software, i.e. focuses on planning work, tracking how much effort was spent, ability to add notes to tasks etc.
My ideal bug-tracking software works more like Git: it has a server-client relationship where clients query the database with predefined set of commands, while at the same time it has programmable interface facing test code. This interface should enable tests to do things like:
* figure out what components need tests to run against them when a particular feature branch sees a code update.
* extract history of tests running against a defined group of features.
* manage association of tests and program components.
* manage test sets that aren't feature-related (eg. nightlies).
JIRA kind of has this database / query component, but all the functionality above needs to be built on top of it. And the data organization of JIRA relies on issues as the basic unit, where I'd like the basic component to be "features" (similar to how branches are in Git).
My biggest problem with the currently popular approach (emphasis on time management) is that it's very informal and unstructured when it comes to testing, poorly automated and poorly integrated with other development tools to the point that it makes it both easy to forget to do the necessary stuff and a very repetitive chore to keep the necessary stuff up-to-date, while it's clear that it's possible to automate it.
The attempts to automate this process by adding bots that manage issue life-cycle or generate trivial fixes / merge trivial PRs isn't the way to solve the problem, IMO because this automation is stupid and has a potential to cause harm. Instead it needs to be very tightly integrated with VCS (but, let's be honest, with Git) to the point that such configuration would require minimal effort on the part of the admin and be vendor-independent, and, most importantly, be feature-oriented to mirror how programmers conceptualize the development of their program.
I really appreciate your feedback here and I see where you're coming from and can agree if you're looking at Jira as a purely bug tracking / development tool.
Unfortunately, and I think important to call out -- is that most companies are trying to use these tools as a "catch all" -- "a one in all solution that solves everyone's problems" and then ultimately, half of the company refuses to use the tools because it's too focused on one user group.
Our long term approach is really about making work and getting sh*t done as a relevant part of the PM process and less on time management. Time management is part of organization but people want to care about what they're building and why... something that can be absent in a lot of orgs and even in how we organize ourselves in small teams, startups or small businesses.
What I do hear and think would be interesting -- is incorporating a plugin more specific to your workflow mentioned here... because absolutely, tighter QA, etc, is vital and there are things not otherwise easily replicated as part of a dev's flow. We, otherwise, don't have any current intentions to use "bots" in a way that automates things that people should really still be overseeing.
Yeah, what they're asking for needs to be an app / integration / plugin that ties different solutions together. A kitchen sink approach will forever be mired in gigantic codebases that a single group or company can't coherently maintain [at a reasonable time or cost], and a marketplace of solutions is better able to evolve. We need more simple and specific tools that don't do much, but can be combined with other simple specific tools.
Take branching models for example. Why do we have different "branching models" that work certain ways? Firstly because somebody built a tool that works a certain way (Git) and people need to figure out how to use it. Secondly because how you use it has a direct effect on other things, so you need some coherent model for how your group will use it. And thirdly because there's a few specific ways of using the tool, so we write those down and give it a name. Nobody set out to design these branching models, they just evolved as people started using the tool in different ways.
The same should (and kinda does) happen with project management, time tracking, issue/bug/work tracking, documentation, incident response, budgeting, etc. But mostly it's within one ecosystem (Atlassian's) or another. It should really be more general, and it should be easier to integrate different solutions and build on top, and from there new standard patterns can emerge such that we don't have to be stuck into one ecosystem.
Well, if you are going in the direction of tighter QA integration, there are several interesting things that tools like JIRA are missing, and sometimes plugins try to complement, but not quite.
If we accept that bug tracker is to be a planning program, then QA usually needs a lot more than a free-form JIRA story can offer. QA really needs what they call "test plans".
Usually, to test a feature QA, beside writing tests, needs to organize it as an activity, which might be also relevant to release management, but in general may touch on other product life-cycle phases. This comes from the fact that some rare activities performed by QA are not worth automating, and sometimes are very hard to automate (eg. uploading the program to some kind of third-party store, where it needs to be approved by the store's moderators, sometimes requiring back-and-forth with developers / QA / release management). Other typical QA tasks would include producing reports, producing or studying release notes, studying feature definitions, and perhaps, scheduling meetings with people responsible for the said features.
Sometimes QA needs to run a proper scientific research, with all that entails: research planning and execution which are often also quite regimented, but would need to be built on top of tools like JIRA which don't offer any structure to the story, and the existing superstructures of stories (eg. epics or various links between issues) don't cover because they act more like arrays or trees, where what you want is structs / documents.
On the other side, project managers need a structured and formal way to deliver product requirements to R&D, from which QA will later have to produce tests. Again, free-form issues aren't enough here because the structure will have to be written down as free-form text, but will be very repetitive, unverifiable and lead to feature planning mistakes.
If a bug tracker offered a more structured approach to feature planning by formalizing the aspects of this process, this may lead to generation of program stubs as well as test stubs (the promise UML made but never really delivered).
No affiliation. Simply, I really like how it works, and its a great interface as well. Really gets out of your way, has solid integrations and a good API for building your own
On the surface: it's the same as JIRA, Mantis, RedMine, Track etc.: a time-tracking GUI program. Not at all what I wanted. There's nothing bad about being a time-tracker, just not what I need.
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But browsing the marketing site, you have a lot of AI tools for prioritizing lists. This is 100% the place where I don’t want things to move without me knowing. My biggest complaint with JIRA/Monday/etc is they have some entity representing “tasks”, that’s displayed in a million different perspectives. Finding a thing is usually what I want to do and I hate it when stuff disappears or changes in a view I was using.
No matter how good your tool is at prioritizing, it will be wrong some percentage of the time and while it’s a little annoying to skim a big unsorted unchanging list, it’s even worse when it changes ALL the time.
The priority field is not changed as part of that function. I agree that AI cannot be the primary prioritization mechanism. All it can do is augment existing processes and help individuals be more effective.
But then, for some reason, whenever support fails to read their tickets, they just dump the ticket on to my queue. So I could just be being salty, or seeing fewer misses because the ai is better at failing the triage.
Right now we are targeting the smaller companies that don't have a lot of PM experience or resources available. The dream being the slack story of IC driven product adoption :D
We have some overlapping feature set but I would argue Leantime looks a bit better but I may be biased :D
The key differentiators are our goal and strategy tracking though.
Though I've just set up Leantime in my homelab for todo list/calendar.
And then the README and the LICENSE files list different exceptions to AGPL. I'm not even convinced that mishmash of exceptions constitutes a valid license.
https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a0...
https://github.com/Leantime/leantime/blob/a28ed345782a7bf8a0...
The current "kanban board" looks basically the same as JIRA's and it's what a lot of people are familiar with. I would love love love to see a visualization that puts all current planned stories into a single vertical column and groups them by status. Done at the top, ready for review underneath, then in progress, and not started. It's a way more compact view of stories and better use of real estate.
For prior art look at Pivotal Tracker.
I suggest you spend some time diving deep into PT and understanding how it tracks velocity and encourages writing useful stories.
The documentation on the site is pretty good and there are a ton of googleable resources.
Another good open-source Jira alternative is https://plane.so/ . They also have a free cloud plan with unlimited users.
What are the key differentiators in how this is easier specific to those that use JIRA?
In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up -- each work function already has a home. The thing you have to decide is how you want to see the tasks.
Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards either.
The other approach we do differently is to work to engage ICs in the value of the work and we do that by making the goals and work more clear. Some of this is still being developed out and rounded out better by our AI features -- which can be better read about here and how we view it in relationship to our own ADHD and the features behind it... https://leantime.io/2023/07/30/the-top-digital-planner-for-a....
Lastly, for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards. Some of which will be coming out in plugins to OSS here soon.
I'm not sure what this means entirely, but across our projects we have some with different workflows than the others. These are necessary in that we have certain workflows that must meet compliance requirements, and those workflows are the best way to ensure we execute those. In other projects, they are less onerous and apply to different kinds of work (so, different workflows.)
> Our "home" screen is intended for individual users to have pre-defined organization and not needing to set up their own dashboards
This is good, but we generally keep our exec leadership out of JIRA (they don't really have the context for the details.) Our users can design their own dashboards, but that's a personal preference. We use the standard views.
> making the goals and work more clear
I would prefer to see more fall-into-the-pit-of-success for the equivalent of JIRA stories to be more oriented toward the outcome or feature or capability, as opposed to the accounting/I-got-receipts feeling I get from JIRA. While story points are fine, I prefer a focus on clarity and a better measurement for effort than the subjectivity of a team's interpretation of the fibonacci sequence.
> for Confluence fans, we come default with docs and (on cloud) we have whiteboards
So, Leantime includes a markup engine as well as a whiteboard feature? If I already have a deep investment in other tools that do those things, how do they integrate?
I don't really like the idea of bug tracker as a sort of a GUI program that acts like time management software, i.e. focuses on planning work, tracking how much effort was spent, ability to add notes to tasks etc.
My ideal bug-tracking software works more like Git: it has a server-client relationship where clients query the database with predefined set of commands, while at the same time it has programmable interface facing test code. This interface should enable tests to do things like:
* figure out what components need tests to run against them when a particular feature branch sees a code update.
* extract history of tests running against a defined group of features.
* manage association of tests and program components.
* manage test sets that aren't feature-related (eg. nightlies).
JIRA kind of has this database / query component, but all the functionality above needs to be built on top of it. And the data organization of JIRA relies on issues as the basic unit, where I'd like the basic component to be "features" (similar to how branches are in Git).
My biggest problem with the currently popular approach (emphasis on time management) is that it's very informal and unstructured when it comes to testing, poorly automated and poorly integrated with other development tools to the point that it makes it both easy to forget to do the necessary stuff and a very repetitive chore to keep the necessary stuff up-to-date, while it's clear that it's possible to automate it.
The attempts to automate this process by adding bots that manage issue life-cycle or generate trivial fixes / merge trivial PRs isn't the way to solve the problem, IMO because this automation is stupid and has a potential to cause harm. Instead it needs to be very tightly integrated with VCS (but, let's be honest, with Git) to the point that such configuration would require minimal effort on the part of the admin and be vendor-independent, and, most importantly, be feature-oriented to mirror how programmers conceptualize the development of their program.
Unfortunately, and I think important to call out -- is that most companies are trying to use these tools as a "catch all" -- "a one in all solution that solves everyone's problems" and then ultimately, half of the company refuses to use the tools because it's too focused on one user group.
Our long term approach is really about making work and getting sh*t done as a relevant part of the PM process and less on time management. Time management is part of organization but people want to care about what they're building and why... something that can be absent in a lot of orgs and even in how we organize ourselves in small teams, startups or small businesses.
What I do hear and think would be interesting -- is incorporating a plugin more specific to your workflow mentioned here... because absolutely, tighter QA, etc, is vital and there are things not otherwise easily replicated as part of a dev's flow. We, otherwise, don't have any current intentions to use "bots" in a way that automates things that people should really still be overseeing.
Take branching models for example. Why do we have different "branching models" that work certain ways? Firstly because somebody built a tool that works a certain way (Git) and people need to figure out how to use it. Secondly because how you use it has a direct effect on other things, so you need some coherent model for how your group will use it. And thirdly because there's a few specific ways of using the tool, so we write those down and give it a name. Nobody set out to design these branching models, they just evolved as people started using the tool in different ways.
The same should (and kinda does) happen with project management, time tracking, issue/bug/work tracking, documentation, incident response, budgeting, etc. But mostly it's within one ecosystem (Atlassian's) or another. It should really be more general, and it should be easier to integrate different solutions and build on top, and from there new standard patterns can emerge such that we don't have to be stuck into one ecosystem.
If we accept that bug tracker is to be a planning program, then QA usually needs a lot more than a free-form JIRA story can offer. QA really needs what they call "test plans".
Usually, to test a feature QA, beside writing tests, needs to organize it as an activity, which might be also relevant to release management, but in general may touch on other product life-cycle phases. This comes from the fact that some rare activities performed by QA are not worth automating, and sometimes are very hard to automate (eg. uploading the program to some kind of third-party store, where it needs to be approved by the store's moderators, sometimes requiring back-and-forth with developers / QA / release management). Other typical QA tasks would include producing reports, producing or studying release notes, studying feature definitions, and perhaps, scheduling meetings with people responsible for the said features.
Sometimes QA needs to run a proper scientific research, with all that entails: research planning and execution which are often also quite regimented, but would need to be built on top of tools like JIRA which don't offer any structure to the story, and the existing superstructures of stories (eg. epics or various links between issues) don't cover because they act more like arrays or trees, where what you want is structs / documents.
On the other side, project managers need a structured and formal way to deliver product requirements to R&D, from which QA will later have to produce tests. Again, free-form issues aren't enough here because the structure will have to be written down as free-form text, but will be very repetitive, unverifiable and lead to feature planning mistakes.
If a bug tracker offered a more structured approach to feature planning by formalizing the aspects of this process, this may lead to generation of program stubs as well as test stubs (the promise UML made but never really delivered).
No affiliation. Simply, I really like how it works, and its a great interface as well. Really gets out of your way, has solid integrations and a good API for building your own
[0]: https://linear.app/
On the surface: it's the same as JIRA, Mantis, RedMine, Track etc.: a time-tracking GUI program. Not at all what I wanted. There's nothing bad about being a time-tracker, just not what I need.