Show HN: Clubhouse – project management built for software teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Clubhouse – project management built for software teams

clubhouse.io

72 pointsandrewchilds49 comments

We're currently using Clubhouse (and very happy with it), and one thing it does extremely well is the Github integration; you can assign steps in your workflow to events in Github, including merges and pull requests. For example, in our setup, if you tag a commit or branch with a Clubhouse issue number, then the issue automatically moves into "in development", then if we open a PR from a branch to our development main branch, it moves into "ready for review"; once the PR is closed it moves into "ready for deployment". As a developer, it means you don't have to micro-manage your issues most of the time, especially if you have more than 3 steps in your workflow. This is a very nice experience, and I don't think I've seen this in other products (apart from tinkering with APIs and Github webhooks of course).

Sounds like a good reason for Clubhouse.

Do you think the same would be possible with Trello connected to Github either directly http://blog.trello.com/github-and-trello-integrate-your-comm... or via Zapier?

Hey HN, if you want to give Clubhouse a try, you can use this link for a $100 credit: https://clubhouse.io/signup?referral=hn

(I'm a co-founder, also happy to answer any questions.)

I'm curious to hear how you would describe Clubhouse relative to the competition. Are there aspects that are fundamentally differentiated? Or is it more a matter of making lots of little improvements, which add up to a much better experience overall?

I ask because project management software is a super crowded market, with a lot of products that seem only subtly different from each other. On the surface Clubhouse also seems like it's only subtly different from other products. I'm curious about strategies for navigating these kinds of markets. Is high-level differentiation useful? Or are the details more important? Or is it really all about marketing and branding?

Or, if you guys just wanted to make something you like and are hoping enough other people like it too so you can pay the bills, and you're really thinking strategically about growth fight now that's cool too.

I haven't really tried Clubhouse yet but it looks really nice. And I certainly have yet to fall in love with anything out there. I will definitely give Clubhouse a try.

Good questions! It is a crowded market, but nobody has really nailed it yet. Clubhouse is being built specifically for software teams, and we're trying to provide just enough structure to let you see what's going on at a high level, but keep it flexible enough so that you can work the way your team wants to.

Part of what makes us different is the little details that add up to a better UX, but our GitHub integration is pretty sophisticated: we don't just link stories to pull requests, we can actually automate your Clubhouse workflow using your existing GitHub workflow. We've also put a lot of work into cross-project visibility, so most other tools only let you see one project at a time, so it's difficult to know what a single person is doing across multiple projects, but in Clubhouse it's very easy. We're also starting to get into more interesting features, like providing data-driven guidance around milestones and deadlines, the ability to create roadmaps and more organic story dependencies, more analytics/dataviz... we still have a lot to do.

Everyone who visits your landing page thinks 'Trello' and here you try to explain why Clubhouse is advanced (without mentioning Trello) which is not so easy to digest.

Why don't you just create a nice comparison matrix on your site where you compare Clubhouse to Trello feature by feature and highlight the advantages (which are mentioned here and there in your posts in this thread). Would help a lot.

It's on the list of things to do at some point soon.

Here's a blog post that one of our users wrote a few months ago that covers some of the same ground: https://medium.com/humans-in-space/clubhouse-is-the-best-pro...

Does Clubhouse have any features to help show a product roadmap to other teams? For example, something that shows the priorities and queued work for the next six months that can be referenced by an inside sales team.

We have a dedicated page for Epics which lets you prioritize epics against each other, which basically provides a high-level priority that anyone in the company can look at to get an idea of what the next few months look like. We're also working on building roadmap support to make epic dependencies/order more explicit.

Thanks for the reply!

We currently use Trello for project management but find that the duplication of data between Trello and GitHub and the lack of "higher order" views (epics, roadmap, etc) make us want to move to a more purpose built service.

It's a bit funny: Standard plan ($8.50 per month if paid annualy is $102) while the credit is $100 (which gives 10 months nonetheless) :)

Edit: as the other comment said, it's $8.50/per user/per month... and event though comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11118413 says " Good point, we've removed that line. Thanks for your feedback!" (which is great!), it seems to be there (after a hard re-load).

It looks like what you're doing is quite similar to Sprintly. https://sprint.ly -- Including your advanced GitHub integration which they've had for a few years.

What would you say makes you different from them?

Sprintly is cheaper.

Trello is free for unlimited users, this thing here is free for 3 users? So what's the point?

We use Trello for years and never had the need to get the paid versions and those are the same price as Clubhouse.

Could somebody enlighten me—why?

EDIT: It was predictable that this post is getting downvoted instead of just replying to some valid points

Don't downvote this. I want to hear the differences between the products too.

We've been using Clubhouse for about two weeks, having transitioned from Asana, which we found lacking in many respects. (Before then, we used Trello, which we also found to be not fit our workflow very well.)

So far, Clubhouse has been working really well. They are emulating the Slack aesthetic pretty hard, and that's not a bad thing. It's pretty responsive and well designed. I find the story card view friendlier than Trello's.

Clubhouse is really a clone of PivotTracker, and I don't mean that as a criticism. They even use the same terminology (points, stories, epics, workflow) and categories (bug, chore, feature). However, there's less of a focus on iterations, and the UI is decidely smoother from my perspective.

There are some features I'd like. For example, I would like their Slack integration to PM me personally about changes; Clubhouse can currently post updates to a Slack channel, but monitoring all the story activity is just not an option when you're on a team working on many different things.

There are also some rough edges in the UI. You can save your story view as a workspace, but if you alter anything (e.g. hide an epic), you have to save it under a new name, then remove the old workspace. I expect stuff like this to improve over time.

AFAIK 'points, stories, epics, workflow' are generic 'agile' terms rather than specific to one particular tool.

They are, but if you look at Clubhouse's UI there are exact analogues to almost all of Pivotal's UI. Didn't Pivotal invent some of these terms, too? I could be wrong.

We tried to use rather generic agile terms.

Here's a reference to most of the same concepts on the Jira site, for instance: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/delivery-vehicles/

(I've worked with Pivotal on projects in the past and I worked at Thoughtworks for a while, so we're definitely using language that should be familiar to users that are familiar with the flavor of "agile" promoted by those companies.)

We user Pivotal Tracker but at 15 people switching to this would be over twice as expensive.

It looks really nice, I'd love to try it. But we're a small startup (many of the 15 people are part time or consultants) and doubling our expenses on this is more than we can afford.

We tried to price things fairly but still make enough to grow and invest in the what we're building.

PT uses tiered pricing, so if you have 16 people we're only $10 more a month than PT and at 26 people we're $40 less expensive each month.

Yeah, I'm just an unfortunate edge case where I'm right under the Pivotal price break.

15 * $8.50 = $127.5 vs Pivotal $75 flat. But if I had one more user Pivotal would jump immediately to $150 and Clubhouse would only go up $8.50.

So pretty much you are cheaper at the low end of the ranges but more expensive at the high ends.

Don't get me wrong, this looks awesome! I really want to try it. Maybe when we hit the next user barrier on Pivotal I'll use it as an excuse to switch :)

As a former preview user of Clubhouse, I can say that it's easily my favorite work/story manager to date. It gives you what you need for keeping track of your work in an agile environment, and more or less just stays out of your way beyond that. It's totally worth a try if you're fed up with JIRA, Pivotal tracker, et al.

Seems like a nice combo of things I've stitched together (at 3 different companies now) with Trello + Zapier + GitHub.

I'm interested to know how you identify the trello cards in the commit message? Are you using your own codes to identify them? I'm thinking of building something similar myself.

We squash commits before merging so we use the PR as the tie between cards and commits.

This feels like a more opinionated Trello, which is not necessarily a bad thing. One oddity on the pricing page. You say the standard plan is $8.50 for unlimited users. Then if you read the small grey text underneath, you see that this price is per user per month. This doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Good point, we've removed that line. Thanks for your feedback!

After searching through these kinds of products for the past couple weeks, this product looks great and is priced reasonably (unlimited projects!).

Theres a few features it's missing though. It needs a calendar view, daily agenda for scheduling tasks in your work day, and time logging/tracking. These three features would make it perfect for me.

Additionally there's some UX issues in my opinion in terms of how you get from one view to another. For example, if I click on a story, the story modal comes up, how do i get to a view where I can see all the stories for that project? I haven't tested this yet, but it seems that the dashboard doesn't show upcoming due dates, which is one of the most important reasons I would check the dashboard.

All considered, this app still seems great and I'll continue using it for the next few weeks.

Based on the description it really sounds great. I didn't really try it, but I intend to, because even though there are a lot of options, unfortunately, they are all lacking. It seems the general topic of work and organizing work is much more difficult then we are willing to admit.

Does it cooperate with an issue tracker? I.e., is it easy to convert tickets into tasks?

Also, I just watched the demo gif. To move a task from "unstarted" to "started" you have to drag and drop it? Doesn't that get clumsy when the "unstarted" column is really big (which it will probably be in realistic sitations).

You can use an integration like Zapier or our API [1] to automatically generate stories based on some external event. As already mentioned you can update the state within the story dialog, or using our GitHub integration you can partially automate the process by setting up rules like so:

- When pull request is opened on master, move story to Ready for Review

- When branch is merged to master, move story to Ready for Deploy

We use these rules ourselves, and they not only reduce process overhead, they make your cycle time data more realistic vs. doing these steps manually.

[1] https://clubhouse.io/api

We don't currently have any official integrations with external issue trackers.

We do have a full API though (https://clubhouse.io/api/) so it probably wouldn't take much effort to build something for your issue tracker of choice, which some of our users have already done.

You can also change the story's state (ie., "started") by going into the story and changing its "State" field.

Don't think it works with an external issue tracker, though I haven't looked closely at the Github integration.

This looks like a good alternative for Trello. One thing I am missing from Trello is time estimation / planning / tracking. With a bit of help with extensions you can make it work, but it's not a nice experience overall.

Does this tool has this covered, and/or how do other people deal with this?

We have estimation in place, and planning is done at a high level via Epics, but not at the granular level of "you can get 25 points done this week, based upon past performance" (yet).

Related: We have cumulative flow diagrams in place at the Epic level so that you can see where your bottlenecks are and visualize progress.

Suggestions are welcome on how to best add tracking to the system without it being too overbearing.

(I'm also a founder here.)

I just want to say that your product looks great and the presentation is excellent. I knew what it was in under 10 seconds. I feel like I already know how to use it, in a weird way.

Definitely trying it out tonight! I'm a single dev, but still could be useful to manage projects!

Is it just me, or can you only set up one workflow per organization? Does that mean that you can't have multiple teams/projects using their own styles within one account?

It's a constraint imposed, by design, so that you view progress easily across projects. (i.e. view the progress of the frontend, backend, and UI team against a common epic)

Some of our users have extra steps in their workflow (for example, "waiting for app store review") that some of the project teams hide in their workspace (each column in the workflow can be hidden by an individual user).

In the future we might support different "departments" within an organization to allow for multiple ways of working, but it's not at the top of the list of things to do currently.

I feel like you're missing out on all the money that big companies with more than a handful of dev teams could be spending on you.

We're focusing on teams of 3-150 developers right now.

We have some of the building blocks in place for bigger teams, but it's not a priority right now.

Good Product. Been looking for something similar (multi-projects project management) for years, but we would need something to self host due to company policy. Any plans?

The software is built so that we can ship an on-prem version at some point in the future, but we don't have the processes in place yet to make that a reality.

Nothing planned yet, but if there's enough interest we'll consider it.

Have you checked out Duet? https://duetapp.com

It's not specifically for software like Clubhouse though.

Do I need to sign up to try? I see no live demo option? If you want people to try best to provide a no strings attached option (I.e. No account needed).

Too many things inside the cloud. Does nobody create software to install on bare metal=

It's much easier to dev, test, deploy, and migrate when you are only supporting your own technology stack. It's so much easier than supporting all the random platforms everyone has.

Additionally, the account management side is so much easier. It's a pain in the ass to maintain license servers, and it costs more. If you're shooting for fast early user adoption and/or small and medium size businesses it's a lot less daunting to charge $x/user/month than $1000x + yearly maintenance, or all of the other on premise licensing schemes.

It's easier to control and twist arms... in the cloud.

$10 (or $8.5) per user per month is relatively expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com