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Comment by aunty_helen | Hacker News Reader

After listening to in-person talks from Atlassian in the past, I got the impression of them having a smugness from being a big fish in a small pond (Australian tech.)

Their original and early Jira product was great and put them out in front, but I couldn’t name any other product of theirs except Bitbucket which is very much a second place competitor in their market. Jira itself has faded and been caught up with too.

Reading through the post and seeing the level of support some people on Twitter have been tweeting about, I would take this as a great time to look at other offerings out there.

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Bitbucket was also an acquisition (Most of their offerings were acquisitions).

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/atlassian-buys-mercurial-p...

I think Confluence is a genuinely good product. Its nice to see that even Atlassian struggle with day to day sysadmin of Atlassian tools

A lot of people look down on Jira. My experience was that Confluence was much worse. It turns writing a couple technical notes into a publishing journey with missteps and failures along the way.

For me Confluence dramatically improved in experience when I learned that it's possible to write files locally using $FAVORITE_EDITOR in confluencewiki format (or markdown if you don't care about macros) and post them through API.

Can you share anything more about your technique? As far as I know, Confluence hasn't supported a markup format natively for several years. I've found some tricks to allow me to author stuff in Markdown but it seems to come with a lot of limitations which ultimately mean that I have to start using the web editor as soon as I want to start collaborating with others.

In Confluence Editor, under the Macro "Plus" button, you should find an entry called "Markup" pretty far up the list, which accepts "Confluence Wiki" Markup (which is just Markdown + Macros). This works for both on-premise as well as cloud instances.

I wrote a tool that automates the posting part[1]. Unfortunately I could not solve the collaboration problem either. Setting the body of the page overwrites it.

I did see some examples of editing HTML through similar approach but never tried it myself.

[1]: https://github.com/VTimofeenko/confluence_poster

I read somewhere recently that confluence is write-only because search is so bad nobody will ever find what your write.

I haven’t used it in years, but that seems accurate. I could never find anything unless I knew exactly how it was worded in what I’m looking for.

Putting markdown text into SQLite with FTS5 works amazingly well for search. How come they couldn't just bolt that in?

Yes, it's actually so bad that you wonder what part of the picture we're missing.

My experience with Confluence's search was that it's a mistake the press Enter.

That is, the pop-up results that appear as I typed where significantly better than the actual "search results" page.

I also vaguely remember this being the case. Confluence always felt so bloated to me.

When they first acquired confluence it was great. Now I can’t stand it. Is so slow now. So clunky.

I had Jira inflicted on me before Atlassian was big and Jira was terrible back then too. I always liked FogBugs.

>I always liked FogBugs

You lost me there. In no way was FogBugz a better product. It was at best mediocre by 2010.

Current user of FogBugz, and prior user of JIRA.

Jira is much better. We also use SharePoint and Confluence is so much better.

Honestly I get the criticism of both JIRA and Confluence but till you've used the other big names in that space you don't realise how bad it can get.

Fogbugz was on the downhill as early as 2010. I always assumed that when Fogcreek started working on Trello they pulled the A team off Fogbugz.

>Current user of FogBugz

I'm so sorry. Fogbugz has been in maintenance mode for years now, stuck in the middle of a half-finished redesign.

Having dealt with the pre and post sales support quite extensively over the years, I always got the impression they were a big fish in way over it's head, and with a tail that didn't work so good.

>Jira itself has faded and been caught up with too.

Tell this to all the big corps still running a slow, bureaucratic JIRA system demanding one to update multiple tickets multiple times.

What caught up with JIRA

I have yet to find something as good, even with all of JIRAs pain points

Asana. It has its own idiosyncrasies, but it's faster, cleaner, supports things out of the box that I just gave up on in JIRA...

Having used Asana in several organisations, I think it being a suitable replacement for JIRA says more about how poor a choice JIRA was for situation than anything about Asana.

I've tried it before, it's just as bloated as Jira and performance suffers as a reason. If I'm going to suffer slowness anyway I might as well stick with Jira.

Ive tried Asana breifly a few years agoand it didn't seem to have enough to make it worth the effort to swap.

Maybe I should check it out again

I don't recommend anyone to swap from JIRA. Stability is probably more important for a PM tool, but for new projects trying out something new makes sense.

We've been using https://linear.app/

Trello? OpsGenie? Statuspage?

Maybe it is my enterprise hat, but they always seem to miss something.

I don't think you could attribute Trello to Atlassian. Maybe all the junk they've added to it.

The other two I've honestly never heard of but that says nothing about them as products except they don't get talked about.

Funny edit, Atlassian actually made a plugin for Jira called greenhopper that was very much like trello. But they discontinued it only to realise a few years later that they liked trello and paid a massive amount of money for it. If that doesn't exemplify incompetence of a companies strategy / directorship, then I don't know what does.

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