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Comment by kofman | Hacker News Reader

If there's demand, we'll definitely consider offering this.

Confluence is the wiki we use where I work and I absolutely hate it (ending tags is like you are opening a tag, so {bold}this would be bold{bold} (example, I don't remember any tags off the top of my head).

If something better came along that helped us rather than slowed us down it would be fantastic.

I checked out Confluence earlier this year and wasn't too impressed at all. So agreed, it would be great for something better to come along!

Oh god. I helped support an overly customized Confluence wiki that was to be THE wiki for the entire company one summer. I quickly grew to hate the software quite strongly. Took me a while to be objective about JIRA's other products when I used them later.

JIRA is the bug tracking software. Atlassian is the company.

JIRA is absolutely terrible as well. I can't express in words how much I hate and dislike JIRA, it's horribly slow and bloated user interface and how complicated it makes certain tasks... using it as an Agile tool makes it even worse especially with Greenhopper the add-on.

We use JIRA + Confluence. We are a huge installation. Both work well, JIRA breaks much more often than Confluence, but then again we are adding a ton of records every single day. To be fair, JIRA breaks because some third party programs are really careless about how they call the API (ask for way too many records, and that sort of thing), if we shut off API access (and only allow JIRA access on the web interface), then all is well.

Confluence is very stable. We have a ton of content in it, and without it we are completely dead in the water. It works well.

Yeah the tags are a bit ambiguous, but I have never seen the tags get in the way. Downtime would get in the way much more.

Lots of people here seem to dislike Confluence and Jira. What do you folks prefer?

Having used Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis, MediaWiki, and several other tools I 100% prefer Jira and Confluence...

Redmine here. Currently loving it. Tried lots of others but the multiple projects and the fact that I could use plugins helps. BaseCamp was by far the worst for me.

Could you elaborate what's wrong with Basecamp?

After a long journey we settled on Basecamp. It is kind of shitty until you nail down your own workflow and the API allows you a lot of scope to do that through automation.

I'd pick any one of those over Jira and Confluence any day.

I tend to use Trac most.

I agree... Multi resistant TB is to be preferred, compared to the black plague. :-(

(Mantis might have less capabilities than Jira, but I almost enjoyed working with it. That might have depended on the project. [Edit: On consideration, Mantis was simpler and didn't make me scream from pure hatred.])

Yeah, I've had a hard time figuring out why Atlassian's products became so popular. Good corporate sales people I guess. They charge a lot and the software is nearly universally terrible. Can anyone tell me some reasons I would want to use JIRA instead of Trac or Bugzilla?

I promise you that there's absolutely loads of demand from companies for things like this, so long as they can be deployed inside their own network.

On the plus side, you can charge them lots of money. On the negative side, it's not as easy (or cheap!) to market to these people and take care of their needs.

Couldn't you offer something where you host the UI, but you allow a client to provide their own data source? That way the data stays on the client-side, and they never have to worry about upgrades, since you host the UI?

Github does this perfectly. You get a VM, fire it up and you're good to go.

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