I feel like Jira is like democracy: it's the worst bug tracking tool there is, except for all the other ones.

That was true for some time, but they're making me miss Bugzilla now. I spend increasing amounts of time just watching Jira load it's ever more bloated UI.

I’ve been upgrading a todo app into an issue tracking tool, and I already find it to be more useful than Jira.

I also have the misfortune of being our Jira admin, so I have more reasons than most to hate it.

I think it depends on how it's configured and on the team's workflow. It really sucked at my second to last job, but at my most recent job it was reasonably usable, in that about half the time it was better than a comparable tool like Pivotal Tracker or Asana, and about half the time it was worse. A good and bad thing about it is that it isn't a typical single page app - good because it has fewer glitches and bad because it is more tedious in some places than Asana or Pivotal.

You may be right, pivotal might be even worse. Haven't used Asana.

PT has hands down one of the worst UIs I've ever seen in a tool. It's an absolute clusterfuck next to something like Trello.

I disagree, if the project is organized the way PT is intended, it's nice. If you have too many cards, or too much information with each card, it gets cluttered, and handles clutter worse than JIRA or Asana.

The worst is team foundation server. Jira is better than tfs.

to be fair, I've never seen a good bug tracking tool

Taiga and GitlabIssues are not too bad. Bugzilla was good 5-10 years ago, now I see it as too complex (and it's written in Perl...).

It was written in Perl when it was fashionable to write in Perl

And it probably has fewer dependencies than a node.js hello world app

I hate node.js maybe more...

> and it's written in Perl

I don't personally much like Perl for my own projects. But, why in the world would you care if some other project is written in Perl?

Because being an opensource project means you could contribute bugfixes/features to it? But being in Perl would make that insurmountable...

Have you tried HP’s Quality Center (QC)?

LOL. Never. But you say it like if that one was the VisualSourceSafe of bugtracking tools.

Having used both HP QC and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (the successor to VSS) for issue tracking, I have to say that Jira is better than TFS is better than QC. The big problem I ran into is that many teams had different fields and TFS and QC showed them all. This is a huge problem when there are well over 100 teams.

It is.