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by mkching 3918 days ago
I'm curious which products you would recommend for bug tracking. If they have testcase management, even better.

I run a managed hosting company that hosts a fair number of Atlassian instances. We have our complaints about Atlassian and our customers often experience sticker shock when upgrading past the 10-user licenses, but we've had trouble finding other issue trackers with similar functionality, flexibility and market acceptance.

The same goes for Confluence as a wiki. While not perfect, most other products seem unable to do things such as access controls easily.

If there are other mature products out there that people are using we'd love to take a look. We do support Bugzilla and MediaWiki as well, but this is usually a different market segment from what Atlassian serves.

2 comments

At my workplace (going on two years at a startup) we were saddled with bad I.T. (every service was accessed by its IP address, no DNS lookup), hosted TeamSite/Sharepoint for engineering document management (with absolutely no imposed organization or hierarchy (though P.M. kept their stuff together well there) most things ended up being thrown around in email), Bugzilla, and Subversion.

After some organization changes -- long time coming -- we switched to hosted Confluence, JIRA, BitBucket/git. The transition has taken some time but communication is going so much more smoothly since.

Confluence especially has been great. Designs/how-tos/best-practices are so easy to write. Permanent records of discussions and decisions are so easy to track. I made sure to collaborate with a few others to establish the skeleton of our Confluence -- without a good skeleton it would devolve to chaos. But Confluence is so much better than Word docs floating around ... and I haven't seen any other Wiki tool that is so rich in authoring ... Confluence has:

  * great search capabilities
  * easy to organize
  * easy to create links to other relevant content
  * great text styling
  * great tables
  * plugins/macros for displaying PDF / Word / Excel inline
  * linking with JIRA
  * great diagramming tool Gliffy
  * easy cut-and-paste-of-images -- capturing screenshots is fast
  * (unfortunately to get GraphViz diagrams you need your own server, hosted version doesn't allow for that)
  * good export
  * and plugins for almost anything you'd need
We're finding all kinds of great ways to use Confluence. I'd been pushing Confluence for my whole time at the company because we had no institutional memory. Confluence is helping us build that. I haven't seen any other tool for the price that comes close, but I admit limited exposure. That's my experience.
If you are after "enterprise" grade solutions that cover the core of issue management, tasking, ticketing and testing -- take a look at Countersoft Gemini.

We compete routinely with Jira and win deals by providing fully loaded 50mb zipped solution that runs on Windows servers, integrates with AD/Outlook/Exchange, etc., custom Apps Framework and obligatory RESTful API. Just the things that "demanding enterprises" look for.

No idea if this helps you.