[wwalser]

If ZenHub works for your team, sweet. If the business is operating at a scale that ZenHub can serve adequately, you're probably not an ideal customer of JIRA. There's a tipping point along two different axes where JIRA becomes worthwhile.

One axis is number of people actively using the tracker for a single project — I personally think that threshold is around 50 people^1. Another is workflow complexity — very few tools are as capable of mapping business processes to software as JIRA^2.

1. Careful, there's another threshold at which JIRA becomes painfully slow. At that point you either move to something that's less adequate in nearly-every way but scales or you start splitting JIRA instances by department or project.

2. Careful here as well! Poorly created JIRA workflows are probably _the_ #1 reason people hate using it. Users learn a highly customized JIRA workflow and think it's absolutely bonkers that Atlassian did this to them, when really it's their company's customizations that are causing the pain.

[brazzledazzle]

They have JIRA Data Center now which is far from perfect but helps with the scalability issues. It’s costs quite a lot though. DB is typically the bottleneck after that, especially since they don’t officially support any DB clustering. Postgres is their best supported DB (it’s what they use in production themselves) so maybe as native Postgres clustering matures we’ll see support for that.

[subpixel]

The 'threshold where JIRA becomes painfully slow' for our team of 5 was on day one, when we had to wait multiple seconds for an issue to load in the browser.