[tokyodude]

probably the wrong thread to ask but what should a 5-10 person company with 20-25 outside contractors and lots of costumers that may need to access the issue use?

I'm currently consulting for a company who has no issue tracking system. they use an excel sheet which makes it impossible to have conversation about individual issue and nearly impossible to track updates.

I can't imagine getting them to spend $300+ a month for a managed system. bugzilla or Trac seem progammer oriented whereas this is a game dev company meaning copy/paste drag/drop image support is important (having to first create a local image file and then navigate to it is right out)

any solutions out there they could install on an unused computer or remote computer that might meet their needs or do they just have to be convinced to pay $4k+ a year?

[peterwwillis]

The dumbest, cheapest, simplest option is e-mail. No matter who they are, if they're an actual company, they have to have an e-mail provider for their domain. This means (at the very least) they can create a single account that will accept e-mailed issues, and forward to all relevant users. Track the issue in e-mail thread replies, which always has the latest updates.

There may be provider-specific productivity features, such as G Suite's Collaborative Inbox, or Exchange's Public Folders. The IMAP Protocol also supports shared mailboxes, so any IMAP server that supports this will allow you to collaborate on issues sorted into folders that multiple users can access. Some open source mail servers definitely support it. Once they pick up a real issue tracking system it will probably support issues created via e-mail, so it can be seamlessly integrated later.

[cimmanom]

Check out Phabricator, which is open source and easy to set up. It’s got a pretty robust issue database and can be set up with kanban boards.

[chrisper]

Can't you use something like trello? (I think they got bought by Atlassian recently, so I don't know how long they will be around)

[chris-at]

Take a look at Bitrix - IMO it's better (and cheaper) than Jira for small teams.

https://bitrix24.com/

[raarts]

Setup your own Redmine instance.