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by marpstar 2489 days ago
I've been evaluating PM/bug-tracker apps lately. I'm in a unique scenario, maybe an interested party could give me some guidance:

I build WP sites for a local design agency (my client) who designs the theme for their client. I have 2-3 subcontractors that I work with to build these sites.

Building the site needs to be managed like a "project". Once launched, I want to give my client AND their client the ability to create tickets for any post-launch issues. I need these users to be "siloed" into organizations so that they can't see bug trackers for other clients. I need my subcontractors to be able to see tickets from projects they're approved to see.

I want the ability to create tickets via e-mail, sometimes from my client, other times directly from their client.

JIRA + Service Desk seems to give me everything I want, but the admin menus for their "classic" templates (i.e. Service Desk) are daunting. Lots of settings that (IMO) should be "global" are instead per-project. The only way to share these settings is to clone an existing project.

We've got ~12 sites that we're managing, and to make a "tweak" to one setting means having to go tweak that same setting 11 more times.

Is there any system smaller/simpler than JIRA that meets these needs?

2 comments

You might give ActiveCollab a shot. I've spent 16 years going through various project/product management systems and it's one of the only ones that springs to mind when you mention sharing client access like that and trying to keep things user-friendly.

That said, if you're using the service desk stuff from Jira I might stay with it. I understand the pain of having to administer Jira and how it creates project-specific EVERYTHING on the backend (workflows, et al.) but it's great for end users and it's super flexible.

Duet can definitely do this. It's self hosted though- http://duetapp.com

Let me know what you think (I'm the developer)

This looks amazing. It appears to have absolutely everything I need. For $150 I'm willing to give it a trial. I'm currently using Pancake (http://pancakeapp.com) which is also self-hosted, so I'm fine with that. Duet makes me feel bad for Pancake already because if it's as awesome as it looks, I may switch my billing over...provided one thing...

Because I work with an agency, I'm typically billing my client, who then bills their client (plus markup). Obviously we don't want their client to see what I charged them. Is it possible to "hide" the billing for certain users?

Not currently, but I can add it. Can you shoot me an email about it so we can discuss your use case? I want to make sure any changes I make work for you. duet [at] 23andwalnut.com