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by time0ut 1968 days ago
I use a couple dozen tools on a regular basis. JIRA is by far the worst. The functionality is ok. Maybe it is a bit bloated. Maybe our process is a little over complicated. That's not a big deal. The thing that really gets me is performance.

The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.

Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.

6 comments

Nope. We _just_ switched to Jira/Confluence from Notion+Trello (sigh), so we really don't have a complicated set up, and it is definitely "absolute dog shit" for performance. It is hands down the slowest tool I use. I've used it at large organizations with hundreds of devs and it's even worse. I regret not pushing back harder, since it is totally overkill for 1.5 PMs managing 3.5 devs.
Seconding the performance issues. This is obviously amplified when screen sharing, which makes certain types of collaboration difficult. (Remote grooming sessions, for instance.) I also find recent UI changes have made the product harder to use, at least for our version and processes, and have added nothing of value in return.

As far as how useful Jira is, a huge percentage of that is going to be your team's processes external to Jira. I have found it to be a very good mirror. If your team's processes are a mess, your Jira instance will quickly become one as well. But if your team is organized and is bringing an existing, functional system to Jira, I have found that it's a good enough value add to be worth it.

It's definitely an enabler, though, rather than a tool that will funnel you into good practices. (The same can be said for Confluence but it's even more true there IMO.)

Same performance problems here. I hate it. I also need to access other JIRA boards with different email addresses occasionally. It takes forever to sign out, login again, navigate to board, find the issue. It puts me off using it so much.

One light at the end of the tunnel is the Mac app (for some reason there is no Windows or Linux version). It's much more lightweight and feels way faster than the web version. However, it is buggy in my experience, and a fair few things I do a lot can't be done in it and require the web interface, but for quickly checking stuff it mostly works.

Rather than signing in and out all the time, why not use Firefox's container tabs?
Truth. On Jira Cloud, most painful part of my day, daily. I wish I could say it was free. Far from it.
Hi - I'm coming from the Confluence team working on Performance, but I can say that we (all of Atlassian) are aware of performance is an area needing improvement, and we're working on it. Customer feedback (including logs, recordings, and exports of slow pages) is always very helpful to us. If you're open for followup over email to provide specific information, please let me know.
If anyone is considering switching, we built liner.app as an offline first app, so all interactions are <100ms.
> we built liner.app

linear.app :-)