[solraph]

That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together.

It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. You can do the integration yourself, but it's a gigantic PITA, and as the number of tools rises, the number of integrations you need to set up is going to rise terrifyingly fast.

I have a litany of complaints about the Atlassian suite, but none of the competitors have even have the services we need.

[mtzet]

On the other hand, I find the integration between Atlassian tools to be pretty barebones. It feels very clear to me that Atlassian tools are really developed separately, with a separate jira task to integrate specific parts. There's no "coherency" to them.

You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list, they've made sure to check it. If you go around the office asking everyone what features they want, Atlassian is going to check all those boxes. That's pretty hard to compete with.

[paulryanrogers]

Second this. Even within JIRA itself the markup it accepts is inconsistent. Back ticks vs double brackets being the bane of my existence.

[hinkley]

It is infuriating the extent to which Atlassians tools are only slightly more integrated with each other than they are integrated with third party tools. If they’d done a better job with their acquisitions then we would all be complaining about how they’ve not done enough for third party tools.

I kind of want a modern version of Trac. Trac is essentially a collection of integrations that just happen to have useful features.

[gknoy]

    There's no "coherency" to them.

It's interesting to hear you say that. With the integrations we have with Slack and Github, I see previews, summaries, etc thrown at me when I link things

[mih]

I recently had to upgrade Jira and Confluence at the workplace. It was clear from their configuration methods and how they respond to errors/failures, they are written by different development teams. One needs to be an admin to experience this, ordinary users will see no difference.

Take for example the admin UI. When adding "Application Links" to link Jira and Confluence with each other, Jira has a nice tabbed interface allowing you to configure it easily, whereas in Confluence, you have to scroll down a long sidebar with dozens of options until you chance upon the required link. Had similar experiences configuring various other options at the filesystem level.

Jira configuration was more coherent, fault tolerant and failed gracefully. Confluence configuration on the other hand was messy in comparison.

[hinkley]

As a bamboo user who is not an admin, everyone on that team can fuck right off.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a CI tool on a concept of information hiding is a monster who should be banished back to whatever eldritch plane they crawled out of.

You can’t have a coherent conversation with anyone about the functionality of Bamboo versus other CI tools because Bamboo is constantly lying to you about what is available. You don’t even know to ask other people for help with something because you don’t know if Bamboo can do it. So people use the ugliest kludges that their privilege level allows to get things done, creating an unmaintainable mess in the process.

[Macha]

Or even just the wildly different text formatting syntax across tools

[zozbot234]

> It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another.

Isn't Phabricator trying to do all of this? It seems to get quite a lot of fairly high-profile usage in both enterprise and community-focused/FLOSS contexts.

[solraph]

I wasn't aware of this, I'll have to check it out. Looks like it would especially good for companies that can't or won't the atlassian tax.

[licebmi__at__]

Well, to add a counterpoint, never in my career I have encountered a place with a proper atlassian products integration. The most common integration I saw was using Jira and Confluence, which seems a little underwhelming to me. In all the places I have seen a mishmash of different products not really glued together and the workers had to navigate that mess. One of the places I’ve worked on had salesforce for customer sided issue tracking, and JIRA for software development tracking. Support engineers had to copy and paste tickets to raise defects and bugs, keeping track of all the interactions in both systems. Silly stuff.

[solraph]

That's my point though, the alternative is glueing all those tools together, and Atlassian promises (and frankly often falls woefully short on delivering) to give you an integrated out of box experience.

[pydry]

I don't think I've ever seen integration between confluence and jira that mattered.

[solraph]

The useful ones I've seen are where Confluence automatically indicates jira tickets that mention the page and confluence pages that link tickets that will have their status embedded.

It's just those two though, it's also the git branches, pipelines, and release integration from jira, being able to see the support ticket cases and / or alerts that were the cause of ticket/branch/release.

I'm in no way arguing that atlassian does a great job here, only that no one else offers that end to end integration. (Possible exception of phabricator mentioned in a sister thread)