One of the challenges of Gitlab is that the pricing does not work well in organizations where a significant portion of accounts would need to be non-developer roles.
With devs and a premium tier, this isn't bad... but the "ok, we need to double the user count and move from premium to ultimate, even though most people are only looking for multi-level epics and the reporter role." That represents a significant cost increase.
Taking all the devs from $29 to $99 and doubling the accounts is a lot more than $15 per account (devs, ba/pm/mgr, business).
MSFT also does volume discounts and if you have enough spend they'll give you GitHub for free when renewing VS licenses. I'll take GH anyday over Atlassian when it comes to collaboration.
The problem with this though, is that commonly a requirement (ticket) does not map exactly to a single code repository.
I feel that it is breaking encapsulation in a sense to be dealing with issues at the repo level. The repo and the code are implementation details of the business requirements. The tickets describing requirements belong at the next level up of abstraction?
Hi there! I lead the product teams for planning features at GitLab. Issues at the group level are in the works to meet this exact need. You can follow the work in this issue https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/8308 . As always, would love to hear from you in the issue if you have feedback about the approach or have follow up questions.
I do use gitlab-ce at home for my personal projects and think it's awesome.
I would recommend it to work in terms of its features for code management and build pipelines.
But I just cannot see any of our product management team wanting to use this for Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking at all. Its far too technical and too close to the code, both of which are things they have neither the time, interest or skill to interact with. Management are comfortable with Jira (and some of the extended Atlassian suite), as it hides the technical stuff away and allows them to focus on the management data.
I don't know what the perfect solution looks like though, and I also haven't spend the time to exhaustively try all the competing products either.
>[Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking] Its far too technical and too close to the code
I'm a Product Manager in the Plan stage at GitLab and I'd love to learn more about this impression. Would you be willing to share more either in thread or on a call?
Specially, I'm trying to understand what about the GitLab Plan tools (epics, roadmaps, etc) feel dev-centric?
One way to approach this would be using Epics [0], which can live at the group-level. Child epics and/or issues can then be used for more finely tuned requirements.
I should point out that multi-level epics are only available at Gitlab's $99 per user per month level. We wanted to use them, but it's not worth that much. Jira is a lot more flexible and cost effective in this regard.
There is no perfect issue tracking system sadly and integration with prs and commits actually is becoming a hard requirement for me. This is not something that people should be updating to an issue tracker manually, ever. Or doing without entirely (more common). Also nice in Github is the integration with Github actions and being able to see whether something can be merged safely or not.
I double as a product manager and CTO, meaning I do both code and planning. We're using Github issues and Asana. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd take both over Jira any day. And since I'm in charge, my company is blissfully free of anything Atlassian.
I kind of like Asana for planning. It's got a few sane features one of which is separating issues from projects. This allows me to quickly plan out projects and then add tickets to the relevant team boards. And another one is making it very easy to create issues in a spreadsheet like view that minimizes the click bureaucracy other tools have. Great when you basically are thinking at the bullet point level and just want to hit enter instead of having to fiddle with obnoxious modal forms.
Of course for developers Asana isn't great because it has no markdown support and no usable github integration (a few commercial things exist but they are basically glorified sync tools). Github issues have a few nice features as well. I like working with check lists and then converting the individual items to tasks. That comes close to how I like to use Asana.
Where Github falls off a cliff is what passes for project management. I don't know what their PMs were smoking but it's just completely wrong and useless. It kind of lives orthogonal to issues (!!!!!) and nothing syncs automatically except with really awkward github actions crap. So, it only serves to add a lot of bureaucracy and busy work without actually addressing the core problem. A combination of over engineered and inadequate.
The core issue with Github is that issues are tied to a single code repository. From a planning point of view that is just horrible because I manage a product consisting of multiple code repositories and I need one plan that may involve zero or more code repositories and not several and I don't want to lock in my issues to a single repository before I have even figured out what the plan is. I guess that's what they tried to fix with their project management thingy. Except they messed that up badly.
I'd love a tool that is a bit like Asana but more integrated with pull requests, CI/CD, the notion of work being distributed across multiple code repositories, teams, etc. I don't mean yet another sync thingy that copies tickets from system X to system Y. I would like a one stop shop that can be used throughout the life cycle of a software product from before any code is written until users / customers start reporting issues and everything in between. Doesn't exist.
We've moved to plain markdown in Git(Lab) as Confluence replacement. A CI pipeline compiles it to HTML and hosts it on the web via Material for MkDocs.
It lacks most collaboration options for non-developer users, but we found that they are rarely, if at all, used anyway. Non-developer users can still use an edit button that points to GitLab's web editor and update the docs that way.
I can't suggest a replacement for Jira at this point. I don't think there is one tool to recommend that fits every company's workflow. The other comments seem to have some nice tools to try.
> It lacks most collaboration options for non-developer users, but we found that they are rarely, if at all, used anyway. Non-developer users can still use an edit button that points to GitLab's web editor and update the docs that way.
The wiki uses the same Rich Text editor as known from issue/MR comments, aiding visual editing with context actions - for example, Markdown tables, rows, columns, or uploading and resizing images.
> Material for MkDocs.
I personally love this project. I'm using it for o11y.love and opsindev.news published via GitLab pages. Editing happens mainly in the browser, using the Web IDE.
Gitlab and github are a lot more than simple markdown. They support a lot of additions like equations, and mermaid graphs. The only thing I've used confluence for that won't work in out of the box gitlab is a circuit diagram. And the right way to do that was probably to have the pipeline generate an svg from the circuit simulation model, not draw it.
Despite the "Azure" name, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server), is still a rock-solid on-prem system for git repo hosting, issues/stories/projects, build automation, and the rest - though I feel it has stagnated somewhat, and git integration still feels half-baked compared to TFS's previous SVN-clone, but is still my first-choice for on-prem installs (granted, I'm still wedded to the MSFT stack).
> Who the f wants to waste their day with that UX and feature set?
TFS' UX is hardly any worse than Jira's.
BTW, if your complaint is based on your personal experience dealing with hideously complex Issue/Bug form-fields, "areas", and the like, then that's not so-much an issue with TFS/AzureDevOps, but with your PMs, who are the ones responsible for applying customizations to the built-in workflow forms. The stock workflow forms/fields are a (relative) breeze to use compared to Jira, IMO (but GitHub Issues+Projects are better, I agree).
Having been forced to daily drive both for the past few years, I'd take DevOps over Jira any day. Neither is great, but DevOps has had 100% fewer incidents of adding a comment to the wrong issue because of a dog slow UI that's chock full of race conditions.
If you have access to Azure DevOps Server your company likely also has access in its existing plans to GitHub Enterprise (on-prem) as well. GitHub Enterprise is usually about 6 to 9 months behind GitHub "Regular", but that's quite a bit better than Azure DevOps "Regular" which now seems destined to be 2-3 years behind GitHub and however far Azure DevOps Server trails behind that.
Microsoft is still playing "will they/won't they" with killing Azure DevOps for whatever reasons make sense mostly only to themselves, but it is hard not to wonder if the writing is on the wall to migrate to something like GitHub Enterprise sooner rather than later.
(Arguably yes, running GHE is different than Azure DevOps Server, as it is still mostly not Microsoft-stack. But I'm told they package it in a friendly enough way that even companies deep in Microsoft-stack-only don't have too many problems.)
I keep hearing rumors that I can’t corroborate that the decision has already been made to kill Azure DevOps but that there won’t be an announcement until there’s a timeline. I’ve never seen it in black and white. I’ve seen that comment several times on HN, but it’s always so couched that it’s sort of useless.
It seems like one of those rumors that doesn’t die, and then just becomes self-fulfilling if they ever do announce it.
Microsoft's "on the record" voice is always "Azure DevOps is alive and has an active roadmap".
You can read that roadmap for yourself. It is kept in a GitHub repository. Last time I checked this year the last commit was sometime in 2020. The last group of features that loudly launched for Azure DevOps were branded "GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps". (This is where I get the 2-3 years behind GitHub metric.) Microsoft's actions seem to be speaking a lot louder than their "on the record" words.
I've heard from multiple "off the record" sources who are entirely hearsay and I cannot name names that "Yes, of course Azure DevOps is dead."
The best, I can say, as mostly an outsider is that Azure DevOps is at least "undead" and definitely in some sort of zombie state. I've got an unsubstantiated feeling, again as mostly an outsider, that Microsoft is somehow superstitious about Azure DevOps' home office (Microsoft office in North Carolina was founded out of Microsoft's source control dreams) and is afraid to kill it.
I used to work at Microsoft, though I left a few years before MS purchased GitHub. Post-2010s, Microsoft was still migrating many products away from Perforce/SourceDepot and into TFS, and then TFS+git around ~2015. Microsoft hacked TFS to be a git server so they could continue to use TFS for work-item/project-tracking (and no-one wanted to go back to Product Studio). That’s TFS’ strength, as far as Microsoft is concerned, because git hosting is a trivially fungible feature here - whereas GitHub’s Issues only works well for small teams and really doesn’t scale to projects on the scale of Windows or Office.
…but I’ve noticed that GitHub’s recently (since 2020?) has really being fleshing-out their Projects/Issues - it’s not quite as flexible as TFS/AzDO’s Work-Items but on-track to reach parity in a few more years, I reckon.
So that’s my pet-theory: eventually GitHub (and GitHub Enterprise) will reach “good-enough” parity with AzDO for Issues/Work-Items/Project management - and as soon as that happens I fully expect AzDO to die an unceremonious death (because MS doesn’t want to spook the many Enterprise(TM) customers who still bankroll it). We may-or-may-not see some improvement in AzDO-to-GitHub migration tooling, as that that comes down to what side of the bed the Director of the ALM team woke up on that morning.
Yeah, GitHub Projects/Issues have picked up a lot of "features" that only a (Microsoft) PM could love. Many of them don't even light up unless you are in a paid organization (or GitHub Enterprise) (not just a paid account, but a paid organization) so probably a lot of GitHub users probably don't even realize how much GitHub now has feature "parity" with Jira or AzDO. (Nor how quickly that has happened.)
I'm mostly aware of it from GitHub Universe and Microsoft BUILD demonstration videos. Both of which give me a lot of signals that Microsoft internally has moved a lot faster to GitHub than it did from predecessors to TFS/TFS+git. Some of the teams talking about it are huge ones (both in terms of size but also in terms of weight internal/external to the company).
From their own hype videos in the virtual sides of the two conferences, I certainly get the impression they reached "good enough" feature "parity" with AzDO Work Items internally a year or two ago, at least. That doesn't seem like the reason they keep saying AzDO is still alive.
I do realize that AzDO has some big enough Enterprise customers though that not spooking them can be a big reason for the weird messaging despite their overt actions and all the subtle hints that AzDO is dead. But also, my understanding is that many of those customers don't entirely care if a migration needs to happen so long as they are given a migration with a far enough out deadline. [1] I know some companies seem to be acting more spooked that there isn't a deadline yet for AzDO's shutdown. (It was a factor in my last employer migrating to Atlassian's terrible products for everything but repository hosting after years in AzDO [after years in Bitbucket and Atlassian's terrible products and hating them; vicious cycle].)
I obviously don't know what Microsoft is truly waiting for at this point to kill AzDO, which gets back to that feeling that it is something fundamentally weirder such as a superstition.
[1] Case in point: no one seems to be shouting too much about the crazy Azure AD to Entra shenanigans because it has dates and timelines! The timelines don't even make sense: among other things, Azure AD B2B and Azure AD B2C both get marketed as "deprecated" months before their Entra counterparts are expected to leave "Beta" or "Preview" statuses and even more months before automated migration tools are expected to be available. But it is all a planned migration and that makes all the difference.
It's nice, has most of Jira features that were important for my org. Philosophy is bit different in some parts (eg. backlog management), so there was some complaining, but overall it's ok.
Only one major complaint: For main license, you can buy and own license for selfhosted version. However for helpdesk addon it's subscription only, which sucks a lot. For Spaces they have only subscription-based pricing, even when self-hosted. I hope they don't go Atlassian way.
Can anyone speak about YouTrack/Space's warts? The marketing blurbs makes Space + YouTrack look like a decent replacement for Jira + Confluence + Bitbucket, but I don't recall ever hearing a developer talk about it.
YouTrack is pretty great. So is TeamCity and they integrate well. The JetBrains instance is open so you can just sign up for an account there and play with it. Also you can run them both on-prem and they're pretty easy to admin if you do.
Space I haven't used. It seems like an attempt to reinvent both products in a GitLab style product which is a pity because the JetBrains tools are very mature and I don't think they needed a new product.
A decade ago when we used JIRA team-wide and not org-wide, some teams internally preferred YouTrack so they used that (until the whole org moved to JIRA). What bothered me personally was that fields were basically "unschema'd" and everything suggested every value -- everything was effectively a label field -- including typos, which are more common in a company where English is second language.
But that was a decade ago, and it could've been a misconfiguration on that team's part. It was also back when JIRA was more of a structured database with real issue types and not stories atop stories for all eternity.
Project Managers are missing some features, but the devs (including me) like it a lot more due to integrating so well with PRs/commits.