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About Shortcut

Shortcut is a fast project management platform built for today's software team. Free for teams up to 10 users.

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Pros:

Ve used more complex software for ticket management and simpler tools, and Shortcut is the right balance of features, cost and ease of use.

Cons:

Some technical bugs that come about (and no way to avoid upgrading versions) because it's a web app. Mobile app could also use some work.

Shortcut ratings

Average score

Ease of Use
4.4
Customer Service
4.6
Features
4.4
Value for Money
4.5

Likelihood to recommend

8.4/ 10

Shortcut has an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 363 user reviews on Capterra.

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Filter reviews (363)

Shu-Wai
Shu-Wai
Director of Engineering in US
Verified LinkedIn User
Information Technology & Services, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Developer-friendly and hits the Sweet Spot for Features

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

Shortcut is "just right" for our needs, and thinking back about previous companies, would have been perfect in their needs, too. It is much more than a to-do tracker but doesn't overwhelm you with flexibility. My favorite part of this software is that it's story-centric. Epics are available, but they can play a supporting role if needed. Tasks are left to the developer to fill out themselves end up being merely a checklist. This paradigm shifts the focus to deliverables and prevents gamification by closing out menial tasks just to pump up ticket closures. As a bonus, this standardizes the language of Epics/Stories/Tasks. There is no more endless debate on what should be what. The one thing I've always seen with Jira, especially in young teams, is that the flexibility of the product creates unproductive debate and confusion about terminology.

Cons:

This product focuses on product delivery. For more general applications, like issue tracking or process management, it may not be the best for that.

Lee-ann
Director of Business Systems in US
Marketing & Advertising, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Shortcut (previously Clubhouse) has been a great improvement for us.

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: Overall our experience has been great. Less has been falling through the cracks, and we're able to actively manage & prioritize our development with ease. The application is enjoyed by both the development team & the management team, so everyone is benefitting from our switch to Shortcut.

Pros:

1. The app is very easy to configure & set up. 2. The user experience is seamless & functionality is very self-explanatory. 3. There are multiple ways to configure each component, so you can set up the app according to what works best for you & your company. (No "one size fits all" model.) 4. The ability to set up different workflows for different departments has been a huge help for us.

Cons:

1. It's a little hard to envision how each of the components should be set up for your organization when you're first getting in there (i.e., projects, workflows, milestones, epics, stories), so we ended up changing the setup as we went along after the initial configuration. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as it allowed us to improve the way we currently did things. 2. The biggest issue we have now, after using the app for a while, is that stories do not populate into the Gantt charts, only epics. This means if we have one-off tasks that are added as stories, those do not pull into the report we'd like. For that reason, we have to set up an entire epic just to set up a single story, for reporting purposes. I think it would be great if you had the option to pull the Gantt reports at the epic or story-level.

Kirsty
Teacher Support Specialist in US
E-Learning, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

Short may be an overstatement for shortcut

3.0 3 years ago

Pros:

This is an adequate task management/tracking software. It has a fantastic Zendesk integration and multiple customizable fields. It also boasts decent search and filtering functions but it isn't particularly user-friendly and filling out all the fields that make it function well takes a great deal of time (hence the title of this review).

Cons:

There are no AI/smart suggestions for related epic/team fields so every time you make a new ticket you have to search through them by scratch. They also don't offer a great tag database or tag definitions so you have to create naming conventions separately offline. You also can't use rich text in story descriptions.

Benjamin
CEO in US
Computer Software, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Effective Project Management for Small to Large Software Teams

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: I really enjoy using shortcut and it has given us the ability to manage complex projects. I highly recommend it.

Pros:

Whether you’re part of a small software team or you’re integrated into a collection of agile teams at an enterprise software shop - Shortcut makes it easy and intuitive to manage the many integrated software projects of todays micro services oriented development style. We’ve found that Shortcut grew with us from 2 devs to 10 and we expect it to grow with us as we grow to 50.

Cons:

Story management sometimes feels like a full time job, but at least Shortcut makes it a joy. For our open source projects we have a hard time integrating with issues on GitHub where public issues are generated, but for our private projects, the GitHub integration is lightweight and effective.

Justin
Co-Founder & CXO in US
Telecommunications, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Scaled for the complexity of JIRA, but with the best UX possible & no sysadmins needed

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

Every org grows out of Github Issues, Trello, and Asana when they realize a) stories need relationships such as blocking/blocked; b) stories need task checklists; c) different groups have different workflows; d) stories are often mini-project briefs and need to read as such. However, once you find yourself in JIRA, which you've been told is the mature platform for mature orgs, you're operating a nuclear submarine, you need 3 sysadmins, nobody can find anything, and you want to throw your computer out the window. SC has the infrastructure but with the user-friendliness of everyday software. Think of how Mixpanel took what Omniture was doing and made it accessible to the everyday marketer. That's what Shortcut does for eng/prod teams. No sysadmin needed, everyone gets it. Their API is well-documented and incredible. We do tons with Zapier because of how much they expose. Their CS team is spectacular, inquisitive, friendly, helpful. They want their customers to succeed. They have a one-click signup link which has made our onboarding process much faster They have templated stories and checklists which we use across the org for everything from product launches through onboarding/offboarding hires.

Cons:

very few dislikes. it's amazing. if i have to force criticism: - If you work cross-departmentally, avoid multiple workflows, or you'll be having to look at multiple kanban boards daily - the "dashboard" (home) isn't as useful as it seems like it should be so we all either use iterations or stories view for our daily lens - shortcut and productboard both boast integration, but it's not great, and i think this is the fault of productboard but really these criticisms represent like 5% negative compared to 95% enthusiastic positive

Josh
Engineering Director in US
Computer Software, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Took of our Trade

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: One spot for all teams to work together for client success is always going to be a win for a team.

Pros:

Shortcut does a great job allowing us to manage all facets of our product and being multiple teams together for what is most important, client and end user satisfaction. It follows standard agile flow but allows flexibility where engineers and non-engineers can use it alike. We also utilize their API for templates epics and stories and it is great to work with. Support team and client success managers have been a pleasure to work with when we’ve had conversations. They always are able to handle a situation or get us in touch with someone who can. Lastly the product is always evolving and they are very transparent through their website and slack channel of what is coming next to make your life better!

Cons:

Some things were less flexible such as naming conventions and required fields on stories/epics, but these are getting worked out over time (for ex projects are not required any more)

De Ville
CTO in Canada
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Clubhouse is all the software project management you need without the clutter and noise

5.0 5 years ago

Comments: Clubhouse has been a game-changer for us since we migrated from JIRA. We looked for something that was more lightweight, but still afforded us all the features we need to track our software projects. This is exactly what Clubhouse delivered, and more. I love the fact that Clubhouse gives you everything you need to track a project from the granularity of a sub-task, all the way up to milestones. This makes it easy to distinguish the forest from the trees, and present the relevant story to stakeholders at different levels. We haven't regretted the move to Clubhouse for a single moment, and we're always delighted with the new features that are regularly released. Simply put, Clubhouse gets out of your way very quickly and lets you get on with your actual goal: creating great software.

Pros:

- Clean user interface - Fast search - Continuously adding of new, useful features - Great integrations - Free for teams of up to 10 users

Cons:

- This is mostly me nitpicking, but I'd say reporting. It has been improving over time though. - It would also be great if there was a tool for simplifying backlog grooming

Thomas
Developer in US
Automotive, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) is a great task management tool for development teams

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

Before switching to Shortcut, we used Jira. While Jira has plenty of features, we found it a bit cumbersome and the performance of the interface was atrocious (everything single task was incredibly slow, even the most basic activities had a noticeable delay). The first major benefit we saw with Shortcut was the speed of interaction - instead of waiting for the interface to catch up, we could just log in and get things done. The integrations with various source control platforms (we use the Gitlab integration) also helps keep task statuses up to date without even having to open the web interface. Overall the speed of the interface and the available integrations lead to a feeling that Shortcut never "gets in our way".

Cons:

We started out paying for Shortcut (when it was still called Clubhouse), but were soon switched to a free plan without even having to ask. Although this was a nice gesture on their part, they then released a beta of their new product called Write. This beta is only available for paying users, which is understandable, but having been moved to a free plan meant we couldn't access it. This isn't a major issue, but starting our subscription back up would require going through the approval process with our accounting department again so we've just stayed on the free plan without access to Write so far.

Freddie
Product Manager in US
Financial Services, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Shortcut is a great tool for small companies!

4.0 3 years ago

Pros:

Many of the features of this software are useful to our company. Our team has come to heavily rely on the roadmap view and reporting tools. These features have kept our company on track and increased our velocity in immeasurable ways.

Cons:

A few of the features our team feels are missing from Shortcut are custom fields and release management. If our team was able to have a reliable release management system, it would be very impactful to our team and customers.

Cindy
Product Manager in Australia
Financial Services, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Simple to use and provides enough features to run and manage sprints for a small team

4.0 2 years ago

Pros:

- Simple to learn and navigate so the team could quickly start using the product after switching- Love the dark mode and the colour coding of different story types i.e bug, feature or chore so it's easy to see things at the high level- Easy to create sprints and I like the summaries provided on the story points

Cons:

- You can only write stories in markdown text. Not a big issue since I've become really good at it! But it'd be good if there was a text editor instead- Sometimes when I create a story and I accidentally click out of it, I lose the progress. It'd be good if they had a draft functionality where the stories get created as a draft straight away

Kateřina
Study Coordinator in Czechia
Hospital & Health Care, 1,001–5,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Shortcut Review

5.0 2 years ago

Pros:

Shortcut is a project management tool which is very easy to use and is suitable for agile teams. It also integrates with a lot of third-party tools, e.g. Slack, which works just fine and is helpful.

Cons:

I didn't find any disadvantages in particular. However, the free plan is unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) quite limited.

Manish
Software Engineer in India
Hospital & Health Care, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

A very effective management tool

5.0 2 years ago

Pros:

This software has many cool features which helps make my development process easy and fun, and this is very important because you don't wanna worry about other things when you are busy with your product. The task tracking feature is something I love, making a list of sub-tasks in a task is awesome it helps break down and simplify task. It's super easy to use Shortcut features without going into much details as it's self reflective.

Cons:

As of right now I haven't across anything that is annoying or considered as disadvantage. I'm sure team Shortcut will be up for any feedback.

Sean
CTO in Canada
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Clubhouse vs Jira? Clubhouse wins.

5.0 6 years ago

Comments: I have previously used Fogbugz, Jira, Trello, and a few others, and Clubhouse is the clear winner. You will find some of what I mention here applicable to something like Jira; contains depth, customer service request and issue tracking are highly visible, can be simple to use. But it would be like saying a burger from McDonald's is the same as the burger from Raoul's in NY; they both have buns, a meat patty, and you can create depth with the condiments! You could say that, but you'd be a fool. Are you a large org with cash to burn, needing extreme amounts of control, and customization, with mandated workflows? Jira has your answer. Are you a small/medium team that needs a fantastic feature & project tracking tool that works great out of the box? Clubhouse is hands down the best.

Pros:

I find the product to be very simple at the surface with deep capabilities. Previously, we were using Jira and I found the software to be overkill for many of the tasks that we perform. Additionally, so much of Jira's useful functionality (and the Atlassian suite as a whole) is hidden behind paywalls, 3rd party addon services, and little gouges along the way. I absolutely abhor that practice so finding Clubhouse was a godsend. Customer service has been prompt and helpful, and though they have not implemented my feature request, I at least know that it has been prioritized. Team collaboration is great with their Slack integration. My team posts bugs, hotfixes, feature requests in the proper project, and I am automatically notified via Slack. The whole team has visibility to their request's progress.

Cons:

Navigating the nomenclature of Stories, Epics, Projects, Milestones, and how they should fit together is a bit taxing at first and takes getting used to. It would be helpful to have visual guides for someone like myself, but the documentation is available and well written. This is where I discovered the depth of capabilities in Clubhouse. You can very simply manage your project with Stories, and you can very finely tune your progress and visibility by getting to know these different groupings.

Paige
Product Manager in US
Education Management, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Shortcut makes managing products, projects, and people simple

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: Shortcut has helped my team stay organized, connected, and informed in a hybrid work environment. Everyday they can see who is working on what, who needs reviews or help, and what we’ve accomplished. I run 2 large scale applications and Shortcut has given my team the transparency it needs to operate at a high cadence.

Pros:

I have found that the ability for me to create story templates for my team has improved the quality of the requirements for features, increased the number of test cases we identify before implementation, and has decreased the amount of time it takes my engineers to push fixes for bugs.

Cons:

I would say one thing I feel is missing is the ability to see status of team members across multiple workflows. I can click through each one and jot down notes, but when there’s a critical bug it would be nice to just see a birds eye view of who’s working on what so I know who to give it to.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Information Technology & Services, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

A relaxing experience

4.0 3 years ago

Comments: Overall when I use Shortcut I feel relaxed compared to other product tools. While in other tools I feel like I am fighting the software generally I feel that Shortcut is just doing what I need to. It sounds silly but not being frustrated is a great thing!!

Pros:

- I have like many in product at one point or another used Jira - It's way smoother and way less. clunky then jira. Pages are more responsive and load quicker with less jumping - Creating tickets is easy - The UI is visually appealing

Cons:

- Lacking integration compared to Jira - Sometimes the auto-save fails and you lose work - sometimes tickets you create are lost in a void if not triaged correctly

Alan
Alan
Product Manager in US
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Product Management Made Easy!

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: I am a bit newer to the PM world, but jumping into Clubhouse and getting going was quite easy! It's helped me set some order to my projects and collaborate with the proper people in a timely manner.

Pros:

Once you understand the structure of the application, like the epics, stories, and iterations, it becomes very easy to navigate. The collaboration with team members and tracking of features or bugs makes it very valuable for our dev and product teams!

Cons:

You do get a lot of email notifications when you are mentioned or anything related to you is updated, it would be nice to combine these notifications into one email every couple of hours or so.

Greg
CEO in US
Marketing & Advertising, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Shorcut - Flexible and Scalable

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: We have used 4 different tools and Shortcut is by far our favorite.

Pros:

The flexibility and scalability. We can get it to work as we do.

Cons:

Prioritization could be a bit better for our needs. Gantt isn't where would like it, that said, it's probably more about how we're using it.

Kerry
Kerry
Scrum Master in US
Verified LinkedIn User
Newspapers, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

Get up and running in 1 day

5.0 6 years ago

Comments: Clubhouse is allowing us to capture user stories on the fly, and keep those stories organized. We are able to create custom swim lanes that match our process perfectly, so that the stories can flow from one step to the next easily until they are done. We use the reporting on a daily basis to look at our burndown chart, and to track our stats for each sprint. It is easy to add tasks for each other to complete, and to leave notes and comments for each other within the stories. It helps keep all the communication for each story in one place, and lets us easily see what is going on with them at any point in time. And it's REALLY easy to use, so we actually use it! Also, we love having the Milestones feature where we can keep the big items on our roadmap and easily see our progress towards them. SO much better than having a separate roadmap tool that we never look at. I recommend it to anyone.

Pros:

We're a scrum team developing software in the news industry. We switched from PivotalTracker to Clubhouse, and the ease of setup and how quickly we were able to learn the product was amazing. It took me weeks to get a grasp of PivotalTracker, but within a morning we were up and running on Clubhouse and loving it. The software looks clean, appealing, and intuitive, and it is so easy to learn and use that you will wonder why you used anything else ever. And the price point is easy to swallow, too. We love it!

Cons:

Clubhouse is still missing robust sprint related tools. There are great workarounds in place, and they will be releasing those soon, so no hesitation on recommending it. But once they roll those features out it will be even better.

Anna
Software Engineer in US
Computer Software, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Shortcut helps my team to stay on track and deliver on time

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: My engineering team uses Shortcut largely for task management, issue tracking and project planning. As a technical lead on multiple larger scale projects, I've found it essential to keeping the team on track.

Pros:

Compared to other similar systems, I've found Shortcut's UI to be welcoming and intuitive. Their feature releases are innovative, and their product team has built something that makes work feel more fun. I especially love the Git widget that makes it easy to copy suggested branch names.

Cons:

The GitHub integration seems to still be linking to CH- prefix tickets. But that is very minor.

Andrew
Software Developer in US
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Decent off the shelf solution for small companies

4.0 3 years ago

Pros:

It's amazing to just have everything work logically out of the box. The API access allowed me to integrate Shortcut with my tooling to make tagging commits and code far simpler than ever before.

Cons:

There's definitely a lot of room for improvement with auxiliary features like the built-in WYSIWYG document editor, and sometimes the rigidity of the project layout does get somewhat cumbersome if you ever need to deviate slightly from the main feature set.

Wanja
Product owner in Germany
Financial Services, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Impressive

5.0 2 years ago

Pros:

From usability and technical perspective this is really an amazing piece of software. The easiness to never having to save something is extremely impressive

Cons:

Moving stories between different Workflows is sometimes a bit annoying. Also it would be really awesome if you could apply your own prioritsation scheme and rank for it.

Davis
Manager, Data & Integration in US
Health, Wellness & Fitness, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Shortcut is the easiest to use and fastest project management tool available

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

I love the interface. It's fast. It's simple. It's as feature rich as we need it to be for the most part. Most integrations necessary for our business are there (GitHub, Slack, Teams). Working with stories and tickets is far simpler than it ever was with JIRA.

Cons:

Building custom reports and doing custom searches for old stories for reporting purposes isn't great. It's fast, but I'm not sure what options I have available to search on.

Samantha
Mobile Dev in US
Banking, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

Simple fixes would make it awesome!!

4.0 3 years ago

Pros:

The user interface was great. Buttons made sense and I had a general idea of how to use it upon first look.

Cons:

The terminology! All of the agile terminology is flipped or thrown out in shortcut and it makes it so confusing. Why not stick to the commonly accepted agile terms instead of creating new ones and redefining old ones. Adds a huge learning curve that doesn't need to be there.

Rafael
Marketing Leader in Brazil
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Thas the easiest way to manage and track your team work

5.0 2 years ago

Pros:

I like how easelly is to edit, tracking and manage your Projects anda tasks. We also manage our OKRs, so its very simple to connect those simple tasks to the strategic goals.

Cons:

The dashboard is very complex, I Know its because there are man alternatives and posibilities, but i like simple things, streight to the point, previous setups etc.

Benjamin
Sr. Product Manager in US
Computer Software, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

A Reliable, Scalable, Continuously Improved Product

5.0 6 years ago

Pros:

As a product manager, I love the usability of Clubhouse (CH). Having come from competitive products such as JIRA, Rally, Pivotal Tracker, etc., CH feels far more intuitive and the user workflows well thought through. I greatly appreciate the ongoing development by the CH team. It's always a pleasure seeing regular alerts come in with rather material improvements.

Cons:

Greater attention to how cross-team and cross-account collaborate using the software is a gap for me. Our business has a 2 or 3 different CH accounts mainly due to security needs (limiting certain access for groups of individuals). Which leads me to an additional thought which is, the ability to configure more granular security levels within CH is limited. Especially for an organization working predominantly with enterprise customers, we tend to have highly regulated standards related to third-party approved solutions.