YouTrack

A hidden gem in project/bug tracking

Comments: Our overall experience is positive. We run it within our own environments and can't even remember a time when we've ever had any problems or outages. It's rock solid. It's also very performant and does not have unreasonable system requirements. Internal and external users all comment on it's ease of use, particularly as we can hide away the parts which are not so friendly for non-technical users.
We run our projects using the kanban functionality and when we show the boards to some of our clients who are familiar with JIRA often comment on how clean the interface is.

Pros:

It's easy to use not just for techies but end users. We use it as a customer support tool and with a simple cheat sheet, they are up and running very rapidly. The same is not true of JIRA which is a bit overwhelming for non-techies and is also way more expensive.

Cons:

There's very little to find fault with. There are some minor gaps in functionality but nothing that's been a show stopper throughout the years of use.

Lightweight and fast without boundaries

Pros:

It's very easy to use and getting startet. Also it's very flexible, it can fit in so many workflow styles.Also the software itself is pretty lightweight and fast (much better than a certain Australian competitor)

Cons:

When trying to implement SCRUM, we found it difficult to fit YouTrack into this workflow as it had no "borders" for working with sprints and backlogs etc.

Alternatives Considered: Trello

Reasons for Switching to YouTrack: More and better overview of tasks and the project in a whole

Great for project management and tracking

Pros:

The customizable nature of the software makes it a very interesting choice.

Cons:

Some of the plugin functionality can be a little difficult to set up.

Inexpensive alternative to Jira that is a great tool for a startup or SME

Comments: Overall, our transition to YouTrack from Jira / Confluence was at first a good cost conscious upgrade for our team. The smooth onboarding process of migrating documentation and tasks from Jira was quite straight forward. However, after some time using the product everyday it was obvious that it loaded extremely slow (even slower than Jira), this included changing ticket statuses, reporting new tickets, etc.

Pros:

Onboarding was seamless from Jira / Confluence into YouTrack. It was able to ingest all our existing tickets, comments, attachments, custom fields, etc. without almost any manual configuration.

Cons:

The UI is quite confusing and feels clunky. For example when you have multiple projects and looking for the "assigned to me" on individual projects, you have to navigate around before being able to then search. In our opinion.

Alternatives Considered: Jira, monday.com and ClickUp

Reasons for Choosing YouTrack: Initially we were looking for a tool that would be faster and more responsive as we had issues with Jira / Confluence loading tickets very slowly which wasted precious seconds / minutes. Additionally, we didn't want to have to pay for Confluence separately, we wanted an all inclusive tool. YouTrack was an inexpensive alternative that seemed good at the onset.

Switched From: Jira and Confluence

Reasons for Switching to YouTrack: Inexpensive in comparison and the team liked YouTrack

A great bug tracker

Pros:

Can be integrated with VCS repos (such as Github or Gitlab) A lot of custom fields and options to customize issue tracking experience Great customer support from Jetbrains

Cons:

UI a bit minimalistic (it can be a pro for users who like a minimalistic look, but personally I don't like minimal UIs. I prefer more detailed ones)