In my day job, we use Jira to manage our software development projects. For various things at home, I would also like to use a ticket system, And while I wholeheartedly hate Jira, compared to the open source alternatives I found, it is still the best system.
Is anyone aware of a good alternative that provides a good backlog view, a Kanban board, and the possibility to group tickets together in epics and sagas?
Also check out: https://github.com/makeplane/plane
GitLab can do all of this. But iirc the Epic feature is paywalled. As for a plain ticketing system(that can integrate with GitLab, try Zammad.
get this, we use jira in hw development. it sucks btw
Redmine is the top self-hosted alternative to Jira
Holy wow that UI is a blast from the past
Yep, I agree, UI looks a bit old but reacts quickly so it’s nice to use. You need to add plugins for some features like kanban IIRC.
When JIRA practically stopped supporting self-hosted installations we migrated to YouTrack and it worked quite well. Not as powerful, but the simplicity also comes as an advantage.
Also running youtrack here and I’m quite happy about it. It lacks some features though that seem quite basic to me. E.g. you can’t sort knowledge base articles alphabetically and in the Gantt chart you can’t show the due date of an issue
Also the android app crashes all the time
The knowledge base really could use a lot of improvement. The basic ticketing and agile board system works quite well though.
Thanks for sharing! I’ve already used Taiga, which is super cute, for Scrum, but didn’t know about Vikunja. Looks really cool for stuff that doesn’t warrant its own project.
Taiga looks interesting, I will give it a spin!
Wanted to look at Taiga a bit and then saw this:
That’s a no for me, dawg.
I mean, technically they could have hyper agile teams that use taiga there?
When they say agile they don’t mean that the company is flexible and adjusts to new situations quickly.
They mean that those companies are some of the most proficient in Agile software development methodology.
To be fair I see how people can get them confused. But in the context of work tracking they clearly mean the latter.
You can learn more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
Look man I know what Agile is, and I can guarantee fucking Halliburton is not amongst the most Agile companies in software. I’ve worked for government contractors (not defense contractors, sorry, I like my soul right where it is). But even if they were, why the fuck would you advertise it as if it’s a great thing they’re using your software?
I agree that taiga shouldn’t feature Haliburton.
This all bearing said do you really think the people working on Taiga seek to be more evil and more terrible?
The people working on the software might not, but the pointy headed managers obviously are reaching for it, and in the end the people working on the software’s opinions don’t matter in the least.
For property software you would be right. Yah.
But it’s open source AGPL stuff. Full time devs improving AGPL code is good even with pointy haired managers.
This all being said I don’t think even the managers aim to become more evil and more terrible as their goal.
I self-host Forgejo and use its issues for this purpose, though it’s lacking if you need to track work centrally across repos.
OpenProject is what you’re looking for.
When I tried it, it was quite weird and unintuitive to me, also the Community Edition lacks quite a lot of features.
Huly is worth checking out. We’ve been on it for about a year. They’re in super active developments so features are coming rapidly, sometimes breaking or requiring migrations.
They seem to be in bed with livekit.io and OpenAI. They’re also still using Telegram and X. That means Huly isn’t a fit replacement for anything.
That project looks great. If they ever move their code out of Github I would contribute.
I think Request Tracker is the closest thing to Jira, whether it’s good or bad is an open question (for me).
It’s strictly a ticket system without any pm/kanban, but I really like RT request tracker.
Trac has backlog and milestones (for epics and sagas) and plugins offer kanbans. It’s been OK when I’ve used it, including hosting one.
God no
TIL Jira isn’t selfhosted anymore?
They require an “data center” subscription now, and they will end support for that in 2029. So self hosting jira is basically not an option anymore.
Comically, the organization with the worst history for virtualization now doubled-down on SAAS. This is certainly going well.
…and their SAAS version is a terrible pain to use
wekan and Jotty are very lightweight and flexible.
Check out OpenPeoject if you’re wanting something like Jira. Personally, for home/personal tasks, I like the Deck software that comes pre installed with NextCloud. It’s more basic, but I don’t need too many features for my personal stuff; just a kanban board.
I tried Open project, but it was kind of weird. Also, for quite a lot of features, they require you to purchase a license. The community edition feels quite crippled.
