I like both JIRA and Confluence. I think many bad feelings towards JIRA are actually related to bad configuration. Like customizing the issues to add too many mandatory fields or creating a process that does not really match how people are working in practise.
JIRA configuration is pain. Unless you are large enough to afford a dedicated JIRA admin, it would likely make sense to just pay for somebody once in a while to implement the stuff you want.
All my bad feelings are almost completely related to the horrible search, terrible UI and the hilariously bad performance of the app. The web app has two completely different markdown adjacent formats that are not compatible with each other so you get text rendered one way when you create a ticket and another when you edit it later. Search is almost never helpful beyond finding recent tickets. Multiple pages take so long to load abs the new UI is so laggy and busted
- default text size is too small, text block widths are often not constrained enough getting the "slashdot unreadability effect"
- 0.5s+ lag when clicking any textbox
- 1s+ lag when clicking any dropdown
- 1s+ lag delay when grabbing and trying to drag-and-drop to reorder items in the backlog
- 2s delay when clicking in an issue in the backlog before the loading starts (add about 2s more for the loading itself)
- "Link issue" using a hyperlink icon. The whole idea of using the word "link" to talk about related issues without spending some time to think whether that's really confusing with hyperlinking
- Error messages about what "might" be wrong with things rather than what is actually wrong: "We couldn't save your comment, it might be empty or have invalid formatting". Well which one is it? Did you really have trouble deciding whether my comment is empty or not? Be specific and tell me what exactly is wrong, or do you want me to binary-search / bisect myself?
I think most of the issues can be fixed by completely rewriting the frontend.
Jira? Yes! Properly self hosted with skilled SysAdmins which don't allow every employee to install their favorite plugin. Then it runs fast and reliably.
The UI is very configurable and has many power user tools, like their search is very good and has so many features.
The Language for writing text is bad and sadly not even the same on other Atlassian products. Please just let me write markdown.
Confluence is another story. It is one of the better tools for documentation, but it's generally slow no matter who runs it. It has very quirky drawbacks like a page needing to have a unique name in a space even if it is in a completely different tree structure.
The editor itself from confluence hangs so much and has destroyed pages multiple times for me, thankfully the history is decent and you can recover usually.
I don't know anybody that likes using JIRA, but to be fair I don't know anybody that likes to use Asana either.
I might be wrong, but I think those tools are dedicated to something people don't like to do by default (planning, going through bureaucratic processes), so they don't like the tool either.
But for some reason, they convince themselves that they don't like to go through Bureaucratic Processes because of JIRA/Asana/etc... and that if only the tool was better it would be a breeze, when in my experience the process is the real issue, rarely the tooling (even though it surely can be improved)
Asana shows a flying unicorn when you complete a task. Makes my day every time.
A bit more seriously - it's not only about Bureaucratic Processes. UX matters. If you need to deal with "Bureaucratic Processes" using a terrible UI, it makes things worse.
Jira's UI is notoriously bad. Very slow. And the worst of all are the UX inconsistencies in Atlassian's products. Things behaving differently in Jira vs Confluence or even within Jira itself. For example, being able to use markdown when creating an issue but not when editing it (or vice versa, I don't remember).
I hate it. Being forced to document crap in a pile of tens of thousands of documented things is insanity. Nobody reads that stuff, but because it's documented, you can always say: "Wait, did you not read the documentation?"
Work goes faster if you keep it in small teams and let them self-organise.
I love this approach the team can pick which tooling they want to use, github wiki, readthedocs, docx on FTP, whatever works best for them. Each teams has its requirements. I don't see PMs using git/markdown to write their documentation, the same way don't make me write an API documentation on Confluence.
I liked it when I first switched to it from whatever was I was using ~2010 (Intervals, I think…). It still is somewhat better than a lot of task management/workflow software that you commonly find in enterprise. But it’s kinda just become another version of the thing it was supposed to destroy. The huge, complicated, bureaucracy management system.
I use Jira at work with a workflow that is highly customized to our development workflow, and I like using it.
There are some annoying aspects, but it's way better for our workflow than anything else I've tried (which includes github issues, gitlab issues, OTRS, RT, trac and a few others I've forgotten by now).
Over the past few years I've gone from despising Confluence to really, genuinely enjoying authoring in it. I find the syntax and shortcuts easy to remember and the UI pleasant. Hell, I even like the iOS app.
Jira and Bitbucket, OTOH, the less said about them the better.
Confluence has always confused me. Every aspect of the product sucked when I used it several years ago.
There was little to no discoverability, it was slow as shit and the editing tools weren't that good. The integrations to their other products were at the time pretty much non-existing as well. Always felt like it was really basic which made me wonder how it could be so slow.
Any other wiki software were probably better. Mediawiki is free but people still paid for Confluence.
I don't get why people used it and still use it to this day. I dislike pretty much every of their products though, they all suck in my opinion and I have written several JIRA plugins so I had extensive experience with it.
I like Confluence. It does the job and is simple to use. I use it at home for general household stuff and projects.
At work we are using a combination of notion and gitlab wiki and are probably going to move to confluence. Gitlab wiki is especially hard to use and thus stuff is under-documented. eg I'm a little project right now, we could use about 20 pages to document bits of it, this is such a pain in gitlab wiki.
I use Jira, it is okay. I think a lot of people here hate it because they associate it with Enterprise paperwork and rules.
I tolerate Jira (even though it is too slow and clunky to me). But I despise everything else from Atlassian. I don't understand how people can stand using Confluence or Bitbucket.
Anyone using these products has no choice, so, I would say that these products having any API at all that can cobble together automation is a huge blessing.
We have wrapper functions that allow us to automate all the painful interactions with atlassian software. None of them are clever in any way; they're rote. But without them, we weren't using the services fully, which is sophomoric since we don't have freedom to use other services.
I really liked, when I used them, how well integrated all the tools were: BitBucket, JIRA, Confluence...
You could see PRs related to a given ticket, see tickets in wiki, I'm sure it integrates well with CI (Bamboo/Pipelines?), etc. It might seem small, but such integration makes work more pleasant and comfortable.
Like many, I would rejoice to see Jira die in a fire.
But the fact is that if that happened, another tool would be used instead, and the same dysfunctional management processes would just re-emerge. Jira makes micromanagy bureaucratic process easy, but does not in itself cause it.
I love JIRA. It's versatile, as simple or complex as we need, integrates with many things and drives processes in the org.
People have many objections to using JIRA but often these are not about the tool but about the management procedures the tool serves.
I don't mind Jira. We're using Github Projects (because for OSS project where people report issues to the repo) and while new Projects has gotten significantly better, I do still miss some of the planning views that Jira gives you.
I have learned a lot of the hate towards jira including my own is the difference between a well setup config vs a bad one or where many people are, using it out of the bud.
