[HN Gopher] Show HN: Tara - A free Jira alternative, now with Gi...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Tara - A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab
Author : iba99
Score : 133 points
Date : 2020-10-29 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tara.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tara.ai)
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| This thing is in absolutely no way a Jira alternative.
|
| (YouTrack is the Jira alternative, but it's not free.)
| iba99 wrote:
| For us, the key was to build a simple Jira alternative. A good
| PM tool should do the basics, and get out of the way.
|
| Personal opinion, so many PM tools tend to be bloated and each
| view ends up causing more mental overload for the team, EM and
| PM.
|
| We've tried to focus on speed with performance and keeping
| things simple.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| "Simple" isn't a Jira alternative; not being "simple" is
| Jira's entire raison d'etre.
|
| If you want "simple" there are already a thousand and one
| options available, but alternatives to Jira are extremely
| rare. This is how Atlassian captured the market.
|
| So in my opinion you should really change your marketing, as
| it is it really gives off a false advertising vibe.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Jira is a project management tool? I think that one of the
| only things we don't use it for.
| taejavu wrote:
| It's a great operating system, lacking only a decent
| project management tool.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| We went from Jira to Tara (with Notion in the middle), and the
| problem is everyone thinks they need Jira, and a huge swath of
| people really don't. Jira is a complex product and those
| complexities are probably needed by some people.
|
| OTOH, Tara's simplicity is godsent, especially as a small team.
| The comparison makes sense to me.
| iba99 wrote:
| Hey PJ! We've loved having Placenote on board. Hoping the new
| slack integration works well for you guys- if not just ping!
| FYI - notifications on sprint reports are shipping in 2
| weeks.
| poleapple wrote:
| Does Tara support a public facing board to capture bugs feature
| requests from our users? We would like to be able to link public
| facing issues to internal issues.
| iba99 wrote:
| Not yet but it's on the roadmap! Several pen source
| repositories are requesting this feature as well, to monitor
| development with their contributors and we need to ship this.
| We've discovered there are very few options for open source
| communities to monitor and track/report on progress - and the
| cost for hundreds of contributors can become prohibitive with
| other PM tools.
| poleapple wrote:
| Thanks for the reply.
| BtM909 wrote:
| @iba99, what tool did you use to create (or how did you create)
| the promo video on the homepage?
|
| I like the style :)
| iba99 wrote:
| Framer!
| flixic wrote:
| "Free" is the worst pricing of all.
|
| Open-source is great. One time purchase price is great for
| products that don't require maintenance. Subscription pricing is
| perfectly valid for online services that are not open-source.
|
| Free? Free is the worst. I don't get any trust that the service
| will stay around, it can completely change along the way to
| "paid", and I don't get to keep anything in that case.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| FWIW, they explain exactly how they'll make money in the
| website (under Pricing) and in this thread.
| masukomi wrote:
| we hope to get you dependent upon our product, and in the
| meantime come up with something we hope you'll be willing to
| pay for is not the most confidence inducing of business
| plans. Also, if the current plans are "free forever" have no
| caps on users or much of anything else and are good enough to
| use until they actually finish off the things worth paying
| for then how many folks are actually going to be inclined to
| pay for them?
|
| if it's NOT good enough as-is then why bother using it in the
| first place?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| The business model isn't anything special... It's just
| freemium.
|
| Take a look at ProfitWell for instance, they do the same
| thing: Give away their core product then make money on
| upsells.
|
| Also, building the business model as they go is pretty
| normal for a startup.
| autotune wrote:
| Do you offer SSO auth like Okta integration?
| grinich wrote:
| Happy to help! :)
|
| mg@WorkOS.com
| iba99 wrote:
| On the roadmap but looks like we should checkout WorkOS :)
| brorange wrote:
| I don't see anything on the website about Gitlab integration
| iba99 wrote:
| We haven't had time to update the homepage or the overall
| website, just been focusing on shipping early and often.
|
| This was just published - a quick guide on setting up the
| Gitlab webhook: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-
| us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I...
| jahlove wrote:
| "now with Gitlab" is overselling it a bit, no?
| smartbit wrote:
| Gitlab CE free edition has many _plan_ features
| https://about.gitlab.com/features/#plan including Milestones,
| Issue Board, etc. What features is gitlab ce lacking, that
| makes you want to use a 3rd party planning product?
| jahlove wrote:
| sprints, epics, kanban boards.
|
| They seem to use their "milestones" as sprints in the
| examples, but its a little clunky.
| viach wrote:
| > Our free forever plan has unlimited tasks, sprints and
| workspaces, with no user limits.
|
| If so, what obstacles prevent from open sourcing it? At least the
| the part of functionality which is declared to be free forever?
| georgyo wrote:
| It is free now, they never say it will be free forever.
| serial_dev wrote:
| How do you interpret this in the "Pricing" modal:
|
| > Our __free forever __plan has unlimited tasks, sprints and
| workspaces, with no user limits.
| viach wrote:
| I interpret it as "we will somehow monetize your data and
| train our AI model on your activities"
| syed99 wrote:
| Hey! Co-founder/CTO of Tara here.
|
| We take privacy around your data very seriously. We're
| thinking about the ML training model as a "walled
| garden", ie recommendations are based on your past sprint
| activity, effort load, tasks completed during a sprint,
| etc. and are exclusive to your organization.
|
| In the future, if we decided to do benchmarking (for eg
| quick recommendations on how companies in your industry
| are running sprints), we would have a double opt-in. This
| would mean anonymizing the data, and providing the
| recommendations an opt-in. Basically, very similar to how
| google's autocomplete email recommendations work.
| viach wrote:
| Interesting, just had this idea - would it be possible to
| feed the model with wrong data and make it giving bad
| suggestions to competitors who opted in?
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| So a competitor isn't made.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| How is "an AI for teams" a replacement for Jira, which doesn't
| market itself as an AI at all? I'm looking at your features and I
| don't see anywhere that AI plays a role in the core offering? Can
| you provide more info on how this is your distinguishing feature?
| gorpomon wrote:
| It's hard to find but if you click pricing, it pops up a modal
| with a FAQ:
|
| > How will you stay in business?
|
| "We are working on functionality for teams that provides
| visibility and predictability in product development. Features
| may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows.
| This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI
| comes into play."
| eecc wrote:
| Perhaps they're using AI to predict capacity "based on past
| sprint performance"
|
| /s
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| Is that a bad idea?
| syats wrote:
| Just wanted to mention Redmine, which is actually GPL and can be
| installed on premises.
|
| Looks a bit dated and somehow hard to customize.. but at least
| you keep your data (ai models, you say?) you get to keep it when
| "free" is no longer a valid business model.
| mkarliner wrote:
| I really, really don't want another Jira.
| iba99 wrote:
| Nobody does. It's ridiculous that it takes 21 clicks to create
| a sprint. We've literally timed ourselves in every Jira
| instance (cloud and next-gen), and every point of
| configuration, setup or action just takes hours.
|
| A platform for productivity, should have zero to minimal setup,
| built-in views and it should work hard to get out of your way.
|
| If it helps, creating a sprint is 1-click on Tara. And I'm
| hoping it stays that way!
| gjvc wrote:
| https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ is a better option
| 3np wrote:
| Is self-hosted on the roadmap?
| mrweasel wrote:
| One would hope, that's one of Jiras best features, even if
| Atlassian clearly doesn't agree.
|
| I get why they want to compare Tara to Jira, but when you look
| at what companies actually do with Jira, then you'll hit a wall
| rather quickly with pretty much everything else.
|
| Like them or not, Atlassians product integrate rather well, and
| you can "easily" customize them to integrate into pretty much
| everything else. We have Jira integrated into pretty much
| everything from monitoring to invoicing.
|
| You can also customize the snot of internal workflows in Jira,
| per project basis. Even to the point where nothing makes sense
| any more.
|
| Finding a replacement is hard, but relevant given the latest
| pricing changes from Atlassian. That and their idiotic
| prioritisation of their cloud offering. Oh yeah, and no
| Atlassian product has a functional search feature.
| iba99 wrote:
| Hi HN! We last crossed paths 6 months ago, when we shared Tara
| 1.0, a simple Jira alternative.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033387
|
| I'm one of the creators of Tara, and with support and feedback
| from the community, we've been hard at work building this v1.5
| release over 24 sprints and 500+ pull requests. Several of you
| asked for an improved Github sync, PRs and commits tracked in
| tasks, alongside a Gitlab integration. We've discovered from
| teams, just how painful Jira and Confluence can be for tracking
| issues, sprints and docs. Our requirements feature has also gone
| through a bit of a re-design, and with Gitlab, we've also shipped
| commenting, workspaces and teams.
|
| As for why we're working on this problem; we just wanted to use
| something fast, with minimal setup, and built-in views for Git.
| We just couldn't find anything designed from the ground up for
| development teams.
|
| Finally, Tara AI is free for teams and developers. Our free
| forever plan has no limits on users, tasks or workspaces. Looking
| forward, we're working on predictive functionality around effort
| estimation, release planning and engineering analytics.
|
| Thanks for reading!
| loufe wrote:
| Any plans to accommodate privately-hosted git servers?
| iba99 wrote:
| Not yet but it would form part of a future on-prem version of
| Tara, where privately-hosted instances of Github/Gitlab are
| accommodated.
| ApolloRising wrote:
| Just signed up and so far everything worked well. Couple
| tweaks, you may want to use more than 1 letter for the
| workspace name icon in the left menu when a user has a few
| workspaces since naming is unpredictable.
|
| There is also a lot of whitespace between welcome username, and
| the getting started copy on the page.
|
| The home icon and the logo in the left nav do the same thing
| not sure if you need both.
|
| Create task in the backlog should stand out more, I'm a PM and
| that is probably one of the most used options. Is there an
| option to add time to a task or urgency?
|
| Hope this helps, looks like a great start.
| iba99 wrote:
| Hey! So we had the option for a min char count, but users
| wanted to have one letter workspaces (for fun I guess?). We
| need to revamp our navigation anyway since it's hard to know
| where to click to change workspaces.
|
| Good point on the whitespace- will take a look.
|
| As for creating tasks- we're thinking of a sticky area on the
| left (that's always on) to create tasks.
|
| For priority- we're releasing labels in 3 weeks. You should
| be able to assign #P1 or priority overall on different sets
| of tasks. That being said- we are considering adding some
| form of auto recognition or NLP to suggest priority and
| labels automatically based on past tasks. For time, we have 3
| effort options (points, hours or days), we kept it simple to
| create a standup view where you can see how engineers track
| throughout the week.
|
| Let us know which other parts may be tedious. We have more
| work to do!
| ApolloRising wrote:
| Will do and good luck!
| drcongo wrote:
| Can I be the first to ask _how_ it's free?
| freddier wrote:
| The website mentions in the pricing popup:
|
| >We are working on functionality for teams that provides
| visibility and predictability in product development.
| Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team
| workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is
| where the AI comes into play.
|
| I've also been hurt by free tools that disappear after we
| commit to them but since Tara did AI stuff for PM in the past
| maybe they already have it in the roadmap.
| drcongo wrote:
| Thanks
| dnsmichi wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the GitLab integration,
| is there a page on your website describing it in more detail?
| iba99 wrote:
| Just made this live: https://help.tara.ai/hc/en-
| us/articles/360051704951-Gitlab-I...
|
| Basically, RN its a webhook. Once active, you can view merge
| requests related to a task, when synced. Over time, we should
| be releasing a full fledged Gitlab bi-directional sync and
| app (similar to our Github app here:
| https://github.com/marketplace/tara-ai)
|
| Our Github app also allows you to view stale PRs that are
| blocking the sprint. We should have similar functionality for
| Gitlab over the next few wks.
| shadykiller wrote:
| Your careers page is broken :(
| iba99 wrote:
| Hey sorry about that! Fixing now.
| dvt wrote:
| This is a bit of a meta-discussion (apologies to the people at
| Tara, they did a fantastic job!), but is the market really large
| enough for the insane amount of productivity tools that have been
| released over the past few years? From Airtable, to Monday, to
| Hugo, to Tara, to Asana, etc., etc.
|
| It feels like there's a lot of stagnation here, also. If I was
| building a product management tool, I would certainly _not_ make
| it anything like Jira. Jira 's a bit of a "dirty word," anyway --
| it's a monolithic system that seems to suck more productivity
| than it generates. Where's the innovation? The last truly
| revolutionary productivity tool was Slack, and maybe Dropbox
| before that.
|
| I don't mean to throw any shade at the Tara people -- it seems
| like a ton of work went into the product. But I guess I just
| don't really _get_ the state of the market (even though I work as
| an engineer and am often-times force-fed these kinds of tools).
| dindresto wrote:
| From the privacy policy: https://tara.ai/privacy/
|
| "THIS IS A WEBSITE PRIVACY DRAFTED UNDER U.S. LAW. THIS POLICY IS
| NOT INTENDED TO SATISFY ANY 'FAIR PROCESSING NOTICE' OBLIGATIONS
| THAT YOU MAY HAVE UNDER GDPR OR OTHER APPLICABLE NON-US LAW."
|
| As a European, it's very unfortunate that I'm not legally able to
| try your product.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Is there anything that legally (on the user's side) stops a
| European user from using an American service that doesn't
| collect/operate on address information but bills their service
| as "for USA only"?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It might be problematic if they ever want to charge customers
| of their AI service in Europe.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Are you routinely putting GDPR sensitive information into your
| ticket tracking system? I'd suggestion most people shouldn't
| irrespective of GDPR. And if you don't then those terms aren't
| an issue.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| "Free" in the title should not mean free-as-in-been on a website
| called "hacker" news......
| eecc wrote:
| Does it have something like JIRA-1330?
|
| Because that's what makes everything else in Jira a sorry kludge
| iba99 wrote:
| What's your take on changing the status quo around unique
| task/issue ID's?
| valcker wrote:
| Why change something that works? It is much easier/faster to
| use short IDs than long user story titles.
| eecc wrote:
| Can't say anything more than: it depends.
|
| To its essence, an ID allows interested parties to track
| something over time.
|
| If you add additional meanings to an ID - e.g. the parent
| project as Jira does, or the kind as in ServiceNow - these
| can become outdated over time, and deceiving.
|
| I'd say it's ok to change the "external name" as this other
| metadata changes over time (project name, bug, task, story,
| whatever...) but make the obsolete synonyms redirect to the
| currently active name.
| iba99 wrote:
| One way we've tried to fix this is with our slack
| integration. Using the task URL, or ID, the integration
| quickly unfurls context in the task (showing story info)
| and allows quick actions. Same process with
| requirements/epics.
|
| URL unfurling was shipped today with the slack app, and
| quick actions are coming in a few weeks.
| derektwong wrote:
| Curious, do you mean: if a task was part of project ABC,
| with an ID of ABC-123, then if someone moved it into
| project DEF, its ID is now changed to DEF-621, those two
| should be linked, right?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-10-29 23:00 UTC)