Trac vs. Redmine vs. JIRA vs. FogBugz for one-man shop?

Question

Background

I am a one-man freelancer looking for a project management software that can provide the following requirements. I have used Trac for about a year now. Tried Redmine and FogBugz on Demand for a couple of weeks. Never tried JIRA before.

Basically, I'm looking for a piece of software that:

1. Facilitates developer-client communication/collaboration
2. Does time tracking

Requirements

• Record time estimates/Time tracking
• Clients must be able to create/edit his own tickets/cases
• Clients must not see Developer created tickets/cases (internal)
• Affordable (price) with multiple clients

Nice-to-haves

• Supports multiple projects in one installation
• Free eclipse integration (Mylyn)
• Easy time-tracking without using the Web UI (Trac's post commit hook or Redmine's commit message scanning)
• Clients can access the Wiki
• Export the data to standard formats

My evaluation

Trac can basically fulfill most of the above requirements, but with lots of customizations and plug-ins that it doesn't feel so clean. One downside is that the main trunk (0.11) has been around for a year or more and I still haven't seen much tendency of any upgrades coming up.

Redmine has the cleanest Web UI. It's design philosophy seems to be the most elegant, with its innovative commit message scanning and stuff. However, the current version doesn't seem to be very mature and stable yet. It doesn't support internal (private) tickets and the time-tracking commit message patch doesn't support the trunk version. The good thing about it is that the main trunk still seems to be actively developed.

FogBugz is actually a very well written piece of software. However the idea of paying $25/month for the client to be able to log-in to the system seems a little bit too far off for an individual developer. The free version supports letting clients create/view their own cases using email, which is a sub-optimal alternative to having a full-fledged list of the user's own cases. That also means clients can't read/write wiki pages. Its time-tracking approach is innovative and good though. However the fact that all the eclipse integration (Bugclipse, Foglyn) are commercial. Yet other investments before I can use my bug-tracker! If I revert back to the Web UI, it's not really a fast rendering Web service. Also, the in-built report functions are excellent (e.g. evidence based scheduling)

JIRA is something I have zero experience with. Can someone with JIRA experience recommend why it might be a good fit for this particular situation?

Question

Can we share experience on this? Any specific plugins/customizations would that would best suit the requirements for this case?

Answer 1

For a one man shop, a Github account (or bitbucket) and pivotal tracker (free) or even Getting things gnome should do.

BTW, there is a Fogbugz free version too. But that may not be the best still for a 1 person developer.

Answer 2

I'm using Redmine on my projects and it's working extremely well, but as you say the lack of internal tickets is somewhat annoying. I do highly recommend it, though, and if you've got any Ruby/Rails experience it's very easy to modify to your needs. Adding private tickets probably wouldn't be that hard.

Answer 3

FogBugz handles what you need. You can enable public submissions of cases, and your clients can use that for sending their own bugs. They will not see your internal cases and even your own notes to their cases.

Re Wiki: you can have multiple wikis. You can give your clients community accounts and configure which wiki is accessible to community users, and which is not.

Re Mylyn integration: if you use free FogBugz on Demand for max two users (which I think would work for you just fine, because community users are not counted in this), then Foglyn is free for you. Both Foglyn and Bugclipse synchronize active case in Eclipse/Mylyn together with Working On feature in FogBugz.

Answer 4

Have a look at DotProject (www.dotproject.net). I has many nice features out of the box. If you miss something, you can always develop it in php as an add on quite easily. There is a dotproject plug in for Eclipse that can be useful to keep track of programmers time reports.

Answer 5

My team and I use Assembla.com. Very affordable, easy to use, and has all the features you're looking for (plus many more).

Answer 6

To answer my own question: I have finally opted to use Redmine and Excel after some evaluation. Redmine for bug-tracking and collaboration; Excel for my personal time-tracking.

Here's my further evaluation:

Trac: Too many plug-ins and customizations before it becomes useful. Doesn't really support one installation for multiple projects and the user account management is clumsy without plug-ins. Again, I think Trac would be really powerful with its extensibility but it's just too much overhead for a one-man shop.

Redmine: Works out of the box for all my other requirements except eclipse-integrated time-tracking. For that matter, I finally decided to roll my own spreadsheet with MS Excel.

FogBugz: Would have been excellent for my purposes except the fact that it doesn't scale to multiple clients. At least not without paying each client $25/month for the system. This would have been the best choice if budget was not a concern.

JIRA: Still haven't tried this one out myself.

This solution works for me, because:

1. Redmine has built-in internal tickets, multiple projects and the innovative commit-message scanning (better than post-commit hooks which sometimes fail)
2. Entering Excel timesheet is not so bad after all, compared to having to use a Web UI.
3. Self-baking timesheet means more flexibility. I'm not tied to tracking time on a per-ticket basis. I can now re-organize to say, how much time I'm spent doing Design/Communication/Testing etc. Those are things I care more about, instead of how much time I've spent on Ticket A vs. Ticket B

However...

This solution obviously doesn't scale. With a team of 4 - 5 developers the customized Excel timesheets will quickly become a nightmare to maintain. I guess that's the scope of a totally different topic, though.

Answer 7

JIRA also offers a free personal license for up to 3 users: http://bit.ly/AyPBT.

Answer 8

even though you already have a solution, i would suggest you try Targetprocess. I am in a similar situation than you and it Works Great for me. It is free for up to 5 Users.

It provides all the Features you mentioned and is highly customizable.

Answer 9

Me drive trac 0.11.2 on a private linux-box since one year with external access thru web. Now we at my company decided to take the wiki & ticketsystem inhouse and are putting a win2008-server box on duty with trac 0.12. (the setup took half a hour). Some plugins are not necessesary because the formely missing functions are now in the main. We will be half a dozend users and so we will be comfortable with trac. Just my two cents Ice

Answer 10

Hi, with JIRA most of ur required requirements are fulfilled (not sure how you see the first one) * Supports multiple projects in one installation can be done * Free eclipse integration (Mylyn) can be done, also linking svn * Easy time-tracking without using the Web UI (Trac's post commit hook or Redmine's commit message scanning) can provide graphs, sometimes needs to create views as you want to see the information * Clients can access the Wiki not sure * Export the data to standard formats yes

Answer 11

See also Freshbooks (www.freshbooks.com). This supports many of these things, and is also handy for invoicing and payments. Ideal for a one-person shop. It doesn't really support issue tracking with the same level of detail as Redmine, but I believe it has a helpdesk/tickets system.

Answer 12

Redmine has time tracking currently, you might want to consider just writing a plugin for eclipse... Would be worth your while, maybe spend a day over a weekend completing it.

Answer 13

I looked a bit at FogBugz. It looks nice and I think it works quite well for smaller companies. However, of course it is a setback that you cannot have as many clients as you wish (if you don't pay). Jira is a good solution, but a bit tricky to set up and at least for what we needed, some extra plugins needed to be purchased. We finally bought VisionProject which works perfectly fine for us, without any plugins. I am not 100% it can do all you want, but at least you can buy 1 license for you (around $30/month, I believe) and you have unlimited number of clients who can report to your system. There is no limit on how many projects you want to create either.

Answer 14

Maybe worth a mention is a tool my colleagues and I have been trying recently, sure we're not a One Man Band but there's only 9 of us :)

The tool is called Smartsheet - smartsheet.com - its like commonsense collab xls with extra. They just launched some new project management features too, but my team's just happy with a common place to share current project files like mockups and psds, with the ability to add discussions on each row in a sheet.

I have my smartsheets set up such that every morning I get an update on anything new that has changed, including attached files and discussions. You can export to xls, import, it ties into Google docs. Probably even more.

It's free for limited use - but we chose to pay next-to-nothing for all of the features and 250GB storage. Basically, we pay for 1 account, that user can 'create' sheets and subscribe unlimited other users who can then administer those sheets (but not create new ones themselves).

Answer 15

i have tried trac some time before, it's working well, even though i do agree, the interface is not that elegant or professional. compared to redmine, redmine has been proving more features with better look and feel. I am going to opt to redmine today.