FogBugz compared to OnTime

Question

Has anyone used both FogBugz and Axosoft's OnTime and care to offer an opinion? AxoSoft has a big feature comparison chart but I'm also interested in more subjective thoughts on things like ease of use and stability.

Answer 1

OnTime is more an ALM tool - it's trying to do everything.

FogBugz just deals with bugs (and feature requests) and at that it's excellent. I'm not sure about some of the newer extensions (like discussions), but for bugs it's really good.

There's lots of stuff that I'd add to it in terms of better reports, searching and the like, but I can definitely recommend FogBugz.

Answer 2

I actually encouraged the company I work for to begin tracking bugs with software (specifically FogBugz) and have been very pleased with FogBugz.

We blindly let our customers send bug requests into FogBugz through email, which has it's advantages and disadvantages. But we really haven't had any problems integrating FogBugz into a team that was totally unfamiliar with any bug tracking software. Overall, I'd rate FogBugz about a 9 on ease of use and stability.

Answer 3

I have not tested the OnTime thing, but keep in mind that both FogBugz and OnTime have free versions as well, Axosoft for 1 user and FogBugz for 2 Users, although it's the hosted version. (Check my answer here to see how to sign up for the free FogBugz version)

So you can have some real first-hand experience on both systems.

Answer 4

I've used OnTime for a few years now. It's actually a very easy tool to use and not just a bug tracking tool as was suggested. Where it falls down for me is the slowdown I've experienced as the volumes of Features / Defects/ Tasks have grown. Also, the web client tries too hard to be a parallel of the winform version and can be flaky as a result.

Answer 5

I've used both extensively in production software development environments.

OnTime isn't bad - once you set it up to handle support tickets sent to an email, it has all the daily activities of software developers pretty well integrated.

I personally prefer FogBugz, because of the predictive estimation stuff that it includes. Being able to pick a due date, and then getting a likelihood of hitting that date based on your past performance is pretty awesome. I also think in general FogBugz is faster to use and organize your features/defects, and I like how it tracks time better.

One area where OnTime wins out is that it is much easier to make reports against OnTime. It stores everything in a SQL server so it is easy to access (granted if you get the non-hosted FogBugz maybe you could do this too). Also, it includes a report designer so you can get to your data. FogBugz has the weakness that while you can track and enter the time you spent per item for the purposes of its experienced-based scheduling, it doesn't give you an easy way as a manager to look at how much time a given employee spent on what things that week. Hopefully they will add that in the near future.

Answer 6

I haven't worked with FogBugz, although I recently recommended our company goes with that. OnTime is what the company decided to use and I personally don't like OnTime because of slowness and badly organized GUI. We opted to host it ourselves, but I don't think the machine is slow. The web app doesn't really look like a web app, more like it copies a windows app, just as Brian Scott said in his answer. And don't try using the windows app over Internet (over VPN). It's awfully slow. I suppose it could be due to our Internet connection latency.

Of course, my experience might be different than other people's, I could be having network issues. Someone else will have to confirm my claims of slowness. :)