Redmine

No way JIRA has so few pro's! My boss wants me to set up JIRA as it is used by many large companies in my country, and she has worked with JIRA at previous job, that is why she thinks JIRA is the THING. Additionally, she states "Any commerical and licensed product will get more support and will be more polished and tuned, more affected by user experience etc, just beacuse it is commerical product. No free-software can be like that.". It is hard to disagree with any boss statement, but now, I am trying to set up Redmine, to try it first, before implementing JIRA in my company (we have now self-made problem/issue/project system, that I need to update). I don't like JIRA, eaven from first looks, not mentioning that it is closed-source, so no improvments can be made, if needed...

Feel free to add more pro's.

JIRA is, imho, less polished/has a worse user experience, and a few years back, the support was worse. It might've changed, but I wouldn't count on it.

Just compare the different themes for Redmine with how JIRA looks. It doesn't exactly favor JIRA.

BTW, It looks like, that lowest price for starter pack is for 10 concurrent users, there is no limit to user quantity of accounts.

Nils Linde wrote:

BTW, It looks like, that lowest price for starter pack is for 10 concurrent users, there is no limit to user quantity of accounts.

How so? The Licensing & Pricing page states that "Licensing fees are quoted per number of 'active users'. An active user in JIRA is by definition any user account in the system with the "JIRA Users" global permission, i.e. anyone who can log in. Unlimited 'anonymous users' are permitted on all licenses."

And, for what it's worth, if you'd compare anything but the fully featured version of JIRA with Redmine, the number of Pro's for Redmine would increas a LOT.

I am now going through JIRA, as I have reached limits of understanding Redmine possibilities... As I am newbie to both solutions, I will give things, that is unconvinient for me, as I have not used to anything and have not worked with any of solutions for more than couple weeks.

• Building of reports is limited to filtering options. Redmine is concentrating more on issues and projects, than employees and users. It is hard for managers to get reports about user/employee load, job done, graphs and charts about work progress, and other sorts of reports.
• No notification Schemes. Only possible to notify about changes, no escalation. Only plugin adds possiblity to notify assigned users, which is poorly configurable.
• No issue Security Schemes. Not possible to define, which issue trackers can be seen for each role.
• Not possible to start issue from project and select subproject to which issue is related. You need to browse to specified project, only then, start an issue.
• Estimated time for issue has poor functionallity. JIRA allows to write eaven in 3w 4d 12h format.
• Most of fields in Redmine have no autofill/Ajax based.
• Custom fields have only 7 types. JIRA allows 23 types, including possibility to create "User Picker" and many multi-level fields.
• Activity logs have no filters/tabs, you can't see all activity on current issue in one page
• Can't comment on issues
• Not possible to set conditions to control who can perform a issue status change, and under what circumstances
• No screen configuration, that can be used to select which fields will appear when this screen is displayed, and how the fields are split between tabs. Each issue status can have different screen at JIRA.

• Look and feel is not optimized. Most of stuff could be created using less space in page.
• Cant set issue reporter manually
• No multilanguage issue types, althou JIRA only gives chanse to choose from pre-defined languages, that are not many (not my native language included).
• No issue icons, that increases readability.
• No keyboard shortcuts
• Redmine documentation is pretty weak, not everything is described, althou, most of everything is easy understandable, but for some specific tasks, there is no documentation and community is not so active to respond on requests.

• Hard to understand user interface, workflow creation process, customization is possible, but need to go through many steps. So many options that you can get easely confused.
• Modifications made is not showing up stright away. You cant edit active workflow, e.g. the workflow that is assigned to any project, that makes customization harder. Overall customization, althou is done only at system productions state, is pretty hard and time consuming.
• Not possible to create sub-projects, only components, that only shares part of main-project functionallity

• Closed source, you only depend on existing functions and possibility, that company will include functionallity, that you lack
• JIRA is pretty slow and massive. Most of functionallity, that is not needed for user of system, cant be disabled, you need dig through all unnessesary stuff, if there is such.
• Althou JIRA documentation is vast and strong, filled with tutorials, you realy need docs, to use JIRA, the system is so complex that you need to read docs almost for every customization task and eaven then, some views are hard to understand.

Most of them are minior cons, but still, if you need to work with system every day, that small stuff can make life lot easier or harder...

To be continued...

I'm gonna comment on a few, the rest I agree with :)

Building of reports is limited to filtering options. Redmine is concentrating more on issues and projects, than employees and users. It is hard for managers to get reports about user/employee load, job done, graphs and charts about work progress, and other sorts of reports.

Looked at the different reporting plugins? There's "reports", "graphs" and a few others. If you use the "reports" plugin together with "schedules", "graphs" and the "time tracker" plugin I think you'll get a lot of the features you're after.

Not possible to start issue from project and select subproject to which issue is related. You need to browse to specified project, only then, start an issue.

How do you mean? If you're at the issue list of a project, that list includes the issues from sub-projects and you can just right-click an issue to change its status.

No issue Security Schemes. Not possible to define, which issue trackers can be seen for each role.

Agreed. For me, this is very minor, since we just use different sub-projects instead. Comparing to JIRA is hard, since JIRA doesn't at all have the same sub-project functionality.

Activity logs have no filters/tabs, you can't see all activity on current issue in one page

http://www.redmine.org/issues/6843 <- how do you mean? what activity is missing? time log entries?

Can't comment on issues

Huh? Just choose 'update' on an issue and enter a comment?

Not possible to set conditions to control who can perform a issue status change, and under what circumstances

Isn't that what you do when you edit the workflow?

No screen configuration, that can be used to select which fields will appear when this screen is displayed, and how the fields are split between tabs. Each issue status can have different screen at JIRA.

Not sure I get this. You can store global issue queries, doesn't that kind of solve the same problem, but in a different way?

Look and feel is not optimized. Most of stuff could be created using less space in page.

Use a different theme.

No issue icons, that increases readability.

Just a matter of using the right theme as far as I know. I've seen themes with issue icons.

That was more like comparison, than problems, that I encountered with...
The things that my company needs, are escalation (email notifications at specific conditions) and reports (havent dug so deep into plugins, just ran twice through plugin list, downloaded some, set up, tuned, now going to next test subject - JIRA).
If theese two things could be solved in no-time, I would push my boss, to use Redmine instead of JIRA... I dont realy like closed stuff, but I realy like stuff, that is optimized and tuned using user-experience, and sadly, most of such things are met only on commercial software... Redmine "does the job", but at first look, it is hard to notice, that developers have thought about look'n'feel of it... Althou, most of companies realy dont care how this stuff looks'n'feels, users do and some stupid analysts like me :P

Examples of at what e-mail notifications you'd need? I'm interested :)

Also you should consider looking at the themes available (for instance http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/ThemeBasecamp http://www.pixel-cookers.com/2010/03/05/theme-redmine-pixel-cookers/ and http://www.modula.fi/2009/redmine-theme-modula-mojito/). I don't see how anyone can consider the JIRA user experience and "look'n'feel" better than Redmines.

X and Y ar workers at deparment, which manager is M and he has a boss B. And there is another department with workers G and H, with manager K, his boss too, is B.
If manager K gives an issue into system, sets assigned user X (technican, responsible for fixing/dealing bug/issue), then X gets a notification, that he has new issue in system, that needs to be dealt with.
For example, after a week, that issue still is not dealt with. System sends notification to X about that. No changes has been done to issue, after 3 more days, manager of issue dealing department M gets notification, that there is issue, that X is ignoring or have not dealt with for any other reason. Nothing happens for more 2 days. Boss B gets notification that X havent solved problem, manager M have not made any modifications to issue.
Depending on priority, tracker/issue type and other parameters, notifications, delays and other stuff should be changed.
That is what we call "escalation".
There is Whining plugin, that allows to send notifications to assigned user and days of incativity can be changed, depending on priorities. That is not enough... There is no possible way to create departments'n'managers system. Redmine lacks possibility to create hierarchy and set leader/manager for user groups. This stuff could be used in other applications too...

Ah yes, that would need a new plugin (which you of course could pay for and get developed if you wanted it for redmine). The Notification and Whining plugin would solve the problem partially, but not completely.

It should however be a plugin imho, and not a core functionality. So I guess that the "issue escalation notification" is the deal-breaker for you? Do the reports and graphs plugin solve that problem for you?

Yes, "issue escalation notification" is the deal-breaker.
Ah, and Reports too... Now I am searching for plugins you mentioned to test them. I found schedules, but not reports, can you give me a link?

BTW, pixel-cookers theme is quite nice, but it is incompleate and CSS needs much editing, before icons, that are included, can be seen. Thats not the problem for me (just time consuming), but I think, for others it would be... Additionally, there is no icons for main-menu items, that I need to search in net manually...

Now that I look around, the only place where I can find reports is in Eric Davis github repository :)

https://github.com/edavis10/redmine_reports

But since it's hosted there I guess it's ok to use it even if it's not "released" yet.

Another JIRA pro: The "dashboards" (kind of like having multiple "my page" pages) has better widgets and customizable layout. If there was Redmine a plugin that could give you good issue statistics graphs etc for projects you're involved in, your own issues etc, that would make up for a lot.

Does 'Reports' and 'Graph' plugins are compatible with version 1.x.x? Because 'Schedule' is not.

The old plugin list is gone.
The new list does not include them, but it seems more updated than the old one.

I forgot to mention.
Reports are very important to my company too.

I managed to create tons of custom trackers so I can generate some "reports" through custom queries.
However its pretty basic and far away from the ideal.

We are thinking about export the Redmine database in some kind of data warehouse and then build an OLAP application.
Doing this we can have unlimited reports possibilities.

Reports and Graphs work just fine here. But I'm on Redmine 1.0.2.

Nils Linde wrote:

Redmine CONS:

• Building of reports is limited to filtering options. Redmine is concentrating more on issues and projects, than employees and users. It is hard for managers to get reports about user/employee load, job done, graphs and charts about work progress, and other sorts of reports.

you can load Redmine tasks into Microsoft project using this open-source free product: http://code.google.com/p/redmine-connect
:) - and then see any kind of reports you want.

It also supports Jira (no subtasks, though - due to Jira's SOAP API limitations).

Alexey Skor wrote:

Nils Linde wrote:

Redmine CONS:

• Building of reports is limited to filtering options. Redmine is concentrating more on issues and projects, than employees and users. It is hard for managers to get reports about user/employee load, job done, graphs and charts about work progress, and other sorts of reports.

you can load Redmine tasks into Microsoft project using this open-source free product: http://code.google.com/p/redmine-connect
:) - and then see any kind of reports you want.

It also supports Jira (no subtasks, though - due to Jira's SOAP API limitations).

You still have to create tasks for things that you were not supposed to.
Like:
which users are members of a project?
what are the projects that a member is part of?
And so on...

JIRA doesn't handle multi-level projects, Redmine does. That was enough for us to decide on Redmine.

We are using Redmin for issue tracking we were not happy with the versions before 0.9 but after version 1.0 we really loved redmine.

Few week before, we have decided to give a try to Jira/Confluence/Crudible/FishEye/Crowd products of atlassian. (With 10 dollars goest to charity promotion) We bought them and started to deploy. However their installation, configuration and maintanance is a mess. We could not installed them properly. Each product have its own non-regular requirements. Some of the products can not work as windows service (becouse of a bug or something) and they are running in administrator account. But I have forgot that and logout from the server now. All of the user management system is not working right now. (So does jira, confluence and crudible) Products have many small problems like that and it became like configuring a very low level linux distro. (Google it. Find solution. Give it a try. Not working. Fing other solutins. Etc.) Each product consumes 256mb of ram. So 1 gb of server memory is allocated to those products which is a big waste. I can not figure out some thing that a simple issue tracker can consumes that amount of memory.

Out project manager is not happy with jira right now. He can not track time and user interface is very clumsy. Confluence is useles becouse its editor is problematic and it does not work on internet explorer 9.

To sum up we have decided to continue on redmine because it is really better product. It does not have fancy stuff (which are useless and hard to configure at jira) but it is a good and complete issue tracker. It works well and all of the major functionalily that our team need is build in available and working without a problem.

So in my oppinium redmine is better and more productive software for both it, development and project management teams.

Disclosure: I've been part of the JIRA and Atlassian community for years and make my living consulting on Atlassian tools at CustomWare. I haven't used Redmine more than as a demo.

Atlassian haven't allowed JIRA to stagnate in the last two years - lots of features in each of the 3 or 4 releases per year.

So many options that you can get easely confused.

Tell me about it! I wrote a couple of O'Reilly books about JIRA to help with this, e.g. Practical JIRA Administration. But lots of people do set up JIRA and use it quite happily. The best bit for me is how configuration is preserved over updates without having to change source code.

Not possible to create sub-projects, only components, that only shares part of main-project functionallity

There is the Structure plugin that does this now

~Matt

http://www.easyredmine.com
Very nice addon 4 redmine. Using Redmine more than two years, were going to move to JIRA. Fortunatly, found that product.
Now seriously considering buying it instead of JIRA.

Well a good IDE support could be handled by TeamCity (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/) which would be helpful.

I'm not a friend of the easyredmine stuff. It creates many incompatibility with other plugins. Mainly the system is just compatible with the easyredmine plugins which are in some cases just commercial plugins. This is not the best way for opensource software, to get a commercial overlay.

TeamCity is even something commercial, but it doesn't manipulate Redmine, it uses his API interface as expected.

Redmine PROs:
1. Way faster than JIRA.
2. The UI is easier to use and more consistent. The JIRA UI is a little wonky here and there, and not very intuitive.
3. The "Activity" tab is way, way faster than JIRA, and shows a full 30 days of history in one page. This is extremely useful and gives you a birds-eye view of all work happening in your project, where you can click right into any issue you want.
4. Tons of free add-ons, such as "timesheet", which can show me the hours I worked.
5. Can be self-hosted. JIRA is dropping support for self-hosting in 2024, forcing you to go to the cloud.
6. You can run SQL queries on the base tables, no problem. So using Crystal Reports or MS Access or whatever tool, you can pretty easily create any report you want.
7. The SQL tables are easy to understand and it's pretty easy to build your own SQL.
8. The default database is mySQL, but you can use other databases instead. That's a really nice feature, so if you are a SQL Server shop, this can add value.
9. It's easy to paste an image from the clipboard into an issue, and it renders very nicely.
10. The UI is way more robust than JIRA and works on all browsers.

JIRA CONs:
1. Much slower than Redmine.
2. No built-in report of my hours worked. You have to list all issues where I charged hours, then click on each issue, then go to the "Work Log", then eyeball the rows which I added and manually exclude the rows from all other team members.
3. The solution for the the above is "Install Tempo Timesheets", which is not free nor is it reasonably priced when you have a lot of users.
4. The equivalent of the Redmine "Activity" tab is dog-slow, and only displays about 10 updates at a time. It is completely impractical and basically useless. There is no way to filter it for my group either, so 95% of the rows shown there are irrelevant to me. Compare that to the Redmine "Activity" tab, which shows updates for the current Project only. In Redmine, every row is relevant, and I can see 30 full days of Activity, and then page to the next prior 30 days - really a fantastic feature completely missing from JIRA.
5. JIRA website says it has great reporting. Reporting? That might be a stretch. There is no report builder. There is only the Issues List. The Criteria for it are good, but there is one and only one output layout, which is only at the issue level - no way to see hours worked, for example. The vendor uses PostgreSQL, but discourages reading from it. So forget about using Crystal or Access. The vendor suggests using their API instead. Are there any sample reports? I know of none. So good luck with your reporting.
6. UI says to only use the Chrome browser? Really? And if you use Safari on Mac, sometimes you loose your updates. Updates fail on Safari on Mac about 20% of the time, and usually you have a chance to save your work by using Copy, then refresh the browser, then click "Add Comment" again, and re-update.
7. It's easy to paste an image from the clipboard into an issue, but it renders way, way too large, so you have to scroll left and right to see it. So putting a screenshot in an issue gives a non-professional look. You are better off NOT pasting images directly into the issue, and instead adding them as attachments. That's unfortunate.
8. So, we paid a lot of money for this product which, in my opinion, is inferior to Redmine.
9. Sometimes adding an attachment just fails. The attachment isn't too big. You have to add it again. Maybe I'm not using Chrome, but... really?

JIRA PROs:
1. Built-in Sprint support. But I can get a free Add-in in Redmine which is just as good.
2. Real built-in Workflow. I have used many projects, and yes they all have different rules. But in my opinion, even though this is superior to Redmine, it doesn't make up for the CONs.
3. Some vendors integrate with JIRA but not with Redmine. It seems JIRA is more popular in the Fortune 500 than Redmine.
4. If you really want Vendor Support, JIRA has it. With Redmine you are on your own for the most part.