
Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool, free project management platform - andrewchilds
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/10/clubhouse-announces-new-collaboration-tool-and-free-version-of-its-project-management-platform/
======
daigoba66
Once upon a time I liked Jira, and most of the products shipped by Atlassian.

While Jira has large admin overhead, it can be configured to make things
simple for users. And I still think most hatred of Jira ought to be directed
at management for imposing bureaucracy and control through the tool, instead
of the tool itself (I see this first hand as my current gig has grown from
“startup” to “enterprise” in a few short years).

But Atlassian has made a lot of questionable product decisions over the last
many years, mostly in terms of UI/UX. What were once very much developer-
centric interfaces are now geared to general enterprise product management.
Somehow it’s becoming _less_ functional over time with each major revision.

~~~
kschrader
One of the lenses that we look at things through when making product decisions
is making it hard to do things that end up feeling like paper cuts for
developers all day long.

I've always seen Jira as the "manager's tool" and we're trying to make
Clubhouse the "developer's tool."

It's a simple decision that I think (and I'm obviously biased) has had some
profound effects on the way we've built Clubhouse.

~~~
x0x0
Since you said "we", some feedback:

I _detest_ jira. The software fills me with loathing. We also pay them a
little shy of $5k/year, and will be paying $12k/year by the end of next year.
I've been begging one of your competitors to let me into their private beta.
So I'm close to being an active buyer for software like this. Also, I can
personally make the purchase decision.

I went to look at your site, and clicked on pricing because I'm scared of the
word free. I want to pay for this type of software so I have reason to believe
it will be there in a year.

However, it says I have to go to the enterprise plan to get SSO. Monetizing
security is shitty of you all, and I don't want to have to take a call to get
the price. I just bounced.

~~~
privateSFacct
I'm in same spot. Willing to pay (ie, routinely pay reasonably big money just
for Microsoft VLSC stuff and a bunch of other specialized software 10K+
annually and willing to do $50K investments in licensing), but want to have
some $ around pricing.

The problem is there are too many players in most spaces.

I literally DO NOT HAVE TIME to handle all the inbound / DRIP / follow-up
sales marketing, go through your qualifications process etc. I need to do a
quick pass - and pricing is an obvious part of that.

Ironically, we have dual fiber options at our location. One sales guy - here
are our prices. Not cheap. Other sales guy - we offer a broad array of
services yadda yadda would like to schedule a time to meet. We already have
VPN / 24/7 on-call help for issues with it etc etc. Called first guy back,
said give us a gig, static IP etc - send me contract and signed within an
hour. Perfect. I don't even care if we are paying more. I'll look again in 2
years and if I can get someone to give me an actual price I'll make a decision
then.

The call for quote folks are HARD to deal with when you change things like
seat counts etc. - just be prepared to spend a LOT more time on the licensing
piece which is harder to delegate than the folks with clear upfront pricing.

------
nevster
We've just spent a good half hour or so trying this out.

It has a snappy interface but in some respects it's very heavy - ie in the
number of clicks needed to do anything.

The main one for us is estimating. We want to be able to go through a list of
stories and edit the estimates. The fact that the table of stories isn't
editable means we have to open up the dialog for each story to edit the
estimate.

As a comparison, we're currently using Airtable for some projects and Notion
for others. In both of those, you can do that.

Also the ability to add our own fields to stories is something we use quite a
bit.

Otherwise it's pretty nice.

~~~
andrewchilds
(Co-founder here)

Great feedback, thank you! We do have bulk editing (to update many stories at
once to the same value) and an ability to update properties in Epics table
views, but not Story table views. Your use case makes total sense. We’ll add
your feedback to our internal Story for this feature, and if you’d like, we’d
be happy to let you know if this ends up being built.

~~~
sergiotapia
Please notify me when this goes live, moving from Clickup to Clubhouse btw,
liking it so far.

------
dragonsh
Our startup is one of the happy users of self-hosted Taiga [1] [2], it is much
better than a combination of Jira and confluence.

It has all the features and much more with both a complete open source and
SaaS offering.

It supports both "scrum" and kanban style development with card layout which
rivals trello. It features many importers, integrations and provides an open
API to build new one's easy.

Depending on the company's policy it can be deployed in their own environment,
cloud of their choice or just sign up for SaaS.

It has a beautiful interface with PWA and mobile apps on app store using its
API, by other developers.

[1] [https://taiga.io/](https://taiga.io/)

[2] [https://github.com/taigaio](https://github.com/taigaio)

~~~
mgkimsal
gotta say I found 'taiga' confusing as hell.

I eventually found a small pale grey floppy disk image (on white background)
as the magic thing to click when typing in comments. That alone cost far more
vs any benefit I had using taiga. Perhaps the folks who set it up for me to
use chose a weird theme?

~~~
dragonsh
Yes possible they choose something. We have been using it for quite some time.
It also server as an example how to build a nice single page progressive web
app for the team.

Although we don't use coffeescript, its' nice implemention. Also there design
assets [1] are also open source, so indeed if your team wants can change those
minor icons or other details.

[1] [https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-
design](https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-design)

------
nerdbaggy
The market is so ripe for somebody to take over the Confluence market. I need
a documentation platform that has the WYSIWYG aspects like Confluence, be
overall less terrible, and can support global replication. I can’t find
anything like it for toughly the same price point.

~~~
tommoor
We've been working on an open source alternative over at
[http://getoutline.com](http://getoutline.com) – it should check a lot of your
boxes!

~~~
jiriro
Does the self hosted version store all the data on the hosting system?

~~~
tommoor
Nope, you'd use your own postgres database if self-hosting

~~~
jiriro
So all data is stored in the postgres db?

I was looking into the github/outline and saw some references to AWS/S3.
That’s the reason I am asking if all data goes to the self-hosting system.

~~~
tommoor
Documents are stored in the DB in Markdown, other Image uploads etc go to S3

------
mmastrac
Clubhouse is one of the better kanban/agile-ish tools I've used. It's pretty
responsible, generally fast, and overall configurable enough for me to be
happy.

------
Michielvv
I really like Clubhouse, but I'm somewhat skeptical about the free version.
(even though it says 'free forever')

In the past two years multiple companies that initially had an affordable plan
( 10 dollars a month or less) for small companies had the same strategy:
change the affordable plan to a free plan. And then within a year kill 90% of
the features on the free plan and have you upgrade to a full plan much more
expensive than the plan you were on before everything became free.

The product is great though, main feature for me is the ability to plan epics
at a milestone level.

~~~
udkl
I don't know why but many project management tools these days do not have a
milestone section. Do teams these days not use milestones as a time box for
significant feature delivery ?

~~~
Michielvv
Yes, before we were using clubhouse someone was doing high-level planning in
an Excel/Google docs. A few months later and even marketing is starting to use
clubhouse and the milestone planning.

I think it really helps to not have 30 different unrelated stories to work on
but plan them at an epic level so at least the things you are working on are
related.

Even for things that are not really an epic I now tend to group related
features together in an epic to make it easier to keep track and plan. (e.g.
grouping 10 minor UX improvements together in one Q3 UX fixes epic)

------
tomrandle
We switched from Trello to Clubhouse 3 years ago - having dabbled with JIRA a
few times. We'd outgrown Trello (not enough structure) but didn't want to give
up on the speed / ease of moving and updating cards. I wrote about it here:
[https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-
tea...](https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-team-moved-
from-trello-to-clubhouse-b1422e6a2c60). This seems like a sensible move to
grow usage - interested to see how it helps!

------
Corrado
My team and I was just discussing the Atlassian toolset and how someone should
give them some serious competition. Some of the things we are looking for are:
markdown support, one place to keep everything (text, xlsx, images, PDFs,
etc.), and a shared "whiteboard". We're currently using Confluence and between
the lousy support, terrible editing, and the fact that you have to install
plugins to get any real functionality it's getting harder and harder to write
that check every month.

We looked at Clubhouse a couple of months ago, and while we all liked the look
of it the project manager decreed that it didn't have enough integrations,
specifically ProductBoard, PipeDrive, Confluence. It looks like that
Confluence integration isn't needed since Clubhouse will have it's own "wiki".
Nice! If we could get ProductBoard and PipeDrive working I think we would
switch tomorrow. Especially if there was a shared whiteboard offering.

In fact, our remote guys are in the office this week for meetings and the
other quarterly things and one of the main discussions was a shared
whiteboard. We've tried several in the past, as well as other tools (ie.
Lucidcharts) but it never really worked for us. I'm excited to give Clubhouse
a try and see if it solves our problem.

------
jesterson
I have chosen Clubhouse as our main project management platform around 8
months ago and never regretted since then. It was adapted almost flawlessly to
out internal processes and procedures.

Can't recommend it enough if you're considering PM system

------
rolleiflex
The thing I don’t like about these tools is that they all imply a core,
unspoken taskmaster in the form of a project manager assigning tasks and then
chases people down for it, and their whole paradigm is built around that.

The future of workplace collaboration is not in the structured silos like
these that are shaped based on project managers’ demands - it arises from the
engineers doing the actual work. JIRA, Confluence and its ilk can work for a
team where software engineers are replaceable - in fact, one of their main
goals is to make them so - but in a startup team, trying to apply this usually
leads to people quitting for a better startup. Probably rightfully so.

Full disclosure, I work on a tool ([https://aether.app](https://aether.app))
that does a more organic async collaboration between engineers than explicit
task-based project management, so I’m biased.

~~~
prepend
Aether seems nice, but I’ve never had a “credit card necessary for trial” work
out. I understand the downsides to the company for trying to collect this
info, but I’m not willing to risk credit card hell even if you super pinkie
promise not to be a jerk. Too many jerks made similar promises and then were
jerks.

The pricing seems high for what it is. $10/month is not a lot, but compared to
the value derived is quite a bit. Especially since the cost of such a service
to operate should be extremely low. This would be cool to bundle into
something, but if this is a great tool spending $300/month on top of all our
other stuff for medium sized team doesn’t compute. I’ll likely use the
existing crappy IM that’s already in place but drastically less cost.

I suppose that the value of productivity gained would be worth $300, but the
cost of service aspect doesn’t fee right to me. If I buy a book that teaches
me a technique that boosts my productivity I don’t want to pay $10/month for
the rest of my life.

All that being said the tool looks great and the design is very considerate. I
will keep an eye out for any improvements or if the software goes OSS or
Microsoft buys you and bundles it with some azure thing.

~~~
rolleiflex
All good feedback, thank you, this is helpful.

The cost of service is a little higher than it seems at the beginning because
we do full isolation, you get a full separate server VM, your own database,
nothing is shared. It’s not like Slack which is effectively a time share on a
global singleton instance. That means we can give you the keys to the kingdom,
E2E encryption with no key held on our end (i.e. no escrow, you hold the only
copy) or we can do on premises in a manner that can be pretty much up to you.
We even offer a service to come in and maintain your own air-gapped physical
box if you don’t want to do the sysadmin work for the on-prem.

We can even accommodate custom requests like running the instance on our
servers, but pointing the database to your on-premises database, so you remain
in full control of the data while you can still avoid the maintenance cost for
running an on-prem service.

Also, if you’re a team large enough for it to cost $300, we do enterprise
pricing, and can actually tailor it to you, so you might actually end up
paying less depending on what that ends up being.

For the features, you’re right, and we actually have lots of stuff in the
docket, I just didn’t feel great about having upcoming features on the landing
page, so that’s why it might have looked this way.

Aether is actually open source, this specific one is Aether Pro. I’m the
maintainer of Aether and the founder of the Pro one. I even wrote about how I
ended up there recently: [https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-
funding-m...](https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-
model-for-open-source-software)

I would love to hear if you have any feature requests, especially if you think
it’s missing something. We want this to be as useful as humanly possible, and
you’re pretty much our target audience. We’re designing for ourselves here, no
holds barred.

~~~
prepend
Thanks for the response. I know I shouldn’t just an org based on its design
but I think that sometimes thoughtfulness in design equates to responsiveness
with comments like these.

The isolation might be really helpful to me and is there a way to learn more
about it? I work in an organization that is weird as the cost isn’t really the
issue, but the effort to test and validate security. So it’s a weird cycle
that’s hard to work with vendors because I might evaluate for a long time
before purchasing, or never purchase at all.

I rarely contact for enterprise pricing for new tools because I don’t know if
it’s an enterprise option or if I want it for enterprise. And I don’t have
time to enter the enterprise sales cycle unless I’m certain. This is probably
frustrating for growing companies as I’m just another annoying customer and
it’s hard to differentiate buyers from non-buyers. And 90% of the time, I’m
not buying. Maybe have some case studies for enterprise licenses showing team
combinations as I didn’t even consider that a 30 person team would be
enterprise worthy. For me “contact us for enterprise” means a lifetime of
dodging bizdev people. My throwaway email is now even too crowded :)

Thanks for the oss link, this helps quite a bit and may be good enough for me
to eval and follow up. There’s a whole cloud reg called FedRAMP that I rarely
find small companies go through the documentation effort even if the design
supports it. And the design constraints are real.

~~~
rolleiflex
All good questions again, and the answer to why of all questions here is
because we launched less than a week ago. :) Well, to qualify this, the Pro
got launched a week ago, but the open source version has been online for more
than a year and it’s been tested up to a few thousand users in the global
realm, so the actual product is solid - just the enterprise side is new.

No documentation for the enterprise features yet, and I fully understand, I
absolutely hate to do the whole ‘call us for enterprise’ dance (never called
that number in my life, never will, hate the whole price opacity thing)
because writing about these features is something I have to do myself. The
reason why we have that is explicitly because we don’t have docs for those
yet. And since it relates to a small percent of users, I have documentation
that is asked by more people that's next on my queue, so trying to cover
starting from the more common things.

However, I would love to answer all questions myself over email, or even come
to your office and have a chat (no obligation! we want feedback) if you’re in
San Francisco.

If you end up picking enterprise deployment and choose us to implement it, I’d
be the one to come set it up, as the founder myself.

And yes - the community version is a good way to demo it, give it a shot. It
does have a decent bit of content in it, so you can definitely see how it
would work. One thing though, the community one is a peer to peer network, so
data propagation is over P2P (I also wrote the P2P stack) this non-instant.
For the Pro, we actually have proper SaaS infra on GCP, so it's much more
work-grade.

~~~
prepend
Thanks, would you please email me at anything(at)prepend.com? Or let me know
your address and I’ll send you a note.

~~~
rolleiflex
Just reached out, but just in case, my direct email is burak at getaether dot
net. Happy to answer any questions.

------
slider_thor
I really want to see a Jira competitor succeed, it's healthy to have some
competition. But it's hard to find something that competes on the per-user
price of Jira Software On-Premise. (Jira Cloud is a different story...too many
reports of slowness, too many UI/UX changes, too many powerful add-ons do not
work on Cloud).

Next, you have to be the system of record for a company. To do that, everyone
needs a license. Jira has a foot-hold because it is used for developers and
for every other facet of a business (basically all company ticketing).

Although Jira sacrificed ease-of-use by offering customization, it's also what
allows orgs to skip buying other tools.

------
somada141
First off really glad with the move to allow small teams to really try the
software for free until they grow organically. Kudos to Clubhouse.

I've been using Trello for my 2-person team but the closer we're getting to an
initial launch the more we've been missing the abstractions more complex
pieces of software like JIRA offer, e.g., Epics, Milestones, issue-linking,
issue-types, etc. I'm not saying Trello can't make up for that with proper
usage of labels, lists, and powerups, but having been working with JIRA and
Fogbugz for over a decade it's hard to change our way of thinking.

So I though I'd give Clubhouse and this free offering was the push I needed.
FYI the tool under [https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-
clubhouse.io](https://github.com/jnormington/trello-to-clubhouse.io) does a
pretty job of helping import existing Trello boards/cards but there's not 1-1
mapping so some cleanup will be required after the import.

------
bachmeier
Nice to see that there's a free plan. I'd be really happy to give it a try if
free plans meant something. As if to prove the point, ClickUp just sent an
email trying to force an upgrade.

The thing about a free plan is that you put all your data into their walled
garden, teach everyone else how to use it, and then you have a limited time to
move to something else once they decide it's time to squeeze you. They have
nothing to lose. If someone doesn't want to pay, it's good to push them away,
and if they do pay, the money is just as good whether the customer hates them
or not.

The ClickUp announcement has all the usual "features":

\- The free plan will be available forever.

\- This is necessary for the free plan to be sustainable.

\- We're happy to give you a short-term discount to make the upgrade less
painful.

Sorry to say it, but this offer from Clubhouse will be no different. They're
in business to make money, and once you start relying on it, they'll pull the
rug out from under you the same as pretty much every other company.

------
afarviral
Just in the process of trying to convert my team from Trello. Clubhouse
addresses many of the issues we have: \- Has functional groups (e.g.
Reporting, ITSM Admin) while retaining functional stages (e.g. Todo, Delivery
etc). – this is a big one for me as we have to use a workaround involving
labels in trello \- In-depth reporting \- Ability to mark a card as officially
completed without archiving it \- Umbrella projects known as “epics” so you
can encapsulate very large projects and have multiple cards (known as stories)
for one big piece of work \- Ability to assign “tasks” to people within cards,
and they can see these tasks in their dashboard \- Markdown formatting within
tasks within stories, rather than just the description like in trello \- “Free
forever”, for up to 10 users, with the only limit being no observers – this is
similar to Trello. \- It doesn’t appear they charge extra for integrations of
which there are many

------
pyritschard
This is great news. At Exoscale we are now using Clubhouse but keep tracking
product descriptions and design documents + ADRs outside of it. Tying these to
the in-flight epics would be a very welcome change.

One can only hope it will remain engineer friendly and allow for reviews and
good text formats.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
I don't see why anyone couldn't unseat Atlassian. JIRA and Confluence are
moderately difficult problems to solve, but it's not impossible to create a
lean competitor with a small team and some funding. Winning the war will be
identifying a reason for companies to switch. There has to be something
particularly painful enough with existing solution to help facilitate
conversion.

On the opposing side: maybe it's an easier sell to know a business uses
Atlassian tools (from a talent acquisition perspective). If you were hiring
engineers and told them you used SVN instead of Git for version control, maybe
it just makes the role less marketable. "Another tool I have to learn", one
could think.

~~~
Noumenon72
Migrating Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud has taken so much time and
support that it would take a strong company to handle migrating out. Of course
there are specialists in this migration process, whom I maybe should have
hired.

As an engineer, I love Confluence, every business I've interviewed with has
used it, and I'd be slightly worried about how a company survives without it.
I don't care about Jira, except for how it works with Bitbucket.

~~~
dreamcompiler
> Migrating Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud has taken so much time and
> support that it would take a strong company to handle migrating out.

I just went through this and my major pain point was having to upgrade my
server to 5.9 before the automatic migration tool would work. Hello? I'm
moving to cloud because I don't want to have to do the upgrade process yet
again. Now I have to upgrade a server I'm about to switch off. Oh, and manual
migration with the XML export files just kind of silently fails, so you have
no choice but to use the migration tool. Nice.

Other than that, the important switches are buried four levels deep and the
docs never describe the particular UI that's in front of me, but that's
something I've learned to expect from Atlassian.

Seems to have worked but it took a lot more futzing around than it should
have.

------
cyberferret
We've been using (self hosted) Phabricator here for a while on our
bootstrapped SaaS project. Been looking at Clubhouse with interest.

Anyone here switched from Phabricator to Clubhouse that can give some feedback
on the process? I really love Phabricators code review and Git repo
management, as well as the secrets management within it. The 'Herald' workflow
rules tool is also great, and I am hoping that Clubhouse can duplicate this
functionality?

------
dgllghr
I put together a custom visualization of our projects in a format that I
thought made a lot of sense. My wife, who is a mechanical engineer, took one
look at it and said “that’s a Gantt chart.” I have been hooked on Gantt charts
ever since, and I wish that software engineering tools would embrace and
integrate Gantt charts.

~~~
zild3d
Asana recently added "Timelines" which are gantt charts. Haven't used though,
as I'm on the free tier

[0] [https://luna1.co/3fa273.png](https://luna1.co/3fa273.png) [1]
[https://asana.com/product/timeline](https://asana.com/product/timeline)

------
pbowyer
We trialled Clubhouse 6 months ago, but didn't find it a good fit for us.
After another 3, we settled on ClickUp
[https://clickup.com/](https://clickup.com/) and have been very happy.

Our clients even use it and they _love_ it. So much so that one has now
adopted it internally.

~~~
batesy
I installed ClickUp over the weekend to give it a whirl, but it seems like
managing sub-projects is difficult. I have multiple projects on the go for
each of my clients, and I couldn't figure out how to go more than one level
deep.

Any tips? It otherwise looks awesome.

------
nathan_f77
I switched to Clubhouse recently, and it's been great! I still use Trello for
personal/founder tasks, but Clubhouse is really great for software development
projects.

------
atemerev
For me, the UI looks perfectly right, thank you. I will try running it for a
week and see how it goes.

------
somebodythere
It's also free for small teams now, which I think is a great change.

------
mister_hn
I hope they give also a offline installer as well

------
techslave
please someone here has used it? i hate jira. every update is worse than the
last.

~~~
cloverich
I used it at my last company before the JIRA brigade took over, and I"m
pushing it at my current gig. My typical JIRA cycle goes like: I use a simple
PM tool. PM's insist on JIRA, because "features". PM's can't figure out how to
do simple things (because JIRA). PM gives me admin rights. I quit. That was my
last three companies. Anyways -- Clubhouse is more limited, focused,
opinionated. The UI is snappy behaves exactly like I expected as I learned it.
It feels a little cluttered at times, but unlike JIRA everything seems to work
in the ways I expect. It has some interesting constraints (stories belong to
epics belong to milestones, so you can't put a story directly in a milestone)
but overall I like it much more than JIRA.

My tl;dr for Clubhouse is that (imho) most software shops would be better off
using it, or something nearly identical to it, instead of opting for JIRA to
turn that one knob they just can't live without. JIRA works well if you need
complex workflow management and can hire people to administrate that _as their
full time job_.

~~~
igetspam
Not any more. New JIRA is more opinionated, less functional, slower and
generally missing features while also being less intuitive. Your experts are
no longer needed because there's nothing you can change. It's way worse than
it used to be and the bar was already really low.

------
sdrothrock
@dang (Though I don't know if these @tags even help you search for these kinds
of comments?)

The original title is "Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool and free
version of its project management platform", I'm not sure if it changed or was
editorialized here.

I thought it was interesting that the HN title ("Jira competitor Clubhouse
launches free plan, Confluence competitor") emphasizes Jira (to frame
Clubhouse).

~~~
ineedasername
Yeah, the TC headline is still the more neutral version. There was definitely
some heavy spin by the poster who, no coincidence, is one of the founders.
Unfortunate they chose to come on to the HN scene by violating one of the
community guidelines.

