
Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams - gauthamshankar
https://zepel.io
======
giancarlostoro
This looks nice and sleek, I hope it improved upon the pain points of Jira and
builds upon new strengths.

The thing that kills me about Jira is the inconsistency I experience between
projects. Everybody sets it up differently, and work based off entirely
different views and contexts. It is exhausting and there's always too much
friction. Maybe managers love it cause they got more time to waste on tools
like Jira than us engineers, but if I have to spend more than 5 minutes
figuring out how to progress forward my ticket, you've screwed up.

One _really_ awful thing about Jira: If you create a state for a ticket, and
then clone it for a new project, and then update the labels of those states,
you're now screwing over the original project because all those states will be
updated too.

~~~
MegaButts
I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, Jira is poorly used. That said,
it's surprisingly powerful software. It's just that nobody takes the time to
learn how to use it properly. Think of how shitty your first massive OOP
language project was. Think of how different coding schemas and practices are
between companies. Now realize that over the years, better and best practices
have started to be established. Obviously mastering Jira isn't the same as
mastering C++, but it actually is a skill that takes months or even years to
develop. So it sounds like what you're really complaining about is that the
Jira admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their
job.

I think it should take approximately 5 seconds for an engineer to progress
their tickets. And generally speaking, engineers shouldn't be cloning tickets
in Jira without training first (even then I would discourage it, but I don't
have enough context). Jira isn't user friendly but neither is C++. Once people
experience a well run Jira shop (I think most people have just never seen it
because in my experience it's shockingly rare) they realize it's actually
useful. The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a
much harder problem to fix.

~~~
grey-area
_So it sounds like what you 're really complaining about is that the Jira
admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their
job...The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a
much harder problem to fix._

Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang
themselves with.

It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding
it wrong', and it should not take months or years to learn to use a project
management tool IMO - the project should be over by then! Tools like Jira
should get out of the way, not get in the way of the real work.

~~~
MegaButts
> Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang
> themselves with.

This is like complaining that C (or assembly, or VHDL) is too complicated, and
we should all use easier languages like Java, Python, and Ruby.

>It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding
it wrong', and it should not take months or years to learn to use a project
management tool IMO - the project should be over by then!

It should not be possible for engineers to do this, which is why the Jira
admins should be to blame for setting up a shitty Jira environment. And how
long it takes to learn Jira is irrelevant to engineers because you're never
supposed to have to learn Jira beyond "move your tickets to done when you're
done." How long should it take to learn C++, or Kubernetes, or TensorRT? Do we
say those are all a waste of time as well because engineers need to set aside
time learning a new language/technology/tool in order to help them do their
jobs?

> Tools like Jira should get out of the way, not get in the way of the real
> work.

I agree. The problem is it sounds like you're assuming I think engineers
should learn Jira. Engineers should not spend more than a few minutes a day
"dealing" with Jira, on average (ideally no more than 30 seconds, but that's a
bit optimistic at a real company). If you spend more than a few minutes a day
struggling with Jira, you should bitch to whoever is in charge of Jira. But if
you really believe that 15 minutes a week of your time in order for the
organization to function at much high levels is a waste of your efforts, then
perhaps you should set out to redefine project management. I assure you, there
is a shitload of money to be made if you think you can do it better.

~~~
grey-area
_If you spend more than a few minutes a day struggling with Jira, you should
bitch to whoever is in charge of Jira. But if you really believe that 15
minutes a week of your time_

This doesn't reflect my experience at all as a developer in small teams.

I spend quite a lot of time in the issue tracker - it is one of the main ways
(along with email and conversations) that I interact with other team members
and track work in the team. I can't imagine any situation where developers
would spend just 15 minutes a week in an issue tracker and be able to do their
job effectively, even junior devs should be spending more time than that
responding to feedback and explaining what they have done, scope changes, what
to test etc etc.

Creating software is not all writing code - much of it is thinking and
interacting with other people, before you even start writing code, and then
iterating fast on what you have written, gathering feedback along the way. An
issue tracker is one of the tools used to do that.

So the tools are important, and Jira gets almost everything wrong in my view.

~~~
MegaButts
I'm not saying you shouldn't spend more than 15 minutes a week documenting,
discussing, and diagnosing bugs and developing features. I'm saying you
shouldn't spend more than a few minutes a day having to wrangle Jira. If you
want to find a bug that's relevant to you, it should literally take 1 second
for you to load the page that tells you your sprint and backlog and start
looking at it. All of this should be managed by a program manager. You
shouldn't have to repeat anything from GitHub. You shouldn't have to go
digging for bugs to work on. You shouldn't need to go looking for
documentation. All of these things are supposed to be done by someone else.

> Jira gets almost everything wrong in my view.

What specifically would you like to be different?

------
new_here
Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA.
Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies
purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is
ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged.

If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run
projects, and deliver on that, then you'll probably get some decent traction
with SMBs and work your way up from that. Make teams feel like they'll be
agile by using Zepel.

Great work and good luck!

~~~
vasco
I use JIRA cloud every day and have for almost 4 years and it's never been
slow. Is your company using JIRA cloud or hosting your own?

~~~
andy_ppp
I'm not sure how we can possibly be using the same website.

~~~
mrunkel
You're not. Jira is run over many different servers. I think that accounts for
a great deal of the difference in experience.

We self host Jira and it's not slow for us.

~~~
andy_ppp
I've just timed it on a bug detail page - it takes 7.8 seconds to complete
with janky loading of different sections/data. I find it impossible to believe
this is server related - looks more like they have terrible frontend code.

~~~
new_here
Agreed, it takes on average 5 - 7 seconds per page load from our office with a
good connection in central London.

------
ken
It starts with "Zepel adapts to the way your software product team really
works", which sounds great, but I can't tell what this means. This claim
doesn't seem to be connected to anything else on the page.

The major selling point / complaint of Jira seems to be that it's _too_
customizable. They're all different, and a bad manager can make your
particular Jira instance unusable.

Is this one as customizable? Or is it inflexible? Or does it automatically
"adapt" somehow? Does it assume that all teams work in the same way? I can't
figure out what tradeoff it's making here.

The "JIRA Alternative" page says:

> "Because when you’re just a week away from shipping your feature, you should
> be tracking your entire feature. Not user stories and tasks."

which makes it sound like Zepel just picked a workflow. It "adapts" to you by
assuming you already work in exactly the way it was designed.

~~~
eddieh
Maybe create a free account and try it out?

------
slykar
I really love when apps like this are free for small teams.

Most of the time I work alone or with 1-2 people. We would look for free
options anyway. Because it's free, I get hooked up and then I stay with the
tool for bigger projects.

Looks very appealing. I'll definitely try this for my next project!

------
awillen
As a PM, I've generally used JIRA because most of the people using the product
are engineers, and that's what eng management pushes for. I have generally
found that most PM-oriented products like this just require me to duplicate
all the stuff that's already in JIRA to the point where the additional effort
just isn't worth whatever benefit I get.

Given JIRA's ubiquity, I would strongly recommend that you build an
integration that allows you to sync tickets from JIRA -> Zepel, so people can
get the benefits of the Zepel interface without having to duplicate their
work. (Unless this is already there, but I didn't see it on the website).

~~~
edmundhuber
What are those things that you need to duplicate?

~~~
awillen
Basically all the user stories/tickets.

------
jrudolph
Kudos for a refreshing take on software project management. This hits a nerve
with me - taming JIRA is a royal PITA (couldn't help the 4 letter acronyms,
sorry). Especially if you don't have time to combing your backlog all day.

Nonetheless, we have found that JIRA can scale nicely from simple to more
complex workflows if you take the time to set it up/customize the workflows.
But a "Feature Oriented" view that allows me to easily track progress on
concurrently progressing streams of work (larger than a single epic) is sorely
missing. We tried to come by with Portfolio and Structure for JIRA (both are
plugins) but they feel somewhat awkward to use as they require tons of clicks
for simple things.

Zepel looks like a great idea. However, JIRA is already so embedded in our
workflow (thanks to bitbucket integration, ticket bots/plugins etc.)... I'd
love to have something like "Github Projects" which sits on top of my normal
GH issues but allows me to roll them up. Concourse for example is a nice
example of using this effectively:
[https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects](https://github.com/concourse/concourse/projects)

Anyone have a recommendation for a tool/plugin that can do this?

~~~
seehafer
[https://www.zenhub.com/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

------
marpstar
I've been evaluating PM/bug-tracker apps lately. I'm in a unique scenario,
maybe an interested party could give me some guidance:

I build WP sites for a local design agency (my client) who designs the theme
for their client. I have 2-3 subcontractors that I work with to build these
sites.

Building the site needs to be managed like a "project". Once launched, I want
to give my client AND their client the ability to create tickets for any post-
launch issues. I need these users to be "siloed" into organizations so that
they can't see bug trackers for other clients. I need my subcontractors to be
able to see tickets from projects they're approved to see.

I want the ability to create tickets via e-mail, sometimes from my client,
other times directly from their client.

JIRA + Service Desk seems to give me everything I want, but the admin menus
for their "classic" templates (i.e. Service Desk) are daunting. Lots of
settings that (IMO) should be "global" are instead per-project. The only way
to share these settings is to clone an existing project.

We've got ~12 sites that we're managing, and to make a "tweak" to one setting
means having to go tweak that same setting 11 more times.

Is there any system smaller/simpler than JIRA that meets these needs?

~~~
23andwalnut
Duet can definitely do this. It's self hosted though-
[http://duetapp.com](http://duetapp.com)

Let me know what you think (I'm the developer)

~~~
marpstar
This looks amazing. It appears to have absolutely everything I need. For $150
I'm willing to give it a trial. I'm currently using Pancake
([http://pancakeapp.com](http://pancakeapp.com)) which is also self-hosted, so
I'm fine with that. Duet makes me feel bad for Pancake already because if it's
as awesome as it looks, I may switch my billing over...provided one thing...

Because I work with an agency, I'm typically billing my client, who then bills
their client (plus markup). Obviously we don't want their client to see what I
charged them. Is it possible to "hide" the billing for certain users?

~~~
23andwalnut
Not currently, but I can add it. Can you shoot me an email about it so we can
discuss your use case? I want to make sure any changes I make work for you.
duet [at] 23andwalnut.com

------
crsv
As someone running a software product team, we've made the decision to get as
close to the developer process as possible with our product management tools.
We've recently started doing everything in Github using Github projects, which
honestly is really usable. It's kind of put me in a mindset where I'm not sure
why I would ever pay for a separate product management tool as I can do most
of my critical things with Github + Markup + our design stack (Figma, etc).

Obviously there's a market for this as I think people are still chasing
potential efficiency gains in making tools that are easy/fast/effective in
organizing work, but as a product leader I don't see anything here that
compels me to leave Github.

~~~
rpedela
You may like Clubhouse.io then. Clubhouse feels like I am using Github when
committing code and automatically updating issues which I love. But it also
has the higher level project management tools Github is missing.

To Zepel team: I think you are off to a great start. Personally, I would like
to see more information about the Github integration on your marketing pages.
Since I don't know the Github integration details (or couldn't find them),
make it feel like I am using Github Issues when I commit code on the command-
line just like Clubhouse has.

------
kull
It is super hard to switch to the new platform for bugs reporting / tickets.
You just do not want to lose all the old tickets and then retrain your team,
then there is a big probability the new tool is not that great after all.

We switched from JIRA to youTrack[1] and it was one of our best business
decisions recently. It is not perfect, but we will switch again, only if a
really superior tool arrives and when it is maintained with some larger
company that we know will not go away anytime soon.

BTW. Zepel looks very sleek.

[1] [https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/](https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/)

------
pymanhacks
Really like the UI interface and it's a lot faster than JIRA for sure.

Feedback: I feel something is off with: Signup for free <b>OR</b> Signup using
Google. Do you charge when I signup with Google?

------
mangatmodi
Thank you for challenging JIRA. I was looking for alternatives for so long.

------
yellowapple
Looks nice, and I really like how straightforward it is to create and work
with subtasks.

I'm immediately seeing two pain points, though:

1\. A lot of the text fields seem to have a nasty habit of jumping the cursor
back to the beginning of the text, thus causing me to accidentally enter
things "islike th". This is a sure sign that y'all are probably
overthinking/overengineering the text inputs :) Also, not having a visual
indicator of whether or not a text field actually saved is absurdly annoying,
especially when the text I enter doesn't get saved when I close a given
screen...

2\. Just because I'm entering something as a work item doesn't mean I'm
actually the requestor of that item. Being entirely unable to change the
requestor to something arbitrary eradicates one of my prospective use cases
for this. I'd assume that if there were multiple users setup in Zepel I'd be
able to choose them, but I don't want to have to setup end-users with Zepel
logins just so that I can track who's bugging me about a particular feature or
bug.

Looks promising, though. Certainly a lot more intuitive than JIRA.

------
somada141
First off congrats on launching and thanks for the "small teams eat free"
pricing tier!!!

I've just tried Zepel out by importing my current project off Trello (loved
that this feature was available) so here's some things that threw me off: \-
I'd like an easy way to move multiple cards from one board list into another
cause I can't multi-select or drag-select. Organising a freshly imported
project is a hassle without this. \- When creating a new feature I couldn't
find a way to drag existing tasks/cards into it but as far as I could see I'd
have to create new ones. \- I would expect tags to auto-complete when adding
them to a card but it didn't seem to work.

Generally it seems to work well if one is populating a new project from
scratch but cleaning up an imported project would require a little more
thought and additional features cause the barrier to entry for users of
existing products seems rather high.

Keep up the good work!

~~~
gauthamshankar
Thank you for the feedback. We are working on the multi-select functionality
in boards, alternatively, you can multi-select items inside a list or feature
and move them to other boards. We understand it can be a bit hard without it
while organizing an imported project and we will add the functionality soon.
Regarding the auto-complete its something that should be working. Will take a
look at it.

Agreed, the post-import experience has a lot of room for improvement and we
are constantly iterating on it.

------
neal_samson_89
JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon
teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would
be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want
engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?

~~~
gauthamshankar
Neal, we see Zepel being bought bottom up. We are engineers ourselves and we
built a tool that we would be happy using. We also plan on having a data sync
with Jira mainly to help teams within larger org switch to Zepel, while the
updates still flow back to JIRA without breaking the “managements” view.

------
19ylram49
Speaking from experience, JIRA is just horrible (at least for me as a software
engineer and entrepreneur). I’ve wasted way too much of my precious time
dealing with JIRA, so I’m all for any software company working to improve that
experience. I’ll be trying out Zepel once I have a moment!

------
alkonaut
I think it looks promising. Just trying to move to Azure Devops and it has a
good product/issue separation I think, but it's _way_ too customizable. I
don't want a tool that can be made to suit any process, I want one that
supports a reasonable process without hours of configuration and plugin. E.g.
i Azure Devops it seems extremely hard to get feature progress and time
rollups for features broken into backlog items and further into tasks.
Everything seems estimated separately and marking a task as having spent 10h
on is never seen as 10h spent on the backlog item or top level feature. It's
confusing as hell (I'm probably just not getting it - but that's usually just
a sign of poor UX instead of missing or incorrect functionality)

~~~
ticmasta
Nothing made me enjoy Jira like being forced to move to DevOps.

By MS's own admission it's way too complicated, so much so that they've now
made the "Basic" workflow (which looks a lot like Jira) the default.

------
chiefalchemist
Maybe I missed it but I hope they allow for IFTTT / Zappier integrations. At
the very least webhooks to send events out.

------
kopiblanca
OP if you are creator of Zepel ,just wondering why you build something against
giant,like Jira?

~~~
gauthamshankar
Hi there kopiblanca, One of the founders of Zepel here.

We believe JIRA and most other project management tools have evolved from the
core use case of issue tracking. While they might be great for tracking issues
and ad hoc work items, when it comes to product development, bug tracking is
only a part of the equation.

We believe 2 key aspects make product/feature development different.

\- Unlike bug tracking, a feature needs to be conceptualized and the form-
based interface of these tools make it ridiculously difficult to spec out the
requirements for a feature.

\- Shipping a feature involves multiple disciplines and rarely follows a
single fixed workflow.

Our approach to solving these two problems is,

\- A text editor like interface that lets you specify your features and making
it super simple to change or update items.

\- Multiple boards per project to capture every discipline and the flexibility
to move items across these boards as per your use case.

We believe its painfully hard for product teams to plan and ship features
using JIRA and that's why we have created Zepel.

~~~
codegladiator
Product teams don't hate JIRA. They love JIRA. Engineers hate JIRA. From your
explanation, I still don't understand how this is different from JIRA (apart
from the theme).

~~~
Tharkun
A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude
better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse
with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man
shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the
Apache Software Foundation.

It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which
can make it a bit daunting to configure. But you can configure it to suit your
needs, instead of having to conform to some harebrained workflow someone else
decided was Good Enough.

What I _really_ hate is that, even after all these years, it doesn't come with
a good planning tool. Portfolio is terrible. I've evaluated several Gantt
plugins, which were all terrible. A closely related problem is the missing
calendar integration. Atlassian has a calendar plugin for Confluence (wiki),
which makes zero sense to me. In my world, issue tracking and planning go hand
in hand. And you can't plan shit without a calendar. Surely I'm not the only
one who feels that way?

Edit: while I'm out praising Jira, have you seen their SDK? You can roll your
own Jira plugin in 15 minutes. Bam. Frictionless. Engineers hate it? Those are
some weird engineers.

~~~
rangitatanz
Curious to know if you have seen any project management software with either
good calendar or planning support built in? What made it better?

~~~
Tharkun
I wish I had. Been looking for that holy grail for some time.

------
TXV
Me and my team have been using Backlog for quite a while now and it's truly
refreshing
[https://nulab.com/products/backlog/](https://nulab.com/products/backlog/)

------
thrownaway954
I'm not finding what the feature difference is between Standard and Small
Business.

BTW... out of curiosity.... how long did it take you to create this and with
how many people?

------
bachmeier
How does one get their data out? Why should someone put their data inside what
appears to be a walled garden that might go bankrupt?

~~~
gauthamshankar
We have an export option available. You can download an HTML, text or JSON
dump of your data. We will also be releasing our public API's soon, so you can
use that to export your data anytime.

~~~
bachmeier
Okay. I didn't see that in the FAQ.

------
xxdesmus
The site is broken on iOS Safari with an ad block on. Not a good start. Looks
interesting otherwise.

------
graphememes
Is there a way to migrate Jira to Zepel, otherwise it's a complete non-starter
from the get go.

~~~
gauthamshankar
We have an import option while creating a project that will allow you to
migrate your data from Jira to Zepel.

------
rid
Is there any chance this will be possible to self-host in future? That's a
deal breaker for us.

~~~
23andwalnut
I built a self hosted alternative to trello, basecamp, etc -
[http://duetapp.com](http://duetapp.com)

I wonder if it's suitable for your use case? And if not, what I'd need to add
for it to be something you'd use

~~~
cdurth
this is really slick. any plans for an API for other integrations?

~~~
23andwalnut
Thanks! Yes, an API is extremely high on my priority list. Zapier as well. Let
me know what kinds of endpoints/actions you'd need from the API so I can make
sure they are included. What integrations would you like to see?

~~~
cdurth
API for time tracking and projects/tasks (our specific use case would be for
time and billing of projects into an ERP system). GitLab integration could be
interesting for the client portals. We have use cases where we are creating
GitLab users for clients and somewhat using that as a "portal".

Outlook integration would be nice as well. We used a simple jira plugin that
would copy contents of email and make a task for a specific project.

just read through your license and it looks like buyers will be allowed to
hack it to their liking +1

------
rebelrexx858
the most important piece of jira for us is the API. How/When do you plan to
have an open api that will assist in navigating issues through webhooks? (i
didn't see it listed anywhere if you already do)

~~~
gauthamshankar
We are actively working on our API's and Webhooks. We should be getting a v1
out in the next couple of weeks.

------
craigharley
Is there any way to import tickets (issues and pull requests) from Github?

~~~
gauthamshankar
Craig, we only have a Jira, Asana and Trello import for now. We will be
releasing our API endpoints soon so you should be able to get your tickets
from Github into Zepel using it.

------
drcongo
As someone who absolutely despises JIRA, this looks so much like JIRA that I'm
unlikely to even try it out.

