We've settled down with YouTrack (by JetBrains). It doesn't look pretty buy it's designed by (and for) people that uses it. Its command management is AWESOME. It's also quite cost effective compared to other solutions. Couldn't find a more productive tool that that one if you want to have something more organized than trello (eg. timetracking and customizable fields)
I absolutely love Youtrack from a feature perspective but it still has the same dealbreaker problem as JIRA -- it's Java-based and needs a fair amount of CPU/RAM resources.
Sadly that's one of the big reasons we're moving away from Jira. The full set is:
* We don't have the money for a 10+ licence
* It's slow (our VPS is underpowered and we don't have the money for a faster one)
* Too many features are now part of pay-for licences, which pushes the aggregate cost over our self-imposed "how easy is this to justify to our attendees?" limit.
In the end, it boils down to the aggregate cost to get what we want.
We are using YouTrack cloud and while it does the job, it's not really satisfying to use. We would like to see more and better integrations. My current frustration is the Git integration; it only works with commits (not PRs) and is not 100% reliable. There is also a Confluence plugin that someone wrote for their hosted version 6 years ago, but the company won't enable it for the cloud version.
On the plus side, I've had pretty good interactions with their support team and they seem pretty responsive. Given that they are located in Eastern Europe, the team communicates very well and I generally don't have any trouble getting them to understand what's going on.
