As someone working for a startup, I’m constantly on the lookout for products that can help streamline our workflows. Issue management and content management are essential parts of our workflow, so I’ve spent a lot of time researching different solutions for these areas.

If you search for “issue tracking,” “project management,” or “content management,” you’ll find a lot of options out there. In this post, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on two of the solutions we’ve used at RainingClouds: Basecamp and JIRA.

Basecamp

We started using Basecamp for AppSurfer, and at first, it seemed like a good fit. The product had a minimal design, was easy to understand, and required minimal clicks to navigate. The single view for looking at all issues/tasks in a project was also helpful. However, as a software company, Basecamp fell short in several areas:

• Task lists could get overwhelming, with a lot of information on a single page.
• There was no facility for tracking the different stages of a task (e.g., Created, In progress, In testing, Resolved, Build broken).
• Once an issue was closed, it became part of an archive that was difficult to search through.
• It was challenging to manage source code changes associated with each task, and we had to use a third-party tool (Zapier) to do so.
• Linking tasks was not possible, which was often a requirement for us.
• The documentation features were limited, with very few formatting tools, no support for code snippets in discussions, and no way to attach a document page created within Basecamp to existing tasks.

JIRA

After experiencing these issues with Basecamp, I started looking for a better solution and came across Atlassian’s products. I was particularly impressed by two of their products: JIRA and Confluence. We started a trial account, and we were so impressed that we decided to continue using them.

Some of the most appealing features of JIRA include:

• They understand the needs of their target audience and provide all the required features for task management, such as task workflows, task types, and task linking.
• Customization of the issue workflow is amazing. We were able to create a “In Testing” stage for issues that are ready for testing.
• JIRA integrates with GitHub and BitBucket, allowing us to connect each code commit with issues. This feature is incredibly useful for tracking code changes associated with an issue on a single page.
• Confluence is an excellent replacement for wikis. It seamlessly integrates with JIRA, so each task has a wiki page associated with it.
• The sharing of spaces is a useful privacy feature, allowing us to control who can access certain information.
• JIRA provides useful analysis of issues, deadlines, and other information.

While I’m still exploring these products, I would highly recommend Atlassian’s products for software firms looking for a task management solution. You can try their trial period to see if it’s the right fit for your needs.

Note: The opinions expressed in this post are my own, and based on the current status of the products at the time of writing.