What are the best free bug-tracking tools for programming?

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. BitBucket does not use GitHub's pricing plan, instead of charging users for each private repo, it charges teams per number of team members. It is free for up to 5 people. See More

Bitbucket's bug tracker

Top Pro

Free unlimited private repositories for small teams

Top Con

Only 5 users are free

5 users free: Unlimited private repos, Dedicated support, Code reviews, Custom domains, JIRA integration, REST API. See More

Top Pro

Supports both Mercurial and Git

Has full support for both Mercurial and Git VCS. See More

Top Con

Integration with other tools is not as good as github

Most of the 3rd party tools ( bug trackers, CI servers, chat servers, etc) always integrate with GitHub first, and either don't integrate with Bitbucket at all or do sub par job in it. For example there are 3 separate projects to allow building and verifying pull request submissions on Jenkins CI server and there is only one viable one for BitBucket and that one is really buggy and lacking many features. The only exception to this rule is Atlassian products like Jira. See More

Top Pro

Native application for both Mac and Windows

Atlassian, the company behind BitBucket is also behind SourceTree, a free application for Windows and Mac wich works as a client for both Git and Mercurial which can be connected to BitBucket and other code hosting services. See More

Top Con

The UI seems old and not very polished

While GitHub's UI is extremely simple to understand and very polished, BitBucket lacks a bit on this category. With a design that seems old and not as pleasant to look at. See More

Top Pro

Multiple authentication methods

BitBucket supports GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, Google and even GitHub authentication. See More

Specs

Redmine

Top Pro

User created reports and listings

Searches can be saved as listings together with sorting and grouping. See More

Top Con

No hosted solution

In order to use redmine you have to install it into your own server or computer where you also need to have Ruby installed first. While it's not extremely hard, it's not an easy feat for a beginner. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Redmine is a free and open source tool. See More

Top Con

Picky

Whenever you get it to run properly, you can never be sure that additional system upgrades will leave you with a running Redmine. See More

Top Pro

Visually appealing and has high usability

Redmine's UI is very simple and easy to learn to use. It does not overwhelm users with many options and information at once. See More

Top Pro

Works well out of the box, but allows easy customisation for extra data fields

You can add additional custom fields to things like issues, time log entries, and so on. This allows for useful customisation of Redmine to fit different workflows and internal systems. See More

Top Pro

Self-hosted

You have complete control over the data you store. See More

Top Pro

Active development community

The code is actively developed, and is slowly improving with time. Older versions are maintained for those who don't want to upgrade regularly. See More

Specs

Mercurial:yes

Git:yes

SVN:yes

Technology:Ruby on Rails

Phabricator is quickly improving, with bug fixes and new features added often. There is an update to the changelog every couple of weeks. See More

Phabricator

Top Pro

Actively updated

Top Con

Expects you to use its workflow for merging code to master

Phabricator expects you to use all of its workflow to merge code back into the master branch. Though this can be worked around through configuration. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

Phabricator is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. See More

Top Pro

Command Line Access (via arc)

Top Pro

Visual workboards

Beautiful project workboards built directly into the product alongside bug tracking and code review for effective project management. See More

Top Pro

Good looking

Top Pro

Code ownership

Users can subscribe to files or even repositories and notifications will be sent when code you are subscribed to is changed. See More

Top Pro

Supports the three major version control systems

Support for Git, SVN and Mercurial is available. See More

Specs

Mercurial:Yes (no largefiles extension)

Bugs Everywhere

Top Pro

Bug state can be modified offline

Users can easily change the bug state even while being offline. See More

Top Con

Source code hosted on Gitorious

The source code for Bugs Everywhere seems to be hosted only on Gitorious, which unfortunately has been abandoned, making the source code for Bugs Everywhere unavailable. See More

Top Pro

Complements distributed version control systems

Bugs everywhere is a distributed bug tracker, it's built to be used in tandem with distributed version control systems. See More

It runs on PHP and MySQL, which are ubiquitous nowadays. See More

Bugs

Top Pro

Simple installation

Top Con

Based on an outdated Laravel version

The maintainer doesn't feel like porting it to a more recent Laravel version. So unless someone steps up, it may slowly die along with its PHP version. See More

Top Pro

Free and opensource

Bugs is free an Open source. Anyone can contribute to it. See More

MantisBT is a free and open source bug tracker. See More

Mantis BT

Top Pro

Open source

Top Con

Little integration

Supports little integration with code repositories, and CI servers See More

Top Pro

Light

Really light and simple. Good for simple management. See More

Top Con

Too simple

Not powerful enough for complex management. See More

Top Con

No documentation can be found in the installation files

The files that are included with the installer or the files that come out of the box after a fresh installation don't include any documentation. See More

You start by simply adding your first bug with hg b add <bug title>. See More

b

Top Pro

No setup needed

Top Pro

Fully distributed

It lives with your code. It is suitable for a completely distributed multi-user workflow without central points of failure. Users need not be online to add or change bugs. See More

Top Pro

'Get things done, not organized'

b follows the principle, "the only way to make your bug list prettier is to fix some damn bugs." See More

Specs

Mercurial:Yes

Offers a hosted version, which is very helpful if you want to avoid the time and energy it takes to host a bug tracker on your own internal server. See More

Lean Testing

Top Pro

Hosted

Top Con

Not very popular

Since it's not a very popular solution, there are not as many guides and resources for this out there. Plus, there's also a greater risk of it shutting down one day than other, more popular issue trackers. See More

Top Pro

Slack integration

Can easily be integrated with Slack. See More

Top Pro

Free unlimited projects & team members

Lean Testing is free for an unlimited number of team members or projects. See More

Top Pro

Test plan manager

Includes a manager for testing plans. See More

The bug genie enterprise version is free only for teams with up to 10 members. However, the open source version is free for teams of any size. See More

The Bug Genie

Top Pro

Open Source (MPL)

Top Con

The enterprise version is free only for small teams

Top Pro

Custom issue fields

The Bug Genie supports having any number of custom issue fields for any type of issue. See More

Pivotal Tracker is based on Scrum agile methodology. The interface is basically based on columns which you can add to your screen. See More

Pivotal Tracker

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

Not great for tracking issues

PT is a pretty good tool for agile development management. But when you start adding issues and bugs, the project backlog can become quite large because of the fact that it's missing a lot of good issue management tools that other products have. See More

Specs

Uyy:Hhhj

104 Community Recommendations

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Request recommendations from the community

ResponsibleAeshma

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Mantis BT

Recommended 7 months ago

Simple and just works!

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Recommended 4 months ago

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Recommended 6 months ago

Simplified team management tools

Nice and usable UI

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GitLab issues

Recommended 6 months ago

Good web UI

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GitLab issues

Recommended 7 months ago

ThoroughFortuna hasn’t added their experience, pros or cons to their recommendation.

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9 months ago

Convenient continuous integration with Travis CI

Only public repositories are free

Large community

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