What are the best issue tracking tools for mid sized software companies?

GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information. For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information. See More

GitHub Issues

Top Pro

Nice and usable UI

Top Con

Only public repositories are free

Unfortunately, compared to some other competitors, GitHub offers closed repositories only for premium users, and the price is not cheap at all. See More

Specs

Platforms:Web

GitHub can be integrated with Travis CI for code testing and it is free for free open-source projects. See More

Mercurial:no

Top Pro

Convenient continuous integration with Travis CI

Top Con

Proprietary tool

Top Pro

Large community

GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have. See More

Top Con

Only git repositories are fully supported

Github has full support only for Git, while it has some support for SVN. But it doesn't have any support for Mercurial though. See More

Top Pro

Excellent native apps

GitHub has native apps for mobile (iOS and Android), Windows and Mac, which make code deployment easier and faster. See More

Top Con

Issues are not systematically linked to a specific release

Top Pro

Simplified team management tools

GitHub has easy and useful features to control teams, large and small alike. Team members can be given different powers on different projects, ranging from the ability to create them, to only being able to have read-only access. See More

Top Pro

Supports Two-Factor authentication

GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account. See More

Top Pro

Anyone can fork

Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch. See More

Redmine is a free and open source tool. See More

Redmine

Top Pro

Free and open-source

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

VersatileEshu's Experience

Flexible issues tracking software in terms of workflow and team needs adaptation. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac

Technology:Ruby on Rails

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

SVN:yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Visually appealing and has high usability

Top Con

It has unatractive interface with low usability

Top Pro

Built In Wiki

Top Con

no

Top Pro

Built in Integration for GIT, SVN, & CVS

Top Pro

Still under active development

Redmine is very much alive, and improving all the time. See More

Top Pro

Plugins support

If there is additional features set you want you can find or write plugins to extend the ability. See More

Top Pro

Self-hosted

No need to trust your potentially-confidential data to a third party. With Redmine you can use a trusted server that you have control over. See More

Top Pro

Flexibility of workflow and custom fields

Redmine offers the possibility to customize trackers workflow, fields and views. See More

The software running the service is closed source. There is no way to know what is happening with your data. Also, it is impossible to implement a self-hosted solution. Source is available under certain circumstances. See More

JIRA

Top Con

Closed Source software

Top Pro

Integrations and plugins

It integrates well with a lot of other tools, including other products from the Atlassian suite. Plus there are a ton of plugins, including charting tools, screen capture, etc. See More

Specs

Platforms:Cloud

Technology:Java

Top Con

Locks you inside its own ecosystem

If you use Jira you are pretty much locked inside their ecosystem. For example, if you want to add a tool to your project management stack (like a wiki) more often than not you will have to buy one of Atlassian's tools. See More

Top Pro

Powerful REST API

Powerful REST API allows you to grab any data you want, run powerful JQL filters and create or update issues as needed. See More

Top Con

Overly complex

Finding out how to get the simplest things done takes a long time. There are options over options that you are not interested in, that you have to evaluate just to make sure that's not what you're looking for, until, eventually, you find your item buried where you wouldn't have thought to look. Example: A simple summary of time spent on all tasks in a project. See More

Top Pro

Lots of integrations and plugins

It integrates well with a lot of other tools, including other products from the Atlassian suite. Plus there are a ton of plugins, including charting tools, screen capture, etc. See More

Top Con

Slow learning curve

To use it properly there is much to learn (and configure) See More

Top Pro

Supports version-focused work-flows

JIRA is not a plain long list of tickets, but can be configured to be version-focused, so planning and understanding the progress in a software project becomes clear. See More

Top Con

It is quite expensive

Top Pro

Supports issue dependencies

Top Con

Client application support

Top Pro

Very powerful

It has many options for configuring the status roads, very good filtering, excellent way of tracking time. See More

Top Con

Requires third-party plugin for DVCS integration

Depending on your circumstances, you might pay for a plugin to provide access. See More

Top Pro

Great reporting tools

Jira offers amazingly powerful reporting tools like activity stream, different graphs of opened and closed issues over time etc... See More

Top Con

Slow

The particular combination of server-generated content and JavaScript used by Atlassian combines to quite a laggy user experience. It feels like wading through mud every time you need to update some little item while you're trying to get something else done. See More

Top Pro

Backed by a trustable company

Jira is developed and maintained by Atlassian, which is not an unknown venture, especially for developers. Atlassian has a great number of other products used by million of users worldwide, including BitBucket, HipChat, Confluence and Stash. Each of these products have hundreds of thousands of users who use them daily and this has allowed Atlassian to garner a lot of goodwill from the dev community. See More

Top Pro

Leverage directory servers

Group hierarchy can mimic or be controlled at the organizational level. See More

Gitea

Cons

The issue management options are very simple (GitHub like). See More

Top Con

Simple

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker

Lavagna

Pros

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker, Vagrant

Top Pro

Free

Specs

Technology:Java, Javascript

MaxiBug

Top Pro

Free

Top Con

PostgreSQL knowledge needed

There should be at least one person in the team that can administer a PostgreSQL server with user roles and rights. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Fork of the free and open-source MiniBug issue tracker that supports multi-user usage. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows

Technology:C#

All that is needed is a single exe and a PostgreSQL server, the database will be created automatically. See More

Top Pro

Single exe

Top Con

Virus warning

Might give a false virus warning on some Windows versions when downloading with the Edge browser, try with Chrome instead. If someone would like to sponsor a paid authenticode certificate this might be solved, please leave a comment! See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

The executable size is less than 3 MB. See More

Top Pro

Git support

By selecting the "Git history" tab in the Issue form and pressing the sync button at the bottom-right, the Git history for an issue can be retrieved. See More

Top Pro

Drag & Drop

Images can be dragged and dropped on the Issue form. See More

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

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

Specs

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

SVN:–

Mercurial:yes

Top Pro

Supports both Mercurial and Git

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

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

Multiple authentication methods

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

Lots of migration options, e.g. from Jira. See More

Mantis BT

YouTrack

Top Pro

Migration options

RickZeeland's Experience

Free for up to 10 users and Open Source projects, integrates with other Jetbrains products like TeamCity. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Web

Technology:Java

Top Pro

Mobile apps

Mobile apps for iOS and Android. See More

Top Pro

Gantt chart

Gant chart provides an overview of your projects in time. See More

Top Pro

Zendesk integration

Can be integrated with Zendesk. See More

Top Pro

State-machine workflows

Top Pro

Image editor

Built in image editor. See More

Top Pro

REST API

Top Pro

Scrum

Top Pro

Kanban

Kanban boards. See More

Each item has a PDF button (among others) which lets you export all the information related to that particular item in PDF format. See More

Axosoft

Top Pro

Items can be exported as PDF

Top Con

Can get rather expensive quickly

Axosoft can get pretty expensive pretty quickly for large teams and/or large projects. The cheapest tier allows for a maximum of five users and costs $20/month. However, for larger teams and larger projects it can easily go into the thousands of USD per month. See More

Specs

Platforms:Online, Windows

Technology:.NET, SQL Server, IIS

Top Pro

Extremely fine-grained control over the lifecycle of each task

Tasks are divided into categories and each category can have one or more workflows which are followed by tasks belonging to that category until their completion. In other words, workflows are used to set each step tasks need to take in order to be completed. Axosoft lets users have extremely fine-grained control over workflows and by extension, the whole lifecycle of each task. Each step in a workflow can be named and you can choose which fields are updated when a step is complete. This way you can automatically tweak tasks as they progress (you can set tasks to belong to different users once a step is complete, you can even change workflows for a task if a certain step is taken). See More

Top Pro

Helpdesk functionality

Turn emails into support incident tickets. A brandable self-service portal can be created for customers to create and edit tickets without using paid Axosoft accounts. See More

OpenProject

Platforms:Linux, Docker, Cloudron

Technology:Ruby

DoneDone