When comparing Kanban Tool vs Pivotal Tracker, the Slant community recommends Pivotal Tracker for most people. In the question“What are the best feature tracking/planning tools for small development teams?” Pivotal Tracker is ranked 5th while Kanban Tool is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Pivotal Tracker is:
While not perfect kanban, Pivotal is somewhat flexible in that you can mark sections of stories. So rather than (or in addition to) a normal sprint, you can put a marker in to define all cards above that point as part of something, for example a release. Further, you can override the auto tracker and define how many points in a sprint. So there is some degree of flexibility which sometimes you don’t find in “purist” agile or scrum tools.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Intuitive
You will probably figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Pro Time tracking reports
Great and seamless time tracking with best time tracking reports.
Pro Customizable and reassuring
Thanks to the visualization of work, it's much easier to see the progress of work. Boosts the confidence in what you endeavour upon and reassures each step of the process. The customization allows to fit a system right to the process you've planned, so that we don't have to match our work to an external way, but build our own.
Pro Good number of integrations
Kanban Tool integrates with: Zapier, WeWiredWeb, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, Google calendar, iCal, Outlook, flexible and well-documented API for external systems integration, RSS feeds for boards, Chrome extension for adding tasks, JIRA® integration (Chrome extension - Kanbanira), adding tasks and comments from email, export/import Excel/CSV.
Pro Simple customization
Kanban Tool provides a collection of power-ups that allow you to customize it to meet your needs. Especially, "Developer tools" are worth mentioning. With this power-up you can add custom scripts and stylesheets to your board.
Pro Scalable
No matter how big a team you work in, kanban tool fits nicely. Thanks to the ability to customize the boards, it's easy to match a board to the size of the process. The kanban tool has been growing with our process for the past 3 years, we started with 3 people and 2 boards, now we have 24 employees and 16 main boards with several process steps each and the system works just as well.
Pro User friendly interface
Pro Work statistics
You can clearly see on a graph how much of planned work have you done already. It's very motivating.
Pro Pleasant design
Pro Swimlanes and customization
You can very easily adjust the board layout to suit your needs and even add swimlanes to have all projects on the same Kanban board.
Pro On-site version available
Pro iOS app coming soon
Just been told by the Support Team there will be an iOS app soon.
Pro Flexible
While not perfect kanban, Pivotal is somewhat flexible in that you can mark sections of stories. So rather than (or in addition to) a normal sprint, you can put a marker in to define all cards above that point as part of something, for example a release. Further, you can override the auto tracker and define how many points in a sprint. So there is some degree of flexibility which sometimes you don’t find in “purist” agile or scrum tools.
Pro Great software to use in conjunction with a disciplined agile/scrum development philosophy
Pivotal Tracker has a Kanban feel to it, but takes a more opinionated “Agile” approach to feature management: It encourages items in the flow to be user stories with effort points associated to them to allow Pivotal to calculate your team’s velocity.
If you agree with the workflow, Pivotal offers a ton of functionality not provided by more generic tools like Trello. You can see your team’s velocity over time, organic smaller Stories into “Epics” (huge features) etc.
Pro Stories can contain media files
Easy to create features/bugs/chores with embedded files (screenshots, docs, videos).
Cons
Con Not immediately self-hostable
To self-host, your server needs to have 10 or more users, and prices on self-hosting are not disclosed.
Con Search could be better
Search is not reliable.
Con Non libre/open source (propietary)

Con No Kanban-board
To get a good overview often Kanban boards are used. You can somehow imitate a board, but it is not comparable to a real Kanban-board.
Con Limited Work Flow & Process
Few story states. If your process involves some sort of QA and sign off, forget it - you get started, deliver, accept/reject, and finished. No way to customize this to your process. Sad miss for an easy fix/configuration.
Con Non-Editable Default Templates
Templates for defining stories and bugs save time. Pivotal has a default for story and bug. However you can’t edit these. So when you go to add your own, the titles can be confusing to users. Maybe title like “Our User Story” and “Our Bug”? Users will see all templates in the drop down and it’s confusing, so you end up with peope using the wrong templates which adds to process problems.
Con No Saved & Shared Views
Everything is in a column. Aside from destroying Kanban, it also gets confusing. The real downside here is that there’s no way to save a set of columns and pin for others to quickly see. Everyone on the team is usually looking at a completely different set of work. This is literally the definition of not being on the same page.

Con Not usable for multiple projects
If you want / need to have an overview of all the tasks going on over different projects and if you have these organized in different projects, there is no way to get an overview beside reporting. Just take a look at the screenshot and you see what you can expect.
