When comparing Wekan 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 Wekan is ranked 9th. 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
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Pros
Pro Open source
Open source software benefits from collaborative development from the user community.
Pro Install with a few clicks with Cloudron or Yunohost
Making it really easy to self host.
Pro Easy to create instance on sandstorm.io
Wekan is available as an app on sandstorm.io. For personal use, it may be sufficient to run an instance in a free sandstorm account.
Pro Easy to install on most arm64, x86 and x64 linux systems
Pro Friendly support
Developers are very helpful and friendly.
Pro Clear UI/UX
Well-thought-out user interface – despite the high complexity of the functionality very intuitive.
Pro Can easily be integrated with NodeJS apps
Since it's built using Meteor, it can easily be integrated with existing NodeJS apps.
Pro Written in JavaScript
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 No print version of the ticket page
Con No desktop notifications
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.