When comparing Mantis BT vs JIRA, the Slant community recommends JIRA for most people. In the question“What are the best issue tracking tools for mid sized software companies?” JIRA is ranked 4th while Mantis BT is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose JIRA is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
MantisBT is a free and open source bug tracker.
Pro Light
Really light and simple. Good for simple management.
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.
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.
Pro Very cheap for small teams
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.
Pro Great reporting tools
Jira offers amazingly powerful reporting tools like activity stream, different graphs of opened and closed issues over time etc...
Cons
Con Little integration
Supports little integration with code repositories, and CI servers
Con Too simple
Not powerful enough for complex management.
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.
Con New releases often change the GUI largely
Sometimes the usage becomes worse, e.g. when creating a new ticket, you need to click the notification to keep it on the display.
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.
Con Client application support
No free client applications; IDE connector development was discontinued. Users are effectively locked into using web interface which requires context-switching.