zerodays’ journey through the world of project management tools

Right after we started our company in late 2021, we knew a good project management tool will be absolutely essential for our work, but we had some specific requirements. We do a lot of agency work, developing for multiple different clients at the same time so the tool had to be amazing for cross project planning, as well as enable some type of transparent sharing of the project progress with the client.

Now, almost two and a half years later and with four tools tested in detail, few others considered and most of them tossed, we feel like we finally landed on a good option for us - Jira. But, as this was definitely not a smooth path, we wanted to do an overlook of everything we have tried, why it worked and why not, in hopes it eases the process for anyone else trying to navigate the world of project management tools.

What methodology do we follow?

The methodology we follow of course defines the tools needed for our project management, so let’s start with that. We follow agile principles, but no specific methodology strictly, however, we use Kanban boards. So, we were looking for a tool that would offer us flexible and user-friendly Kanban boards and would allow us to plan as well as track the time spent on various tasks/tickets.

Trying out the Tools

GitHub Issues and Projects

Our first project management tool we took on was GitHub Projects. We knew and loved GitHub Issues from the open source projects and believed that Projects would be the tool that would fit us. However, unfortunately, it left quite a lot to be desired.

What we disliked:

• All the project management is connected only to the repository. So if your project exists in two separate repositories (frontend and backend for example), you have to make two separate tickets instead of one and cross linking through the repositories is not a practical solution.
• It isn’t really a fit for our office team, as the non-development tasks don’t fit in, and it’s expensive as a project management tool.
• Every ticket you create is a draft by default (this isn’t really a deal-breaker on its own, but it definitely makes the user experience a lot less enjoyable).
• There is no hierarchy when it comes to tickets, which makes having an overview of the issue timeline, the main issue, the sub issues etc. difficult.
• Poor time tracking.

So after a while, we made the decision to move on and try out Clickup 2.0.

ClickUp

ClickUp is advertised as an “all in one productivity platform” which drew us to it. It definitely solved most of the issues we mentioned with GitHub, such as cross project tracking and ticket hierarchy, but unfortunately we still weren’t completely satisfied.

What we disliked:

• Firstly, the app had a lot of bugs and issues, which made it difficult to use. For example, often when creating a ticket, it didn’t show up until a couple of minutes later, when two same tickets popped up. Slow loading times were also a common issue.
• The layout and organization of the platform was in our opinion a bit cluttered, so the project tracking and overlook of the projects is messy.

We have to mention that the bugs mentioned above are supposedly resolved in the 3.0 version, however as the app didn’t convince us, we decided not to stay aboard, and jumped ship to Notion.

Notion

Notion is an everyday organization tool, combining project management tools with wikis, docs, planning tools, etc. Its customizability and the lure of having one place for the documentation and project management are what convinced us to try it. We used it for most of our development and non-development documentation and tried out two Kanban boards - a free Kanban template offered by the platform, and our own customizable Kanban board. What we liked about the platform was the easy addition of external guests and sharing the projects with people outside of the company, and good tools for non-development related team collaboration.

What we disliked:

• Although Notion is quite known to be very customizable for everyday use, it was too limited for our development team. We specifically had issues with the Kanban boards - they were too rigid. Both the template and our own version lacked the ability to move, rename columns, add filters, automatically hide done tickets, etc.
• Poor GitHub integration.
• Sometimes it doesn't work - some tickets are not saved on the first try and other bugs.
• Similar to GitHub - there was no ticket hierarchy, which made the project overlook difficult.
• Columns don’t have an option to hide tickets, so it gets cluttered.
• Project planning and filter options were quite limited. There was also no option to integrate it with our time-tracking tool.

With enough experience to finally know what we like and what not, we started considering our final move to either Linear or Jira.

Jira

In the end we settled on Jira, because of the configurability of the tool and integrations it offers, specifically with Slack, Figma and GitHub, the last one being absolutely amazing. So far, it solves the majority of the issues we had with other tools, most notably, it is automated where it can be, which makes a more hassle-free user experience for the development team.

What do we still dislike:

• Although we love the configurability it offers, it is quite difficult to set up everything - it is confusing, cluttered in different places, and the learning curve is very steep. On the good side, it is only a pain for the admins, not the developers.
• It doesn’t really offer good template options. The way around we found is that we have a project that we named template and we then initiate new projects based on it.. The downside is we still have to manually set up filters and settings, so it takes a while. Again, thankfully it is the issue only for the admins.
• We had to make our own integration for the time tracking software we use - Clockify. There are some apps that offer some integration, but we wanted time tracking to be synced with Jira’s own time tracking. However, with Jira, we at least had an option to do this ourselves.

Wrapping it up

We also considered Linear and although it seemed to cover most of our requirements, we decided to go for Jira because of the integrations it offers. In all honesty, we have to admit that we might have not considered it enough and will maybe return back to it at some point, but a decision had to be made.

So, here we are at last - Jira. Is this the best solution for eternity? Probably not. But, we are happy at the moment, as we configured it to our specific needs and it doesn’t restrict our developers, while being fairly automated, so the hassle of moving tickets etc. is minimized.

zerodays is a custom software development team based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. We focus on AI development and consulting, web and mobile app development, business digitalization, and process automation solutions. If you’re interested in what we do and want to keep up with us, visit our website or follow us on LinkedIn.