Ayoa vs. FogBugz vs. Xmind

It's great for small to medium business where you need to have tracked communication and conversations that can have milestones, deadlines, supporting files, and the ability to pass the task around to multiple individuals for completion. It's not exactly useful but with some work and maintenance can be used for issue tracking and work delegation

Fogbugz is great for case-and-task based businesses. If your business has hundreds of weekly anticipated tasks that exist, such as processes to get files converted, Fogbugz can manage these processes very well. For our team, we knew each week that we would have about 500 tasks or orders to get processed. Fogbugz helped us break down these projects, get them assigned evenly throughout the team, and easily see who is working on what task. FogBugz is also good for tracking unanticipated tasks like bugs, making notes, flowcharts, and categorizing if the problem is a bug, feature request, etc. For us, it was just the best at nailing down those anticipated tasks.

Incentivized

Well suited:

• Organizing information.
• Doing research.
• Organizing goals.
• Planning tasks.
• Planning meetings.
• Structure for writing documents.

Less appropriate:

• Sharing documents among the teams/multiple users.
• General-purpose infographics.
• Writing longer paragraphs in the note field is very limited.
• Integration with GitHub.
• Integration with Confluence.
• XMind uses a proprietary document format which is not indexed by search programs on a PC or a Mac. This means that one cannot search in the content of the XMind documents.

Incentivized

• The user interface is intuitive and easy to learn.
• The ability to organize tasks by user, department, type makes it easy to keep on top of work.
• Ayoa is cross platform and has apps for mobile/tablet as well as the desktop app and browser version.

• Good for documenting
• Good for attaching things

Incentivized

• Easy to use, simple flowcharts.
• Multiple functions, flowcharts can be edited to be suitable for a variety of tasks.
• Displays information in a dynamic and interesting way.

Incentivized

• The administrative side of Ayoa is very limited.
• If a user accidentally deletes a board or leaves the company, it's a bit of a pain to get that data back.
• User administration is difficult and if a use who is invited selects the wrong link after registration they may get locked out of your invite.

• Workflow capability is very limited to the original implementation, could use a refresh and extension of the capabilities
• UI/UX needs improvement. This was in the works prior to purchase by DevFactory, and has taken a back seat to backend improvements that rightfully needed to be fixed first.
• Pricing model doesn't fit our usage very well, so we're paying for full-featured users for everyone even though the majority of Users only need to submit Cases and modify the Wikis, and our small percentage of Users are in Dev and need all features.

Incentivized

• Functionality to show when topics are in-line with eachother
• Unable to save colour schemes on the website
• An ability to see previous versions of the mindmap, save history

Incentivized

Commands and controls extremely easy to navigate and use. Ability to import mindmaps and collaborate also contribute to a very pleasant usability experience

Incentivized

The support around a bug in the tool which prevented the correct printing of diagrams. Support came back after a few days, and there was no workaround. Eventually, the bug was fixed in a future release. The company does not pay much attention to user forums. With better support and plugin mechanism for user contributions, the product would be more convincing.

Incentivized

I've just started evaluating Planner with out recent upgrade to Business Premium but I'm finding that it could easily be used to replace Ayoa and would help offset the cost from the MS365 Business Premium upgrade by replacing another SaaS cost. It does almost all the same things, integrates in our already existing MS365 ecosystem, and is backed by Microsoft... it's just not as 'pretty' as the bubble boards

FogBugz is made for the Developers who actually use it every day, while JIRA is made for the C-Suite who oversees them but has little idea of the finer points of daily dev tasks. In reality, most don't fit into the mold of JIRA tickets, and the summarized information that C-Suite is reviewing is incomplete or skewed. There is also an outstanding issue since 2004 that JIRA refuses to implement despite wide user support, the merging of tickets. You can see the open ticket with the JIRA team here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-3592

Incentivized

As Xmind draws a specific focus on mindmaps its functionality is very clear and easy to use. Other mindmap systems make you connect the topics and arrows yourself which can be very frustrating and finnicky. Its presentation is very clear and displayed cleanly

Incentivized

• Communication and follow-up has gone way up since we started using Ayoa.
• Accountability has also improved considerably since we started with Ayoa.
• It has unfortunately caused some burn out on some users because it had made it much easier to 'punt' work over to someone else without any prior communication.

• Less downtime of jobs. It is each person's responsibility to check their list to see if they have any pending work.
• When people are out sick or busy, a supervisor can easily shift work from one person to another who many have time to cover work.
• Management has a quick view into seeing what is happening with a job and can use it as a tool to request addiional resources as needed.

• Increased productivity of employees.
• Provided structure and clear thought processes.
• Reusable content.

Incentivized