FogBugz vs. Linear App vs. SpiraPlan

FogBugz has been a very useful tool to our organization, and much preferred over other options we reviewed, mainly JIRA. There are still some improvements needed, but with the fairly recent acquisition by DevFactory, we have a great deal of hope for what is in store given DevFactory's focus and transparency. It seems like both DevFactory and FogBugz customers are eager for substantial improvements on the front-end, but there is/was a great deal of backend housecleaning that definitely needed to take place first.

Incentivized

If you are a product based company, Linear is the most powerful fine-tuned platform. Their methodology really works well. It's fast, got nice UI/UX, feels modern, ability to manage projects, love how they show comments as a thread, the integrations like Figma works really well But if you are a software service company and have multiple client projects, it is hard to manage that in Linear plus you would have to pay for guests if you are inviting client stakeholders to overlook progress.

Incentivized

We selected SpiraPlan because the workflow allows us to start simple without adopting an entire methodology. It suits small teams and single users really well.

• Tasks, Subtasks, and notes. All three of these areas were critical for our team. Tasks in Fogbugz were a bit easier to see than in more bug based software like Trello or JIRA
• The entire screen is used to view a task or case. Clicking on a task or case will open up and take up the entire screen, aside from the sidebar nav columns. I like to see details and I think Fogbugz does this very well, using up as much digital real estate as possible.
• Flowcharting in Fogbugz with Creately is nice - instead of getting an exterior flowchart software like Lucidchart, Creately works right in Fogbugz.

Incentivized

• Managing the high level goals and roadmap of our product
• Manage the tasks for dev, QA and design teams
• Visualise the progress of the sprints and projects
• Collaborate on tasks

Incentivized

• Flexible requirements organisation structure. I'm able to group and sub-group requirements as I see fit.
• Competitive product pricing. Paying by active use instead of registered user was the winning point.
• UI is straightforward and easy to use.

• The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
• There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
• There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.

• Linear is missing documentation features like Jira Confluence. We can use Notion but it would have been great if Linear offered more comprehensive solution
• Eventhough we can manage releases with projects, it is hard to manage them when there are multiple projects being released at the same time. The initiatives feature kind of handles this but if we can assign tasks to a release that would be awesome
• Being able to invite guests without costing extra money. Platforms like Clickup allow you to invite a limited no of guests without costing extra money.
• Linear is not good if you are software services company and want to manage multiple client projects. Linear is built for product teams.

Incentivized

• Access from South East Asia is rather sluggish. Could be due to server location.
• Complimentary phone app to do simple tasks (e.g. create tasks, create requirements, add comments) offline would be beneficial because access to the internet can be an issue at the customer's environment.

Linear is the most UI/UX friendly, modern and well though project management tool out there. I've used ClickUp, Jira, Monday, Asana in the past.

Incentivized

I like JIRA a lot better than Fogbugz for many reasons. If I had a choice, I'd use JIRA every time

Incentivized

Even though platforms like ClickUp are pretty flexible, Linear is fast, simple, has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, better UI/UX, modern product development concepts built into it, listens to user feedback

Incentivized

Main differentiating factors: 1. Lightweight process 2. Plans based on active users instead of registered users.

• Saves time by quickly allowing Developers to make the necessary notes without getting bogged down in bloated UIs
• Has allowed us to look back easily and see the exact code changes made for the exact Case to aid in decisions for current changes, increasing the certainty of the decided path, without regression

Incentivized

• Linear decreased the time we take for releases of features
• Linear has helped us work on multiple projects saving time
• Customer support cases are handled well through Linear which improved customer satisfaction

Incentivized

• Allows us to manage simple IT requirements without major upfront costs. Allows us to expand our process complexity at our own pace.
• Slow UI response from a South East Asia country can make data entry a drag.