TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

FogBugz

Score7 out of 10

7 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is FogBugz?

A software project management system used to plan, track and release great software with this lightweight and customizable system that integrates into any project management workflow. FogBugz is designed for software development teams and includes all the project management tools developers need straight out of the box.

Users can:

  • Track projects from start to finish - With tasks and subtasks for each case with required details and track them to ensure timely closure and accountability.
  • Log and track bugs and issues - Maintains the entire project backlog. Teams receive notifications as the bugs move through the workflow.
  • Delivery estimates - FogBugz is powered by Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS). EBS is a statistical algorithm that produces ship date probability distributions based on historical timesheet data.
  • Customized case flows - The workflows in FogBugz are used to plan at the project, sprint, epic, user story and task levels.
  • Search- Search for docs, wikis, articles, code, issues, bugs and discussions in one unified view to quickly find cases based on an array of case fields.
  • Integrations - FogBugz integrates with Slack, Twitter, GitHub, Google Drive and Trello.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about FogBugz.
View all reviews

Fogbugz - Great for all users and a large amount of projects

Incentivized
Becky Jewell LaughtonView profile
Customer Experience in Professional Services at Becky Jewell Art (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Personal dashboards could be a bit more customizable - i.e. if I log in, I'd like to see some of the cases more at the bottom of the screen and notes at the top. This is a minor minor quibble.
  • I wish projects and cases within projects could be viewed in another format aside from list view. Perhaps a panel view or a card view would be good. That said, the list view is compact and agile.

Return on Investment

  • Overall positive. No bugs or issues using Fogbugz, and it was easy enough for managers to learn and for workers to learn. Very low training time and therefore very low cost.
  • It was hard to fudge details or miss work with Fogbugz. It does not let any project slip through the cracks. This is absolutely valuable for our managers and ultimately for clients as well.
  • Fogbugz makes sense to laypeople and to developers. It could be considered a compressed solution that could be used by QA teams and Development teams. There would be no need to get Asana for one team and Fogbugz for another - you can use Fogbugz for both.

Alternatives Considered

Asana, Trello and Basecamp

Other Software Used

Asana, Basecamp, Trello

FogBugz

Incentivized
Gillian HughesView profile
QA Analyst in Quality Assurance at TK Interactive (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Good for documenting
  • Good for attaching things

Cons

  • Missing keyboard shortcuts
  • Missing a good way to link external documenations

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Other Software Used

JIRA Software, Microsoft Office 365

A great fit for software development teams

Incentivized
Verified User
Director in Research & Development (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Evidence Based Estimates for scheduling (This alleviates issues that arise due to people who estimate time poorly)
  • Made from the developer perspective, versus others that are by C-Suite who are so far removed from the actual development process they just contribute to the disconnect or inaccuracy of the system
  • Direction/Ambition/Transparency of DevFactory after their purchase of FogBugz/Kiln is refreshing

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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

Alternatives Considered

JIRA Software

Fogbugz is simple, flexible and easy to maintain. Great for SMB's, not great for large organizations.

Ted ShimizuView profile
Digital Producer in Information Technology at JUICE Pharma Worldwide (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Simplicity: Compared to other tools like Jira and even Bugzilla, Fogbugz minimizes the number of fields. The general workflow and status' of a given task works well for us. (Assigned, Resolved, and Closed).
  • Flexibility: The list views are highly customizable. This allows for many ways to display information and create custom lists for teams and departments. It has prebuilt queries, and basic boolean syntax that you can stitch together to build a list.
  • Easy to maintain: There are just two types of access rights. Regular and Admin. With some training, administration of the tool is done by project managers and a general user admin. We have a self hosted version, so there is an IT component in our maintenance, but it does not requires much attention.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Related Products

Products similar to FogBugz that may also meet your needs.
All comparisons
Atlassian Jira
CompareLearn more