#1 most frequent
United States of America
66.7%246 installations of 369
What is Pivotal Tracker?
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.”
The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.
Categories & Use Cases
Product Demos
Top Performing Features
Email integration
Email integration allows work requests to be made directly from email.
Category average: 7.4
Dependencies and Blockers
Product allows tasks to be blocked or to block other tasks, communicating dependencies to team members.
Category average: 7.1
Mobile Access
Mobile access is the ability to access the software from a smartphone or tablet.
Category average: 5.8
Areas for Improvement
Search
Users can search for related materials across files, discussions threads, schedules, etc. using project keywords or tags.
Category average: 6
Task Management
This includes the ability to plan, track, collaborate and report on tasks.
Category average: 8.3
Resource Management
Resource management is workload planning to maximize resources.
Category average: 8.5
Who Buys & Uses Pivotal Tracker
#2 most frequent
Canada
7.3%27 installations of 369
#3 most frequent
India
5.7%21 installations of 369
Decent Ticket Managing system
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have used Pivotal Tracker for user story documentation and tracking. It was a decent tool for documenting bugs, features, and chores, story points, priority as well as assigning them to developers, tracking comments and the story activity in general. It was used in my organization as a Product Management tool.
Pros
- Story entry
- Story Tracking
- Segmenting stories
Cons
- Lack of customization and configurability
- Lack of UX/UI improvements over 3 years I used it
- Outdated UI in general
Return on Investment
- Positive for ticket tracking for developers
- Negative for project management
- Negative for new features and capabilities
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Airtable, Atlassian Jira and Asana
Other Software Used
Airtable, monday.com, Atlassian Jira
Pivotal Tracker Delivers on Tracking Development Projects
Pros
- Project task tracking
- Visibility of work
Cons
- More project management features like Gantt Charts
- More reporting
Return on Investment
- Able to easily track projects and prioritize the work to meet milestones
- Able to easily manage work priorities and assignments for local and remote employees
Alternatives Considered
Wrike
Other Software Used
Mattermost, Evernote
Great for software devs teams
Pros
- In my opinion, it's geared more towards developers and was useful for them to be using a tool they like.
- It allows for gauging the estimated time required for each task so that a project manager can correctly weight how much time each task will take.
- It's more specialized in its application than a number of other project management software that are for more general project management.
Cons
- The UI isn't very appealing. For many, this isn't important but I appreciate using software that is appealing to the eye.
- This isn't necessarily a negative, but it isn't a good general project management software, which in my opinion is a strength that they've chose to hone in the focus of their product.
Return on Investment
- Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
- The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.
Alternatives Considered
Asana and Trello
Software project management made easy with Pivotal Tracker
Pros
- Managing multiple software projects using an agile methodology.
- Usability of creating and managing 'stories' within the projects.
- Lots of integrations into other applications.
- Rich reports and analytics to track project progress.
- Mobile app makes it very easy to check project status and update it on the go.
Cons
- Managing active vs. temporarily inactive tasks/stories.
Return on Investment
- Pivotal Tracker has had a huge positive impact on our business by allowing us to easily manage software projects and not be worried about the maintenance of a tool to manage projects.
Alternatives Considered
Trello, Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft), GitHub, Redmine and Wrike
Other Software Used
Microsoft Office 365, Google Drive, Dropbox
Keep Your (User) Stories Straight with Pivotal Tracker
Pros
- Pivotal Tracker makes it relatively easy to manage project team members, including inviting new members, as well as managing existing member roles.
- I appreciate how Pivotal Tracker supports the planning and estimation aspects of agile project management, including support for linear and Fibonacci sequence point systems for effort estimation on tasks.
- Analytics are just a click away with Pivotal Tracker, making burndown chart spreadsheets and manual tallying a thing of the past.
Cons
- While Pivotal Tracker takes a lot of the drudgery out of managing agile-type projects, it can be an "opinionated" product, which can make end-users feel like they have to conform their workflows to the product, rather than the other way around. Automated velocity reporting is one example of this.
- Pivotal Tracker has a lot of features, and while this is generally a good thing, it makes the product a challenge to master, for many, regardless of end-user technical abilities.
- The visual interface is extremely information-rich, requiring lots of drill-downs and accordion expansions. It would be nice to see a simplified interface for general use, akin to the old-school Scrum board and Post-It notes.
Return on Investment
- Our software development team and customers are not colocated, so Pivotal Tracker saves us time and money by supporting web-based access to our projects, allowing devs and end-users to collaborate remotely, and asynchronously as required.
- Pivotal Tracker's "all in one place" accessibility helps us to avoid rework by centralizing our tasks, bugs, and user stories.
- Being a cloud-based product, Pivotal Tracker gives our organization the ability to run a sophisticated project management system without having to pay for the infrastructure or staff that a home-grown system would require.
Alternatives Considered
JIRA Software
Other Software Used
AWS Lambda, Navicat Premium, Tableau Desktop
