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Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker

Overview

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Pivotal Tracker is a versatile project management tool that has found a wide range of use cases across various departments and …
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Pricing

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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…

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  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is Pivotal Tracker?

Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management program primarily for software developers. The software organizes projects into “stories,” the goal being to maintain momentum within and between “sprints” of a project within an agile development style. Pivotal Tracker is built to support the Agile development cycle from the ground up, enabling mid-project analysis and feedback based on current progress and development speeds. It also provides a shared priority system so everyone on a given project has visibility on progress and team members’ statuses. It also includes file sharing, project obstacle visibility, and a REST API for customizable integrations.

Pivotal Tracker Competitors

Pivotal Tracker Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Jira Software and Asana are common alternatives for Pivotal Tracker.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.

The most common users of Pivotal Tracker are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(80)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Pivotal Tracker is a versatile project management tool that has found a wide range of use cases across various departments and organizations. Moffitt's Collaborative Data Services Core, for example, uses Pivotal Tracker to form realistic expectations about work completion based on the team's ongoing performance. Other departments at Moffitt employ this tool for bug tracking and as a shared team-level 'to-do' list. The graphics and technology department utilizes Pivotal Tracker to track their work tasks and ensure that no items are dropped or missed. Moreover, the support service team is exploring the expansion of Pivotal Tracker's usage to track additional client work.

In addition to its adoption within Moffitt, Pivotal Tracker is also utilized by agencies and software development teams to manage various projects. It facilitates the implementation of agile methodologies, such as scrum, and effectively manages backlogs and feature roadmaps. Integration with other applications like Slack, Git, Bugzilla, and Usersnap further enhance its functionality. By utilizing Pivotal Tracker, engineers, product managers, testers, and marketing teams collaborate seamlessly. The tool allows for task prioritization, backlog maintenance, progress tracking, and facilitates file sharing among marketing teams. Overall, Pivotal Tracker serves as an invaluable asset in project management for organizations of diverse sizes and industries.

Intuitive and Easy to Use User Interface: Reviewers have consistently praised Pivotal Tracker's user interface, with many stating that it is intuitive and easy to use. Some users have mentioned that they were able to quickly understand how to navigate the platform and create/manage projects efficiently.

Multi-User Assignment for Collaboration: Users highly value the multi-user assignment feature in Pivotal Tracker, as it allows them to assign tasks to multiple team members simultaneously. This functionality has been commended by reviewers for facilitating collaboration among team members and keeping everyone informed of progress.

Exporting Notes into Readable Excel Format: The history tracking and exporting feature in Pivotal Tracker has received praise from users who appreciate being able to easily export notes into a readable Excel format. This functionality helps streamline documentation submission and makes auditing time more efficient.

In-Story Task Management: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the in-story task management capabilities of Pivotal Tracker, stating that it is a weak point. They believe that the functionality could be greatly improved by adding features such as the ability to mention other users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress'.

Lack of Epic Spanning and Parent-Child Story Relationship: Many reviewers have raised concerns about the fact that epics do not span projects in Pivotal Tracker, particularly when scaling agile methodology to multiple teams. This limitation also leads to confusion due to the lack of a concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off from it.

Limited Customization Options for Categorization: Users desire more flexibility in categorizing stories beyond the default sections like backlog, ice box, and my work. They wish for the ability to create custom categories for better organization and classification of their stories.

Users commonly recommend the following for Pivotal Tracker:

  1. Users should take advantage of the free trial to ensure that it meets the organization's needs before making a purchasing decision. This allows them to fully explore the features and capabilities of the software and determine if it aligns with their project management requirements.

  2. It is recommended to utilize tools and tutorials provided by Pivotal Tracker to learn the software effectively. The platform offers resources such as user guides and documentation, which help users understand how to navigate the interface, set up projects, assign tasks, and track progress.

  3. Many users find Pivotal Tracker useful for managing complicated tasks with multiple people involved. The platform offers features that facilitate collaboration and coordination among team members, such as task assignment, progress tracking, and communication channels. This ensures that everyone stays on the same page and contributes effectively to project success.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 32)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal tracker tool is Very easy to use and can be used for smaller and medium projects . In pivotal tracker the best is detailed tracking which is really helpful for me when i need to cross verify my work from previous months. Pivotal tracker allows us to keep track of every tasks, add notes anytime and update their status on time. Pivotal tracker is mainly Used for Agile project management.
  • It allows us to keep track of every tasks.
  • Pivotal tracker is very easy to use .
  • In pivotal tracker you can add the points to a task anytime.
  • Pivotal tracker is not a flexible tool.
  • In pivotal tracker doing Customisation is bit difficult.
  • In Pivotal tracker there is lack of Configurability.
The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal Tracker is used across the whole organization - maybe minus 2 people - so 8 or so. It helps us track software development work into compartmentalized tickets. Almost every ticket is touched by everyone that uses Pivotal Tracker in some way. I.e. there's a problem we are trying to solve, someone creates a ticket, someone picks up the ticket to start the software development, someone does the software development work, someone checks their work, someone tests their work, someone passes the ticket, someone checks the work of the person who passed the ticket, etc.
  • Constant updates - you can always see who touches the project as a whole.
  • Clean, concise ticket structure.
  • It's not user friendly at first. But very powerful once you understand the tools.
  • It's nice that you can customize your lanes (columns).
Medium to small teams - this is a great tool. I'm not sure about large teams because the Project History column would be so filled with information it might be hard to figure out what's going on/what updates have been made. But for Medium-Small teams this is ideal because of the detail laid out in the project history column.
Angela Goldsmith, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pivotal Tracker to track the development and MIS teams' work and ongoing support of software and infrastructure they have built for the company across about a dozen projects/solutions. These solutions range from infrastructure, eCommerce, internal custom software, and mobile applications. We use it to track features, chores, and bugs for each of these areas. We have from time-to-time exposed it to external vendors for project collaboration and centralized project management of those projects. It is an excellent tool for keeping track of the work and being able to quickly prioritize work, check the status, and re-prioritize tasks based on changing requirements.
  • Project task tracking
  • Visibility of work
  • More project management features like Gantt Charts
  • More reporting
Pivotal Tracker is extremely easy to use. New users are able to learn the system and start using it on the same day. I could not manage the number of projects here without this system that gives me a great view of what is happening in each project. Features, chores (maintenance type tasks), and bugs are clearly identified so I can work with Product Owners to prioritize the work according to internal and external customer needs.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal Tracker is used to manage project task flow through utilizing "Pivotal Stories" to track project status, communication, priority level, file sharing, etc. amongst my marketing team! It is used across the pharma marketing department and it solves the issue of task flow management and project tracking.
  • Helps keep track of tasks in your queue.
  • Prioritization.
  • Visuals (platform looks a bit cluttered).
  • Automated task flow (doesn't exist).
It is appropriate for those that work in teams with an end goal that involves a multi-step process. It may be less suitable for more independent projects, unless it is used for personal notes/tracking purposes.
Brad Henderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Pivotal Tracker because our head developer preferred it to other project management/dev tools. The most important function is for helping developers to prioritize dev work. Developers don't always prioritize the highest priority items so it worked well to have a project manager owning the roadmap while the devs had a consistent checklist of priorities to work on each sprint.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Pivotal Tracker is great for software development teams. Approvals are pretty sleek which allows for back and forth between developers and the QA process if there are bugs or the product isn't being built up to specs. It's less useful as a general project management software but they're pretty clear on their website that it is geared towards software development teams.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Pivotal Tracker as a list of engineering bugs, tasks, and backlogged items for the engineering team. We eventually moved off of Pivotal Tracker but while using it, it allowed us to prioritize the tasks and bugs logged by our users as well as the product management team. They did so by utilizing the points feature.
  • Adding points to a task.
  • Ease of use, friendly UI.
  • Identifying/categorizing the type of item created.
  • Assigning multiple people to a task would be helpful.
  • Allowing more of a list feature from a UI standpoint (see: monday.com).
  • Connection to GitHub.
Pivotal Tracker is best suited for a smaller team (JIRA becomes more necessary as your company scales). It is best for engineering bugs, tasks, and backlogged items for the engineering team. Also good to connect to your Slack channel for team visibility. I also found it helpful that you have flexibility with the sub-sections you can create within Pivotal Tracker.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal Tracker is a SaaS project management tool that is used by software development teams and stakeholders to track software projects using an agile methodology. The Ventus Software Development team uses this application extensively to track multiple software projects including but not limited to new features, bugs, chores, epics, and releases. Where Pivotal Tracker really excels is its usability. The layout of the project and the view of the 'stories' within it makes it really easy to organize iterations and have a clear understanding of what everyone is working, what you have to work on, what has been completed, and what has yet to be completed. Where Pivotal Tracker can improve is on the management of stories. It's not impossible, but as often happens on software projects, developers start something and move to other things if they get stuck or need to address something more pressing. I feel that there need to be some controls around starting and 'pausing' stories and clearly identifying that they've been put on pause. Not a big deal. Pivotal Tracker integrates into other applications like Slack, Git, Bugzilla, Usersnap, and a plethora of others.
  • 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.
  • Managing active vs. temporarily inactive tasks/stories.
Pivotal Tracker is well suited for companies that manage multiple software projects with onshore and even offshore teams. More specifically, it's appropriate for teams that use an agile or pseudo-agile project methodology. Pivotal Tracker is not so well suited for software projects that follow a waterfall or other form of project methodology.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pivotal Tracker to manage the maintenance and extension of many different web-based applications. Other departments in our organization use JIRA for software development project management, while still others (who focus on break/fix and help desk support) use ticket-based systems. Pivotal Tracker is a good fit for our department because we are an agile shop, and the application is intrinsically designed to support agile methodologies.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Pivotal tracker is a great fit for organizations managing multiple projects as it's straightforward to manage various team members and roles across multiple projects. Setting aside the application's opinionated nature, it's got comprehensive support for agile methodologies baked in, making it a compelling choice for Scrums and other agile approaches.

Pivotal Tracker is probably overkill for colocated single project team environments, as an actual Scrum room with a dedicated physical tasks board may be more cost-effective, and is certainly easier to explain to newcomers.
Willian Molinari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Pivotal Tracker some months ago when we decided to implement scrum inside the team. I used Pivotal tracker for some time around 2011 and I knew you have to use the "pivotal way" to be able to enjoy the tool. This is the main advantage and also the main flaw of the tool.
  • If you're implementing a new process on your team and you like what Pivotal Tracker provides, it works well.
  • The kanban view is good and compact.
  • It was not expensive for our use case.
  • If you find out that you prefer to work in a different way, the tool starts to fall apart. You have to follow its way of working.
  • It's not flexible at all. You have some configurations to do, but it is what it is.
  • The web app feels heavy, it's not simple at all
If you have a team that has almost no process and wants to start doing something, Pivotal Tracker may help you with that. You first need to check the process the tool proposes (mostly scrum) and decides if it's what you want or not. If you think it's exactly what you need, start with Pivotal Tracker because it will enforce a lot of things to your sprints.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Pivotal Tracker in our company to maintain our product backlog as an agile project management tool. It was primarily used by our Product Development and IT team. It really helped us keep things organized and plan out our weekly sprints with a prioritized backlog.
  • It's great for tracking milestones and reporting team velocity per sprint.
  • Maintaining a prioritized backlog that is sharable with different members of your team is relatively simple.
  • There's a free version of the product for up to 3 collaborators working on 2 projects and the starting price for larger packages is relatively low.
  • Trackability of related stories is a little difficult and unclear unless they're in an epic. Establishing a hierarchical relationship between stories isn't an easy process.
  • Customization is difficult. Changing up/personalizing the milestones for projects isn't easy to achieve.
  • Reporting is still a little minimalistic and it would help to be able to take a deeper dive into our team's performance.
Pivotal Tracker is a great value for the money. If you're strapped for cash and have to work with smaller budgets, this is the right app for you. The support team is great and responsive and the product is easy to pick up and use for your team. It's great to have visibility on your product backlog.
Chris Barretto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Tracker to manage our backlog and feature roadmap. Our whole organization uses it: product, development, and design. Design also has a their own project to manage their personal backlog. The stories are written in the way that anyone can read them without being technically too specific. An example would be:
As an Admin
When I am on the dashboard
And I click "show stats"
I should see stats within a given date range.
  • Measuring the velocity of the team. Every week there is an estimated velocity of how many points can be accomplished per week, or per sprint.
  • Managing priority of stories. Whatever is at the top of the backlog takes precedence over what's below.
  • Integration points. We use the webhooks for git and for Slack that makes the monitoring really easy.
  • Bulk adding of stories in reverse order. When you create a bunch of stories, you often do it in the order you want them done, and they inputs them in backwards. So you need to drag each one over individually in order to get the sequence that you want. This is particularly annoying for epics.
I believe Pivotal Tracker is well-suited for any project, large or small. It scales up for large companies with many users, or can cater to a single user with a personal project. On a fundamental scale, it is a great platform to just get all you ideas out on paper. Large stories can be broken down into smaller ones, and it gives good insight on what is nice-to-have vs imperative.
Craig Comperatore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Pivotal Tracker is used daily by Moffitt's Collaborative Data Services Core, which facilitates access to clinical, tumor and biospecimen data for high-impact translational research. The CDS Core uses Pivotal Tracker as a project planning tool to form realistic expectations about when work might be completed based on the team’s ongoing performance.

Other Moffitt departments also use Pivotal Tracker for bug tracking and as a shared team-level 'to-do' list.

  • Pivotal Tracker helps our team visualize our projects in the form of stories (virtual cards) moving through our workflow. This encourages us to break down projects into manageable chunks and have important conversations about deliverables and scope.
  • The forced-prioritization allows our team to have a shared understanding about what is most important and make collective decisions about what our team will work on next.
  • By dividing future iterations by our team's velocity, Pivotal Tracker accurately predicts when we will complete future work.
  • In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
  • Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
  • Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.
Pivotal Tracker is based on the XP (eXtreme Programming) philosophy & best practices. If your team is following this methodology, or working towards those best practices, Pivotal Tracker is a dream to work with. However, if your team is following a "less-than-ideal" workflow, you may find Pivotal Tracker challenging. It does not easily allow you to modify the workflow, and the reports assume you are following those best practices.
Sergio Iacobucci | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Pivotal Tracker (PT) to track and manage our sprints. It allows us to simply place all of our work and assign it to specific engineers. One of the key things it helps us do is track the stage and age of tasks to help get a good understanding of where things are.
  • The stages a task can go through i.e. Deliver and Accept are great at helping you keep track of what is going on
  • The integration with Slack is useful so that our team is notified when specific aspects of a task changes
  • The burn down charts are not something we use, I think this feature isn't 'culturally' useful for our team since we do not work in this way
  • I would like to be able to bundle the tasks under specific releases within a sprint and not have them move around based on their status
I think PT would be great if your team religiously stuck to sprints however we are more fluid than that and so I think some of the features do not make a difference to us.

Out of all the tools I have seen I do think it is the best for managing sprints however it is not a good external facing roadmap. However, I do not think it is trying to be that.
Brian Dunk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, Pivotal tracker is being used by my graphics and technology department to track their work tasks on their day to day work. We have been able to successfully monitor and track work to ensure there are no dropped or missed items. Currently, we are looking into expanding to use this software with our support service team to track additional client work. At this moment, the difficulty in expanding this software across our entire business is the fluidity of categorizing stories to look for matches in the system.
  • Track Projects; this system allows you to create multiple projects for different large tasks. This is easily labeled and displayed for ease of use and identifying.
  • Multi-user assignment; I can assign a task to multiple team members at a time. This works well when they are working together to make a deadline and letting everyone in the team know where they are at.
  • History tracking; When it came down to auditing time, the history tracking and exporting has been a fantastic tool. We were able to export our notes into a readable Excel format for documentation submission.
  • Categorization of Stories. It would be nice to have the ability to create our own custom categories on top of the backlog, ice box and my work sections.
  • Time lines; although we can put in stars for level of difficulty; it would be more beneficial if we can add in due dates, benchmarks and time lines into the system. This would allow us to easily calculate projects and the resource allocation.
  • Reports; although we can export and review our history, it would be nice to have the ability to pull reports on progress, % of story completion, and success rate.
When working with a new team member, some of the first questions we are always asked is "What can I do next?" with the use of this tool, we have our new tech hires review pivotal for all outstanding work; assign to them what they believe they can handle and make an attempt. This has let us known what is being worked on and where difficulties and training is needed within our organization.
January 17, 2018

Fun Scrum Software

Jeffrey Schneider | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use Pivotal Tracker (PT) for development of iOS, Android and web applications for our company. We work in regular sprints and each major application uses their own board for epics, icebox, stories and task management. It is maintained by our product lead.
  • Tasks are very easy to view and update. Adding descriptions, attachments and notes are very good for difficult tasks.
  • Subtasks are especially useful for our engineers as each task can be broken down into smaller steps.
  • Assigning and sharing tasks and the approval process is very good as each area QA's their specific task.
  • Prioritizing larger initiatives is very simple as they are constantly changing based on customers needs
  • I think it could use a bit more customization. It seems to want you to work in a very specific way and that does not work for all teams.
  • Approvals are great, but can use more of a QA process that can be implemented if needed.
  • Bugs are not counted as points, and sometimes we feel we are not getting a true velocity of our teams performance.
We have used JIRA in the past and switched to PT. We felt it was an easier setup and quicker learning curve for our engineers to start using immediately. We have a team of 12 devs and it is very simple to keep track of multiple teams and projects.
Kyle Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Pivotal Tracker in our agency to manage client projects through user stories and epics. It's used across all teams, starting with sales and project management to organize tickets, then over to the production team to estimate and complete tickets. For our team, it makes organizing sprints much easier and able to give a high-level view of the progress being made across all client projects.
  • User story creation and management (discussions around stories)
  • User story estimations
  • Grouping stories under epics to show progress
  • Add blocking tasks or tickets to stories
  • No native desktop app - would love to see one implemented well for Mac
  • Custom estimation point system (let teams define their own units)
If you're in a team using an agile workflow, organize your work by sprints, and need a very task-oriented approach to completing work - then Pivotal Tracker should work for you.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My organization uses Pivotal Tracker to manage development tasks and track project status. Before Pivotal Tracker, we were doing this with spreadsheets and they were becoming increasingly hard to manage. Pivotal Tracker solved this problem for us bringing our project tracking into a clear place with nice features such as epics and labels.
  • Summarize and track larger feature and project status with Epics.
  • Help easily break down projects into testable, manageable user stories.
  • Bring tasks and bugs into one structure.
  • Collaboration between multiple developers is simple.
  • Structure is very rigid, and we often found we had to force our projects to fit that structure rather than customize the tool to fit how our process was structured.
  • Tracking epic progress might not give a very accurate picture into actual remaining effort. It's possible to come close, and I don't think there's much that can be done about this because it isn't a tool for time estimation.
Pivotal Tracker is best suited for software development projects. If your process roughly fits in with how Pivotal Tracker works, I highly recommend giving it a try! If you need a very custom workflow or prefer a card-based view, another tool might be better suited for you.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our product team - dev and design - use PivotalTracker as their primary project management tool. Our QA, UI/UX, Product Management, and Engineers all coordinate on projects in PT. We use to to track product roadmaps, feature development, bug fixes and QA, and even for some recruiting and other projects. It primarily helps our product team and related teams coordinate and manage their workflow and projects.
  • Project management - helpful for tracking the overall project as well as sub-projects associated with it, thanks to Epic/Story/Mini-Epic/etc breakdown of items
  • Cross communication - each posting (story, epic, etc) allows for commenting and communication regarding the topic so all communication can be logged under the task
  • Analytics - PT shows you the speed at which project statuses change and are completed so you can track your team's efficiency.
  • I imagine some people won't care for the post-style interface and would prefer more GANTT chart style PM software, but I'd say it's a matter of preference and project reqs.
It makes sense for our business as a SAAS company with a multitude of features, bugs, clients, and stakeholders. Plus it's priced reasonably and fairly simple to use so adoption is high. I would think the product is perfect for most tech startups, most software dev firms, and probably a broad array of other dev-focused companies. Companies with a generally agile or other modern approach to project management may also find it useful even if they don't use software, although a more classic Kanban or to-do-list style program may be more useful in those cases.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal is used across our engineering department as a way for individual teams to organize the features they are working on and split them into smaller chunks, aka "stories." It's useful as a roadmap to see where we are in a project, both in showing what needs to be done and what has already been accomplished. It also ties teams together as each team has a tracker, which is transparent across the organization so everyone can see what everyone else is working on.
  • Good at allowing organization of tasks
  • The UI receives updates fairly frequently
  • The UI is dynamic, allowing some degree of customization for each user
  • Flexible system, a variety of different ways to use it
  • The UI has been buggy (maybe releasing too quickly without adequate QA).
  • There is some rigidity in the UI which limits what it could be
  • Lots of features...some which aren't particularly useful in every scenario (velocity) which could be omitted by option to make the app simpler.
In general, pivotal tracker is a good solution for agile development, if you buy into all the features that it's trying to promote (like velocity). The different labels you are able to add is good as well, allowing things to progress through states from start to delivery. However, if you are looking for a more simple, lightweight solution, there are better solutions out there.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used across the whole organization, for software development, IT tasks, managing clinical research studies, and even for managing administrative work.
  • It's simple to use, which makes it really easy for managers and users outside software development and technology teams to participate.
  • It requires virtually zero configuration, aside from inviting new users. I used to spend hours managing complex workflows with other products, but not any more.
  • It encourages teams to follow a sound Agile process.
  • The UI is beautiful, which sounds trivial, but I have it open all the time, so it's nice.
  • The biggest strength of Pivotal Tracker is also its biggest weakness -- lack of configurability. The simplicity of administration means you can't create a bunch of complicated, custom workflows. But in my experience, you're better off not doing that anyway. Unless you want to spend a bunch of time managing complicated, custom workflows.
  • The burndown chart recently moved off of the main page of a project and into its own Analytics tab with a bunch of new reports. That's cool for scrum masters and project managers, but it means the team is not looking at the burndown on a regular basis. I wish they'd bring the burndown back to the main page, in addition to deeper reports for manager-types.
It's perfect for agile software development. It's also a great tool for teams outside of software development who want to share work and manage priorities in a transparent, nimble way.
Wesley Wong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal Tracker is being used mainly by our engineering, product, and QA groups to manage the development work stream. Pivotal Tracker helps us maintain a well defined and easily understandable backlog of stories. It also becomes a place for us to track all of development past and present which then serves as the manifest of where we've been and what we are about to do.
  • Pivotal tracker is simple to use. I can easily onboard a new developer to Pivotal with a 10 minute conversation.
  • Pivotal tracker is very straight forward. It makes sense to craft the backlog in a linear fashion like Pivotal has it.
  • Tagging and email notifications are great.
  • Support for third party integrations is also a plus.
  • Deleting a story means that it is gone forever. There is no archiving.
  • [Doing a] stack of work becomes quite hairy, no great way to manage or modularize that information.
  • Mobile application could be improved for sure, Pivotal seems very built for the web. I always get the notifications but they never bring me to the relevant story within the application. Even a tool like Basecamp can do that for me.
Pivotal is great for small to medium businesses tracking for a specific functional business area. It starts to become harder to use with groups larger than 75 people and across various disciplines. We've tried syncing Pivotal Trackers for different areas of the business but it does seem better suited for an engineering and development workflow.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilized Pivotal Tracker as part of tracking for our engineering team and utilized it for the Marketing team. Pivotal was an easy solution. It's simple enough for us as the size of the company I worked for that required a tool that was easy and got the job done. We needed a tool to track our tasks and provide visibility for the rest of the organization. This was important as some of our stakeholders had not used Pivotal Tracker before, but it was simple enough to where we didn't have to explain how to use it. It's pretty self explanatory.
  • Easy to create tasks/stories - not a lot of required fields, or fields that we don't generally need to fill out.
  • Simple UI. Unlike other tools I've used in the past, Pivotal Tracker has a cleaner UI making it relatively simple to find something you're looking for.
  • Predicting dates based on estimates - this is useful for stakeholders who generally ask "how far along are we, what is the remaining time."
  • Not enough reporting capabilities
  • Mobile app isn't as user friendly. Seems like they haven't solved for the mobile experience yet.
Pivotal Tracker is a perfect tool for an organization of about 50-100 people. It's simple and easy to understand. However, when working for larger organizations, I found other tools to be more useful, especially in terms of reporting, which is something that our stakeholders are more interested in seeing - numbers.
Andrew Barnett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was used to track sprint progress in our development department. It seemed to serve its basic purpose for our needs but had some limitations in how we were able to break out our stories and progress.
  • It gives you a ton of features to track and manage a team and the projects
  • Having native apps for different devices make it much easier to track your project and keep up to date with your team
  • Notifications and color coding each task is very helpful when trying to quickly the state of the project tasks
  • The board does not seem to have an intuitive flow which can become strange
  • The learning curve is a little bit high for some one who does not have a lot of experience with boards like these
  • The flexibility can be great if you need it but confusing and cumbersome if you do not need it or have not used it
It is a great tool for a highly managed large team because of the high flexibility and number of tools available. If you are managing a small team that is very effective at communicating with each other it can be overkill.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pivotal tracker was used by the entire organization. Engineering and Product used it to track requirements, bugs, and progress.
Design and Strategy also used it to track milestones on their projects.
Marketing and other non-project departments used it to track quarterly goals, although this was short-lived since it didn't help.
  • Tracking requirements and monitoring them in one view makes it a nice Product Management tool.
  • The fact it works out your velocity and shows the amount of stories that can be completed in a sprint makes it a nice Project Management tool.
  • It gives metrics that Project Management and managers may find useful.
  • They have an API that enables you to get real-time project data
  • The ability to create your own charts, or anything related to business intelligence, rather than just the out-the-box ones.
  • If a resource is working on multiple projects, it would be nice to see their work in one view.
Pivotal tracker is well suited for any agile organization that has multiple projects, and a need to view progress on them. However, it is only suited for a company that estimates stories, since otherwise it is just a basic requirement tracking tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Engineering and Product teams use this tool. We use it to track releases, new features, builds, and bugs. Product writes stories in tracker, stories are attached to epics and designs are attached to epics, stories are pointed with the engineering team, assigned and delivered. It helps us track our product lifecycle.
  • Easy interface that aligns with writing stories and assigning them to epics and team members
  • Tag feature allows for easy filtering of stories
  • Tracking feature allows PMs to know when stories are being worked on and delivered
  • Icebox and backlog functionality allow you to move stories around when they are ready to be worked on
  • Would like to be able to move stories around in a filter view and not just in backlog
  • Autosync and refresh of updates would be nice
Good for tracking product builds and releases. Good at tracking bugs and fixes. Less useful for tracking design or the product lifecycle of tasks from ideation to spec to design to build. Only good at the build portion. Not helpful with timelining.
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