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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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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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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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Product Details
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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
- Jira Software
- Asana
- Rally Software (formerly CA Agile Central)
Pivotal Tracker Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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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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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
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- Recommendations
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reviews
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February 18, 2022
Perfect project management tool.
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.
March 11, 2020
Pivotal Tracker is a steep learning curve but one of the best Software Development tracking tools out there
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).
February 13, 2020
Pivotal Tracker Delivers on Tracking Development Projects
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
November 13, 2019
Pivotal Tracker gets the job done
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.
November 07, 2019
Software project management made easy with Pivotal Tracker
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.
October 08, 2019
Keep Your (User) Stories Straight with Pivotal Tracker
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.
August 12, 2019
A highly capable tool to implement a process
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
August 03, 2018
The Best in Agile Project Management
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.
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.
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.
March 15, 2018
Pivotal Tracker; Simple to use fantastic to see
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.
December 14, 2017
A streamlined approach to task management with Pivotal Tracker
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)
December 14, 2017
An intuitive and powerful task planner for software development
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.
June 07, 2017
A great solution that has been around for a while.
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.
December 13, 2016
A tool that encourages good development practices
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.
August 11, 2016
The ease of using Pivotal Tracker
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.
January 08, 2016
Pivot to Pivotal
Pivotal tracker was used to manage our agile sprints. Our sprints were of 1 week duration. All the stories for that sprint were estimated and were put in the "Current" queue. In addition to this, we also maintained a "Backlog" which had all the stories that had not been prioritized yet. All the new feature requests had the label "Feature" and smaller tasks like re-imaging a server were marked as "Chore". Developers started a story by clicking "Start". When they were done with the changes for a story, they clicked "Finish" and it changed to "Accept/Reject". The story was then tested by the QA team. Bugs found during testing were entered separately into pivotal tracker. Typically, we included steps to reproduce the issue and attached screenshots if applicable. We used the "Bug" story type to mark bugs. Pivotal tracker allowed the entire team consisting of product managers, developers, testers and others like marketing to collaborate on new feature requests. Questions were posted in the comments section and answers were also provided there. It made collaboration easy. As a QA, by checking which stories had "Accept/Reject", it was easy to see which stories needed QA. Overall, a great tool for Agile software development teams!
- Easy to move a story to the appropriate person/team. The Accept/Reject was a nice feature which made it really easy to indicate the outcome of QA. When a story was "Rejected", it automatically moved to "Restart" and was picked up by the developers.
- Collaboration was easy. Product managers could post screenshots of specs in a story. QA could post screenshots of issues that were found. The comments section was easy to read and made collaboration easy.
- The ability to add Milestones was nice. We used this feature to track major milestones. We created a milestone and moved all stories to achieve to milestone before that and gave a date to the milestone. This made it easy to track milestones and made sure we were on track.
- Search feature could be improved. Right now it's hard to find an old story that was completed. The search could have more options like label, milestone, date range etc., to locate old stories.
- Brainstorming board or white board - most of the stories involve a lot of brainstorming. It would be nice to have a whiteboard where the team could brainstorm ideas and include it in the story. Right now, the team brainstorms ideas on a whiteboard, takes a picture of it and includes it in the story and sometimes people forget to do this.
- Ability to link a story to a CI build like Jenkins. In most software development teams, a story cannot be marked complete until a CI build has passed for those changes. It would be nice to integrate Pivotal with Jenkins so that a failed build will show up in Pivotal and could even change the status of the story to an appropriate status.
January 05, 2016
A former web developer at a startup accelerator thinks...
At my startup accelerator called rhubarb studios, I actively used Pivotal Tracker as a web developer. My team consisted of six people where four were developers including myself, one was a UX designer, and the last was our project manager. We had daily standups where the project manager would ask the team what stories can be up on deck. He would then formulate the story so the team could assign story points to them. Our project manage would further groom them and after they are ready, we would start picking them up. Pivotal Tracker was a favorite agile tool advocated by our CEO and as a result the entire company used it. Since the accelerator worked somewhat as a staffing firm where the company would assign developers to startup projects that come through our doors, multiple projects were going on at the same time where Pivotal Tracker was used. This tool was simple enough and had all the necessary functions to run each project using agile methodology. By everyone using the same tool, if a developer or a designer had to be pulled from one project to another they already knew exactly how to use the agile tools.
- The use of columns makes it easier to see which stories belong to what place. I also like that you can customize which columns to display so that the it is easier to see what's important to you (e.g. current, backlog, icebox, my work etc.)
- I like the colors the board used (grey, blue).
- It is easy to upload pictures onto stories.
- You do not have to change the page to make stories or update the descriptions. It can be done without proceeding to the next page.
- This is good for a startup or small groups but if a bigger corporation has to use it, it is more difficult to keep all the data organized. I've seen organizations migrate their pivotal tracker data to JIRA because they are more used to handling bigger amounts of data.
January 05, 2016
Pivotal Tracker is a great Agile tool!
Pivotal Tracker is being used to manage software development projects for our clients. We manage web, mobile, and special projects in Pivotal Tracker. The problems that this addresses is where are we in the development process. If you are following an agile process you still need to be able to report metrics to your senior management and your clients on where you are in the process. We use Pivotal to track user stories (features) and bugs and also scope of work.
- Extremely easy to pick up. I have used many different traditional and agile systems and this was the easiest to pick up by the teams I have used it with.
- Tagging structure is great. Rather than strict hierarchies, Pivotal Tracker allows your teams to create a group of tags and use multiple tags with one story or bug.
- Powerful searching. Pivotal Tracker's search is definitely a huge strength. It allows you to search by date, words, authors, owners, and tags.
- Visual Design. This is directly related to the first item but it bears breaking it out as a separate item. This is a well thought out application.
- If you are looking for configurability, this application would not excel there. You can add users and tags.
- As a web application, you are at the mercy of your Internet provider.
- There are no built-in or user-created workflows. You have to assign items to the next person yourself.