Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement
27 comments
·March 16, 2025vishalontheline
Make that 11 teams! :)
I've been quietly working on oknext.io since late last year. If you're looking for an opinionated task manager for yourself and your team, then I'd love for you to check it out!
One thing I love about it is that it sort of takes care of sprint planning for me. No more figuring out how much I can fit into a week - it does that for me, and seeing my progress over the past few weeks motivates me to keep my momentum up.
It isn't just like Pivotal tracker - will likely never be - the estimation is in hours, rather than points. I plan on explaining the thought process behind this decision soon. And it isn't built specifically for software teams - I manage personal and dev and non-dev work tasks with it.
If you do try it, I'd love to hear from you (vishal@oknext.io).
applied_heat
I’ve been a happy redmine user for about 15 years. It may not look as flashy as newer systems but I appreciate the consistent UI which hasn’t broken, and someone is doing the hard work of making non flashy but extremely useful things like e-mail workflows, export as PDF, git integration, etc stay working
pcthrowaway
Related: "Pivotal tracker will shut down" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41591622
Aurornis
Can you at least link to some of the efforts? This post is light on details.
I’m already seeing parallels to the MeetUp situation: MeetUp hasn’t shut down, but it’s becoming disliked enough that multiple teams are working on replacements. Unfortunately it seems they’re all more interested in doing greenfield work of developing the replacement themselves when it would be more effective in the most dedicated contributors to the various teams were willing to join up and work on one promising replacement.
porker
What made Pivotal Tracker so popular? It had story points front and center, was that it?
jadbox
The UI had very few states/pages. 99% of your time was just on the project page to with every card action 1-click away.
It also had an optional feature to cap the number of story-point cards in the sprint column based on an upper estimate of the team's story-point velocity. I.e. if the team can only do at max 10pts of cards per week, that's all you are allowed to queue up in sprint. This could be overwritten to force more cards into the sprint, but in practice it provided a nice safety guard from over flooding a sprint's delivery expectations.
stevage
Huh, I totally forgot about Pivotal Tracker. There was a phase where every project I was on used it.
The killer feature was the UI. When the alternative was basically JIRA, Pivotal was so quick and easy to use. That front page view that let you see every task in a compact list, and easily drag things around to reprioritise was pretty revolutionary.
Now it seems kind of passé but it really was pretty excellent at the time.
alakra
This was recently posted:
Separation of Concerns in a Bug Tracker [2024]
lifeisstillgood
What surprises me is that the Linux project is far and away the most successful OSS project (it’s probably underpinning what a couple of trillion dollars of services globally - more?)
And yet the processes they follow are completely ignored for pretty much every corporate project - open discussion on open mailing lists, decisions made by those deep in the weeds, the code as the first front and centre, even the standard git.git workflow is pretty much never used
I do wonder why …
BoingBoomTschak
They do have a bugzilla. I can easily picture Linux's and Gentoo's bugzilla outliving the universe's heat death.
otikik
I'm more interested in MilkyTracker replacements.
Something that worked well on mobile would be nice.
jsnk
I am feeling nostalgic just looking at this.
The year is 2012, rails is the hottest thing and mongodb is the inifinity guntlet scaling monster. BackboneJs and underscore were said to replace all jquery and we deployed things with just one command to heroku. The good ol days
the_lonely_time
cap production deploy still reigns king in some dark corners of the world. Also Hotwire is awesome if you havnt had a chance to check it out.
null
tyre
capybaraaaaaaa
what a nostalgia proc
Omni5cience
I think this was Capistrano, but you're right I that's quite the throwback as well.
jasonjayr
Of course! MongoDB is web scale!
1oooqooq
where do those team coordinate and track their backlogs and sprints? ;)
kunzhi
Pivotal Tracker was built bespoke around Extreme Programming so no sprints.
And obviously...they track everything in the tools they're building. :)
fumufumu
[dead]
benatkin
Some vibe coders incoming after seeing this post?
A lot has changed since the shutdown of pivotal tracker was discussed here. As there were no viable alternatives it seems every month there was a new project popping up. With the last month before the sunsetting approaching, it starts to get exciting who will make it in time, who stays in the race and what the differentiating features of the projects will be.