Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement
97 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).
esperent
I'm in the market for something to replace Microsoft Planner for my team. I can't find any pricing info on your site though, and there's no way I can consider a tool unless I know how much it will cost.
Microsoft Planner in theory fits our needs quite well, although it has a few features we don't need. Unfortunately it's a bug ridden mess.
vishalontheline
Hey, thanks! I'll have pricing info up soon, and update all users about it. I hope you'll sign up for the trial in order to not miss an update. Thanks!
pjerem
Looks nice ! Though, on my iPhone (Orion browser), for some reason, the text on the homepage is black on a dark background.
I like the simplicity of your website and the clear screenshot of what it’s about on the homepage page.
Try to keep it like this if you can :)
vishalontheline
Thank you! That is the plan =). I have tested it on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (both MacOS and iOS) and the font renders correctly. I don't know about Onion browser, although the font is set using mostly conventional CSS (TailWind CSS)
pjerem
Ok night has come to me and it looks like the font appears white only on os/browser dark mode. On light mode it is black. The background doesn’t change.
normie3000
> on my iPhone (Orion browser), for some reason, the text on the homepage is black on a dark background
Same in Safari
vishalontheline
Although my primary browser is Firefox on Mac, I have tested it on Safari on the Mac and on iPhone and the font renders white. Please reach out tome if you continue seeing a black font.
vishalontheline
Found the issue - it happens when the OS / browser is in light mode. I will update a fix. Thankfully the rest o the app works as expected in light and dark mode.
luckylion
Be aware that next.io is a fairly big conference-organizer / news service in the igaming industry.
apsurd
name is good ^_^
vishalontheline
Thank you! I'm glad you like it! ^.^
It rose from the ashes of a long list of well thought out names that my family rejected, and then a good night's sleep.
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
arde
Too bad its UI is ugly and its update procedures make me nervous. It needs a rewrite.
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!
slowtrek
Serious question, Grunt or Gulp?
Aeolun
Those were the dark days of JS as far as I’m concerned.
Cthulhu_
I don't believe it improved much since then, but at least people have mostly settled on specific tools for e.g. dependency and task management.
bartread
I still use gulp for a side-project: it works and it’s simply not worth the effort of replacing.
But I remember back in the day immediately preferring gulp to grunt once I became aware of it.
pcthrowaway
Related: "Pivotal tracker will shut down" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41591622
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.
twic
I think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers. Hence they have endless configurability, millions of views, forms, workflows, and whatnot, all of which gives project managers something to do that feels like work, but end up weighing down the people doing actual work. Tracker has the bare minimum, with no configurability, so it can't be used in that way.
As a developer, i actually wished Tracker had a tiny bit more complexity (eg i want to be able to track items past "accepted" and into "in production" and "validated with users"). But i would rather have a bit too little than JIRA!
gavmor
Yes! Deployed and "validated by users" were on my wishlist, too!
Some projects I was on had very large Acceptance queues awaiting various stakeholders. It was a little awkward, and could have been better accommodated.
And, of course, the ability to reject a feature which had displeased or been ignored by users? Or failed to accomplish its business purpose?
Ah, but these connections are just cute ribbons, and would become repressive if enforced as policy. The story to "Sunset Feature X" needn't be linked to its original implementation, no?
petepete
> I think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers.
This is why I like GitHub Projects. Devs can create and interact with issues and PRs in the normal fashion while project folk drag them between columns and back again all day.
jFriedensreich
100% correct. Also great you want the in prod and user validation features as i am building exactly that into lanes.pm. Though this will be a separate view that also includes things like metrics and product analytics that are relevant to evaluate each features success.
noufalibrahim
It's been a long time since I used it but I do recollect that it didn't have simple numbers for tickets. It was a bit of a hassle to tell a colleague that "xxxxxxxx is fixed" rather than 42 is fixed.
irjustin
Yes it was the first popular tracker that was developer centric, specifically agile (arguably Scrum), with story points being a very key (pivotal? pun) feature. It was also extremely opinionated (i.e. bugs don't get points). This made it very predictable and easy to get started on.
I liken PivotalTracker to a Ferrari. It does one thing and it does it well while JIRA is like your 18 wheeler. It'll also get you A-B, but you can bring everything "in case" you might need it and modify it to hell and back. It can even carry your Ferrari. But getting it setup and moving is a nightmare. Even simple searching your history is an exercise in complexity.
Of course as with anything opinionated, if you wanted to do something outside of its core philosophy set, you basically couldn't. For better for worse, this really meant you were at least waist deep in agile's.
When Agile+Scrum first started becoming popular it was very well received because fundamentally it gave a better framework for business to understand how developers worked other than promising deadlines. But, it's success was its own poison well... that's a different story.
jFriedensreich
This sounds like there were many more modern dev centric trackers after, did you mean it that way and if yes what are they? Part of the reason we all try to build a replacement is that we feel the whole category of tools died after pivotal tracker.
irjustin
Oh sorry no I didn't mean that. I think a more accurate statement was "the first agile centric tracker".
gleenn
HI personally worked on it while I was at Pivotal Labs (RIP). I loved that the point was to get in, add some stories, aka "bookmarks for conversations", have it opinionatedly setup your sprint by averaging the last few sprints worth of points, and then you got out. I use other tools now and I cringe every time at the complexity. I don't want a swiss army knife of features, I want a tool that does exactly what I need and I don't have to spend hours grooming and configuring and tweaking. Tracker hit that sweet spot.
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.
tombert
I haven't used it in a decade, but I always liked it. It was the first issue tracker that I had used that had strong Git integration, and it made very satisfying noises when you would would push a commit.
It also just felt slicker than Jira; not the horrible laggy mess that Jira was for most of its history.
tommoor
https://linear.app is a very mature alternative at this point, in the same way as Pivotal there are default views, automatic cycles, and a polished IC experience.
jFriedensreich
linear is no alternative whatsoever, we state what a project tracker needs to have on the linked page. Part of why i became obsessed with pivotal tracker is that i had to work with linear in a startup and it was so horrible in comparison to tracker.
slashdev
What are the main things missing?
jFriedensreich
Thats the wrong question in the first place. Its impossible for something like linear to replace pivotal tracker because part of the appeal of a project tracker is that there is only one view that everyone shares and lives in. If you have different boards and table views and filters and settings a project manager can preset you can never reach this by adding more stuff. As i said before i added a concise list trying to define what a project tracker needs in the hero section of bye-tracker.net If this is not clear i would love to improve it so please share what does not click. I am not 100% sure yet if you need to experience it before its clear or if this is something fully understandable by reading about it.
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 …
vkou
> I do wonder why …
Because corporations are authoritarian in nature, not open or democratic.
If you don't like a decision people with authority over an OSS made, you don't have to work on it. In fact, nothing in one gets made without free consent of the people doing the work. If you don't believe in a feature, but the decision-makers do, they are free to build it themselves.
Exercising this kind of veto in a corporation will get you fired.
zx8080
It's like comparing a strong tough guy who doesn't cut corners and plans for the years ahead and a "drug zombie" who only wants to have better KPIs on paper by the end of the month/quarter/year for a title promotion or more internal political power.
BoingBoomTschak
They do have a bugzilla. I can easily picture Linux's and Gentoo's bugzilla outliving the universe's heat death.
lifeisstillgood
Nah:
if universe == $HEATDEATH
then
set bug_status = “won’t fix”;
repeat
IshKebab
Because those processes are terrible. Worse than Jira even.
lifeisstillgood
I did not see this till now - am interested in your thoughts ?
dcuthbertson
In another HN post[0], the top comment mentions Nestfull[1]. Is that a viable candidate to replace Pivotal Tracker?
It provides a Kanban board with swimlanes, but the UI is unique AFAICT, because items in the swimlanes can be entire Kanban boards themselves.
Regardless, I'm going to try it for personal projects.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362725
[1]: https://nestful.app
dcuthbertson
Sorry folks. After only a few minutes of using Nestfull, I don't think it is a good candidate. While the UI, with it's nested Kanban boards and lists, is interesting. I don't see any way to estimate the size/length of tasks, and there's certainly no velocity calculation (sigh).
jFriedensreich
I dont see how nestfull would be related, it seems like a trello alternative. These are only similar on a extremely high level but the similarity breaks down very fast. I recommend going through the list in the hero section on the linked page (bye-tracker.net) that defines a project tracker
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.
999900000999
Not a single open source solution in the bunch.
Whenever I have some money I think I'll wip one up.
Although to make it super hardcore, I might just make the whole thing a rest API first. You're responsible for logging in via something like postman or insomnia, and then you need to send in your own rest request to update your tickets. I would do this to encourage a true engineering first mindset.
Then I'm going to open source the whole thing MIT. JSON based project management.
mlyle
Second one in the list is AGPL. Did you miss this, or are you making an "agpl-is-not-open-source" argument in disguise?
999900000999
It's a weak open source license tbf.
maxhille
Really interested in why you would say that. I always think of the AGPL as the strictest/strongest possible license...
Nkunku
Hi there , we created something similar so we can be the 12th team Lite Tracker is the name of the app ,so if someone is interested can test it it is live now https://litetracker.com/
jFriedensreich
lite tracker was part of the list from day one. it was one of the first teams!
Nkunku
Oh really the tread is so big ,so I didnt read everything sorry
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.