I’m migrating to Jira

For the past four to five years, I’ve been using YouTrack as my personal issue tracker for all of my various projects. Generally, YouTrack works incredibly well and is one of the most powerful issue tracking services I’ve used. It works well with JetBrains IDEs and gives me guest support out of the box for issue reporting from outside members. I’ve enjoyed using YouTrack for the past few years. Despite this, I’ve been slowly migrating my project tracking to the more widely used Jira.

This was an incredibly tough decision to make, but there were a few factors I considered when making the move.

• First (and foremost): integration. While YouTrack supports integration with JetBrains IDEs and continues to gain more integrations in other services, Jira still remains the most versatile in this respect. The services I use regularly for game development such as Toggl Track, Notion, and Trello have support for Jira built-in without the need for additional setup or configuration. “It just works.”
• Next, the user base and target audience. I love how YouTrack makes it easy for outside members to file bug reports for software as a guest. However, I’ve noticed this feature isn’t heavily utilized in my use case. Whenever someone reports a bug or issue to me, they usually do it by sending me a message on Discord or reaching out to me on social media. I’ve come to accept the fact that people won’t use the issue reporter. Because of this, I won’t need the anonymous access like I did in YouTrack. Thankfully, I don’t need to worry about this with the free Jira plan. I may consider paying for that feature later down the road, but I won’t need it for now.
• Finally, my use case for issue tracking has changed. Before, I’d do all of my task tracking inside YouTrack, including regular tasks that didn’t need a ticket necessarily. As I’ve been using Trello more, I’ve realized that I don’t need to do everything inside YouTrack (or Jira, for that matter). Thankfully, the integration between Jira and Trello works pretty well, so I can turn existing Trello cards into Jira tickets and vice-versa. This also works as a good workaround to the anonymous access problem, where people can still see what I’m working on.

In short, my use cases for issue tracking has changed, and I recognize that it’s a bit impractical to do it all in YouTrack, even though I can. I still love YouTrack as a service and will be keeping tabs on it. Likewise, my current instance will still remain online for archival purposes. However, I will be moving to Jira going forward and using it solely to track issues.