Alternatives to DrProject
April 11, 2008 – 10:45 amWe’re hoping to release a new version of DrProject next week, and persuade some Trac users to upgrade. (Multiple projects! Mailing lists! Role-based access control! Scripting interface!) This is therefore a good time to take a fresh look at what other systems offer:
SourceForge: not the first web-based software project portal, but certainly the best known and (probably) the most widely used; not free, and too big for most student projects and startups (though there are lots of cases of both using it).
Google Code: much smaller, but growing fast; only available as a hosted service (which rules it out for course projects in many jurisdictions, and for companies that want to keep their software behind their firewall).
Trac: probably the most popular entry-level open source system; this is what we forked DrProject from, and what we’re hoping to supercede.
Mingle: a relatively new offering from ThoughtWorks specifically aimed at agile projects (and lovers of sticky notes everywhere). Very attractive, but not open.
Rally, VersionOne, ScrumWorks, TargetProcess, and Acunote: same story as Mingle.
OpenProj: an open source alternative to Microsoft Project, available both on the desktop and as a service.
XPlanner, ExtremePlanner, ProjectCards, XPStoryStudio, PlanningPoker, and Plan B: all target agile processes, but lack some or all of the features of an all-purpose portal.
Perforce: my favorite version control system, which also has simple task management, but not the rest of the features a team needs in a portal.
ClearCase: a configuration management tool rather than a portal; definitely not something to inflict on a small team (or a large one, for that matter).
Jazz: “an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle.” Slightly smaller than Greenland, and not yet finished; definitely not for student teams.
So, what have I missed?
17 Responses to “Alternatives to DrProject”
Lighthouse + GitHub is gaining some traction in the Rails community.
By Mike Gunderloy on Apr 11, 2008
MS Visual Studio Team System and Borland’s ALM suite of tools are fill the corporate niche.
-adam
By Adam Goucher on Apr 11, 2008
Great to hear about the new DrP! I’m finally about to upgrade our two installs from 1.2 this week…
Does Redmine (http://redmine.org/) count as a competitor?
By Shot on Apr 11, 2008
Redmine: http://www.redmine.org/
Roundup: http://roundup.sourceforge.net/
ditz: http://ditz.rubyforge.org/
By Jeff Balogh on Apr 11, 2008
Redmine is interesting — hadn’t seen it before.
Roundup and Ditz are “just” bug-tracking (though well done).
Hm — I should write up a list of what features something has to have for me to consider it a portal, shouldn’t I?
By Greg Wilson on Apr 11, 2008
Yes, I only discovered Redmine about a month ago from
http://changelog.complete.org/posts/696-Thoughts-on-Redmine.html. He says
the community “lives in an insular Ruby world”.
By Jeff Balogh on Apr 11, 2008
Roundup isn’t “just” bug tracking. It’s issue tracking and highly extensible (so if you want to it can be Trac, but then more).
By Richard on Apr 11, 2008
What have you missed? Well launchpad + bzr. The website suffers a bit in usability, and is still a bit underpowered, but working with bzr + launchpad is a real pleasure as far as the version control goes. Too bad it is not open source.
By Gael Varoquaux on Apr 12, 2008
@Richard: “bug tracking”, “issue tracking”, and “ticketing” seem to be used interchangeably by a lot of people; whichever one you like, Roundup doesn’t (as far as I know) include a repository browser, a wiki, etc.
@Gael: Hadn’t seen Launchpad — neat. How do “blueprints” work in practice? And yeah, it’s a pity it isn’t open…
By Greg Wilson on Apr 12, 2008
You’re missing RT (http://bestpractical.com/rt/). It has really nice email integration, although I’m not so sure about repository browsing.
By Dmitri on Apr 12, 2008
BluePrint. In practice, IMHO, they don’t work. Or rather we don’t know how to make them work. Ubuntu (the launchpad project, doing the issu tracking for the distribution) uses them a lot, and they seem to be happy with them.
I find that a blueprint is a bit poor in terms of possibility to have a discussion. One thing we have done in the nipy team, is to have a branch only for blueprints, in which we put code examples and co. https://code.launchpad.net/~nipy-developers/nipy/blueprints
The killer feature of launchpad is bzr. Distributed version control really makes it easier to make big changes to a project. I love it.
By Gael Varoquaux on Apr 12, 2008
Have you seen assembla? http://assembla.com/
By Walter Cruz on Apr 13, 2008
I think FogBugz meets your list of requirements (we haven’t enabled our svn integration yet so I don’t know if it includes a source browser, but it has a Wiki, Discussion Forums, Issue Tracking, etc.)
By Jay Goldman on Apr 14, 2008
@Jay: Yup, it has a source browser. Which, shockingly, integrates into Microsoft VSS as well as the usual suspects!
By Blake Winton on Apr 14, 2008