Not sure if you're playing dumb, but Confluence is a wiki. When I was using it, it was much better than any other I've tried (with or without live view). People at my company seemed to gravitate towards Google Docs when that came around--which is much better for creating and updating content, but isn't as good about searchability, linkability, versioning, or pulling docstrings from code.
At that same company, we switched to Jira from 6 or 7 different ticketing systems (a mix of in-house and third party systems split up by department). It was a herculean effort to transition, but the result was much better than any of the individual ticketing systems with the huge benefit of just opening a ticket anywhere and moving it to where it needs to go while preserving the history.
Now the cons I've seen are; I have no idea how much it costs and it seems to require a small to large team to manage and deploy it for maximum usefulness. For ad hoc deploys I've heard/seen performance issues if the server isn't beefy or configured correctly and the UI can be inscrutable if users are just dropped into the default. That's about (the best case scenario of) what I expect for enterprise software, though.
I have used GitHub Enterprise and haven't used BitBucket. I might not be using it correctly, but I don't see what's so great about GitHub Enterprise (especially for the cost). We still have to use a separate ticketing system for non-project related things (same with documentation).
I've used different ticketing systems since leaving the place that used Jira/Confluence, but have been disappointed at what they were using and what else I could find out there. What have you found out there that has worked better?
Do you have any specific criticism or alternatives to Confluence? I get that you're probably venting, but I'm honestly interested in alternatives and just calling it "rubbish" or "awful" isn't useful in any way.
I like Trello, I use it all the time for personal projects, but I just don't see it scaling for large groups. I was surprised to see Unreal Engine using it[1] even if they're only using it to communicate their roadmap (and using something else internally). I thought using Trello was creative and interesting, but I have trouble actually finding and following things.
I use YouTrack at my current job. I guess it works fine for our needs, but it feels clunky and crippled compared to Jira. I'm still using 6.5 (looking to upgrade to 7), am administering it myself, and haven't read too much of the docs, but was surprised it couldn't do some things I expected when I've tried to customize it.
I would never say Github is superior to Bitbucket. I haven't checked if they have changed the rules, but on the startup I was working on, Bitbucket provided superior value by far. They allowed free private repos for teams of up to 5 users. After 6 months we ended up paying for the basic plan to accomodate about 10 users.
I am mostly used to command line Git during my daily routine, but the designer/manager was happily using Sourcetree. But as far as some products that are kind of worthless, yeah Hipchat would be one. You are way better off using Slack or even WeChat mobile/desktop app (if you are in China)
Until recently I would've said there wasn't at all much difference between Github and Bitbucket (aside from Github being the de facto home for open source).
However, I'd now argue that Github is significantly better value than Bitbucket for projects, rather than code. By that I mean, Bitbucket is just a component in the greater Atlasssian ecosystem, so it's not a huge priority to add and improve upon project management tools, as you're encouraged to use JIRA, Confluence etc. Even simple things like Bitbucket's Markdown README's not supporting HTML (in particular anchors for same page links) makes the project organisation experience a whole lot less polished.
Where Github shine these days is that they offer a pretty cohesive experience for an entire project's management. Code reviews have come a long way, as have issues and pull requests in general. More recently they've added support for Projects, which for the most part is a Trello clone with built-in integration into Github's issue tracker. Free hosting of Jekyll websites, previews and diffs for all sorts of non-text file formats etc. really put Github in front. Combine this all with the recent change to bill per user rather than per repo (which provides huge savings for small teams) and I don't at all see how Bitbucket are supposed to compete.
I still use Trello for management of clients' projects simply because my clients don't care about the code. However, I can definitely see myself transitioning entirely to Github Projects and the Github issue tracker in the near future.
Frankly, Trello did really well out of this deal from Atlassian. I know Trello have a lot of users, but I'm a bit doubtful about their ability to generate significant funds (paid stickers...?) With Github Projects maturing Trello were likely to lose a lot of users from the tech industry. Atlassian and Trello actually seem like a perfect fit, so it's a saving grace for Trello who couldn't have timed the acquisition better.
> the UX of Github makes it worth the extra expense.
Github UX is weird. It looks nice, and there's lots of nice functionality. But it often takes lots of rummaging to find the things I need, unless I do them every week. Bitbucket and Gitlab seem to be laid out better. Github is the only site I use regularly where I need to refer to notes.
Bitbucket is better for companies than Github, though of course Github is supreme for open source collaboration. Github has improved recently, but Bitbucket had things like better user management more suitable for companies, and didn't have utterly brainless things like not allowing two repos to use the same deployment key (and deploy keys had full write access!). So everyone ended up making a 'fake human account' for their buildservers, which is Just One More Thing To Manage.
As for ticketing systems, they all suck. All of them. Even Trello. The basic problem is that the amount of information you need to put into a ticket in order to be reasonably useful is more than the users are (time-)comfortable providing. No ticketing software will solve that.
My major problem with Atlassian, though, is the licensing subsystem. It sucks hard. Getting support for it sucks. You can have the account that owns a license, and still be unable to access parts of your own account. They have support for multiple contacts, but only the first one receives relevant mail. The owner of the license can't control the order of the contacts, the contacts themselves have to log in and move themselves to that first position (no potential for abuse there!). Getting support through their support wizard process regarding licensing is painful. Ugh, they need to flog whomever designed that setup... I get the feeling that they used to work for the Windows licensing team....
Github has nothing that comes near what Jira offers. Comparing them is like comparing a car to motorcycle factory. Sure they both deal with some comparable things, but the car gets me from A to B. The motorcycle factory cannot do anything that comes near it for me.
I infinitely prefer BitBucket to GitHub. I guess GitHub is great if you are working on public or open source projects, but BitBucket seems to be much better at handling internal (private) projects to me.
Their lack of popularity also seems to translate to a lower attack profile, so I feel that my private projects are safer on BB than GH.
I've evaluated many issue trackers too, and none of them seem to come close to Jira. Yes it is slow, but the depth of features (and plugins) are great, and BitBucket works seamlessly with it.
I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure.
Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.