I forget even who the competitors were, but FAUGUEBOGGEZ (as we called it then) was wildly popular for being less shitty than the #1 at that time. (Maybe it was JIRA, or maybe my memories of having to use JIRA have overwritten every other shitty bug tracking system I hated...?)
Anyway, it didn't remain so, but IIIRC FogBugz was on top (in terms of being the consensus-better-than-the-actual-market-leader) for at least a few years.
Which, if you didn't take 50 or 100 million in VC money, is probably a massive success for 99.99% of people.
But yeah, nothing compared to the most-used website in the history of programming.
IIRC, there were several competitors with no clear leader [1] but Bugzilla was pretty popular. Then Trac [2] showed up with a clean UI which allowed it to gain mindshare among OSS projects.
JIRA ultimately became the market leader due to having a product that sucked less than what was out there and being infinitely customizable.
One of the things Atlassian did to gain mindshare was to gift large OSS projects, often under the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) banner, free licenses to JIRA and Confluence.
FogBugz was popular if you were a regular reader of Joel’s blog or if you had heard of the Business of Software community. Outside of that bubble, it wasn’t that well known.
We looked at FogBugz as a replacement for RT, but it had some severely opinionated limitation on release flow/version numbers that meant it didn't fit our existing product releases, let alone our future plans. (I think we were pretty interested in it for the UI and the dynamic velocity modelling? But the presentation/demo pretty much ended with the "so don't do that" discussion :-)
Anyway, it didn't remain so, but IIIRC FogBugz was on top (in terms of being the consensus-better-than-the-actual-market-leader) for at least a few years.
Which, if you didn't take 50 or 100 million in VC money, is probably a massive success for 99.99% of people.
But yeah, nothing compared to the most-used website in the history of programming.