Shortcut Reviews

Pros

Shortcut is "just right" for our needs, and thinking back about previous companies, would have been perfect in their needs, too. It is much more than a to-do tracker but doesn't overwhelm you with flexibility. My favorite part of this software is that it's story-centric. Epics are available, but they can play a supporting role if needed. Tasks are left to the developer to fill out themselves end up being merely a checklist. This paradigm shifts the focus to deliverables and prevents gamification by closing out menial tasks just to pump up ticket closures.

As a bonus, this standardizes the language of Epics/Stories/Tasks. There is no more endless debate on what should be what. The one thing I've always seen with Jira, especially in young teams, is that the flexibility of the product creates unproductive debate and confusion about terminology.

Cons

This product focuses on product delivery. For more general applications, like issue tracking or process management, it may not be the best for that.

Pros

- Simple to learn and navigate so the team could quickly start using the product after switching- Love the dark mode and the colour coding of different story types i.e bug, feature or chore so it's easy to see things at the high level- Easy to create sprints and I like the summaries provided on the story points

Cons

- You can only write stories in markdown text. Not a big issue since I've become really good at it! But it'd be good if there was a text editor instead- Sometimes when I create a story and I accidentally click out of it, I lose the progress. It'd be good if they had a draft functionality where the stories get created as a draft straight away

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

We needed something that was more focused on sprint management

Switched From

Notion

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

JIRA has a quite suite of features however it was too complex for what we were looking for. We need something to track our sprints and features and shortcut was perfect for that.

Pros

This is an adequate task management/tracking software. It has a fantastic Zendesk integration and multiple customizable fields. It also boasts decent search and filtering functions but it isn't particularly user-friendly and filling out all the fields that make it function well takes a great deal of time (hence the title of this review).

Cons

There are no AI/smart suggestions for related epic/team fields so every time you make a new ticket you have to search through them by scratch. They also don't offer a great tag database or tag definitions so you have to create naming conventions separately offline. You also can't use rich text in story descriptions.

Pros

Every org grows out of Github Issues, Trello, and Asana when they realize a) stories need relationships such as blocking/blocked; b) stories need task checklists; c) different groups have different workflows; d) stories are often mini-project briefs and need to read as such. However, once you find yourself in JIRA, which you've been told is the mature platform for mature orgs, you're operating a nuclear submarine, you need 3 sysadmins, nobody can find anything, and you want to throw your computer out the window. SC has the infrastructure but with the user-friendliness of everyday software. Think of how Mixpanel took what Omniture was doing and made it accessible to the everyday marketer. That's what Shortcut does for eng/prod teams. No sysadmin needed, everyone gets it.

Their API is well-documented and incredible. We do tons with Zapier because of how much they expose.

Their CS team is spectacular, inquisitive, friendly, helpful. They want their customers to succeed.

They have a one-click signup link which has made our onboarding process much faster

They have templated stories and checklists which we use across the org for everything from product launches through onboarding/offboarding hires.

Cons

very few dislikes. it's amazing. if i have to force criticism:

- If you work cross-departmentally, avoid multiple workflows, or you'll be having to look at multiple kanban boards daily
- the "dashboard" (home) isn't as useful as it seems like it should be so we all either use iterations or stories view for our daily lens
- shortcut and productboard both boast integration, but it's not great, and i think this is the fault of productboard

but really these criticisms represent like 5% negative compared to 95% enthusiastic positive

Alternatives Considered

Swimlane, Jira, monday.com and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

A friend told me that Clubhouse was effectively "JIRA but with a designer cofounder" and that's accurate.

Switched From

Trello

Pros

Shortcut does a great job allowing us to manage all facets of our product and being multiple teams together for what is most important, client and end user satisfaction. It follows standard agile flow but allows flexibility where engineers and non-engineers can use it alike.
We also utilize their API for templates epics and stories and it is great to work with.
Support team and client success managers have been a pleasure to work with when we’ve had conversations. They always are able to handle a situation or get us in touch with someone who can.
Lastly the product is always evolving and they are very transparent through their website and slack channel of what is coming next to make your life better!

Cons

Some things were less flexible such as naming conventions and required fields on stories/epics, but these are getting worked out over time (for ex projects are not required any more)

Alternatives Considered

Jira, Basecamp and ClickUp

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Wanted one tool with more power and better price.

Switched From

Trello and monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

Most flexible and best bang for your buck.

Pros

- Clean user interface
- Fast search
- Continuously adding of new, useful features
- Great integrations
- Free for teams of up to 10 users

Cons

- This is mostly me nitpicking, but I'd say reporting. It has been improving over time though.
- It would also be great if there was a tool for simplifying backlog grooming

Alternatives Considered

ZenHub

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

JIRA felt feels like an oil tanker, where most companies we need a tugboat, i.e. lean, powerful and agile. JIRA also gives you infinite customizability options, which often leads to over-complication and analysis paralysis.

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

The other tools we evaluated were either too simple for our needs (lack of features) or lacked in usability. We often underplay the importance of the joy of using a certain software product. I continually found that I had to beg people to keep other tools updated with the current state of affairs, wherewith Clubhouse they simply opted to do it themselves. The other options just didn't compare to Clubhouse.

Pros

The software is so easy to use and was really easy to set up. Almost every integration you could need is also available to make workflow quicker and more automated.

Cons

Switching from Projects to Teams has been quite difficult and required that we rework our custom board and views used for our normal agile ceremonies.

Alternatives Considered

Trello and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Jira was too expensive and everyone hated it.

Switched From

JIRA Service Management

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

More flexible and cheaper

Pros

The ability to use Shortcut the first day, integrate with our process easily and nicely, search items successfully every time, link items, all without a hiccup!

Cons

I wish more people in our organization could use it!!!! Just doesn’t fit their processes at the moment… I am working on it though!

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio, Jira and Microsoft Project

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Cost, ease of use, simplicity and yet the depth of the product was exceptional!

Switched From

Microsoft Visual Studio, Jira and Microsoft Project

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

Shortcut hits all of the notes for us! It’s simple and yet offers so many features!

Pros

The software is incredible, it's easy to use, and the features just feats your team needs.

Cons

For Brazil it is a really expensive product, I wouldn't be able to pay the complete version, although I know that the free plan locks features that would be really helpful. Some international companies vary the price based on the exchange rate. That would allow to sell your product here easily. For example, for a team of 7 the price would be $84,00, that makes almost R$500,00 here that is almost the same as all the shopping (food, grocery..) for a family of two for a month. See?Other than that, it would be awesome to be able to change the team shortcut url. When I've created my team account I didn't know that the company name would be used for the URL, now it is very long and very ugly to share.

Pros

Shortcut is easy to use but very powerful, and has a clean, intuitive interface. It offers a wide range of features, including project planning, task management, and collaboration tools. The software integrates well with other tools, such as Slack.

Cons

The per-user price is a bit steep if you need access to all of Shortcut's features.

Pros

I find the product to be very simple at the surface with deep capabilities. Previously, we were using Jira and I found the software to be overkill for many of the tasks that we perform. Additionally, so much of Jira's useful functionality (and the Atlassian suite as a whole) is hidden behind paywalls, 3rd party addon services, and little gouges along the way. I absolutely abhor that practice so finding Clubhouse was a godsend.

Customer service has been prompt and helpful, and though they have not implemented my feature request, I at least know that it has been prioritized.

Team collaboration is great with their Slack integration. My team posts bugs, hotfixes, feature requests in the proper project, and I am automatically notified via Slack. The whole team has visibility to their request's progress.

Cons

Navigating the nomenclature of Stories, Epics, Projects, Milestones, and how they should fit together is a bit taxing at first and takes getting used to. It would be helpful to have visual guides for someone like myself, but the documentation is available and well written.

This is where I discovered the depth of capabilities in Clubhouse. You can very simply manage your project with Stories, and you can very finely tune your progress and visibility by getting to know these different groupings.

Pros

I like the ease of use, from day one of setting up Clubhouse it just made sense and was easy to configure for our purposes. It was easy to jump in and start using without much learning curve for all of the team members as well. We love how much work we can have in a single work space and with powerful filtering, searching, everyone gets their perfect view for their purpose!

Cons

I wish there were more canned reporting features for Kanban workflows, but honestly it's not the end of the world since we have access to the REST API for building our own custom reports!

Right now our private Gitlab integration isn't working but what is amazing is that Clubhouse support and engineering is working through it with us. I love that about Clubhouse.

(Can you tell it's hard for me to find something negative about the software???)

Pros

* It embraces the modern development process
* It's fast and responsive
* Almost all you need is in one screen
* It has multiple layers of organization (story, epic, milestone)

Cons

* The higher layers of organization do not 100% align with our process
* Some features are not available on different layers and it seems arbitrary. For example, you can't get a burn down on a sprint if that Sprint is not tracked as a "milestone". So if you are using Milestones to track large scale projects (maybe quarter goals or multi-epic initiatives) you have no way to track how your Sprint is going. Either they need a first-class Sprint concept, or allow burn downs on labels.

Pros

- Ease of use
- The UI is easy to navigate
- Perfect for our team structure

Cons

Have only ever run into a few minor issues:

1. Setting up the backlog of our stories to prioritize
- Solution: If you have a ticket that you would like to appear in the backlog. Set the owner as yourself(Product Manager) and set the state to Unscheduled. And we also set up the filters for the backlog to display tickets that have a PM as the owner and are unscheduled.

2. Estimate section of ticket creation - would attribute one point to one day of work, but not having the ability to set half a day of work because there is no 0.5 option

3. When copying plain text from a word file and pasting it into a ticket, I would like it to also appear as plain text

Pros

I like the visuals, the ease-of-use, everything is pretty intuitive even the first time you're using it. It's been a couple of years since my team started using it, and it works very well for us.

Cons

The name change recently forced us to adapt a lot of our automation regarding the app, but the reason for it was understandable.

Pros

I love the interface. It's fast. It's simple. It's as feature rich as we need it to be for the most part. Most integrations necessary for our business are there (GitHub, Slack, Teams). Working with stories and tickets is far simpler than it ever was with JIRA.

Cons

Building custom reports and doing custom searches for old stories for reporting purposes isn't great. It's fast, but I'm not sure what options I have available to search on.

Pros

Epics, millestones, projects, tags, workflow and reports are awesome!! The plataform is very intuitive and make understanding easy. The atualizantions aways come with great news and features

Cons

My team is not from the technology business so some features doesnt make sense to us. My team speak portuguese, so the language sometime is an difficult point for some. Losing the story's interactions history makes my team use the tags to identify the sprints.

Pros

The design really helps with using the app fast and with ease. It's feature packed, but the design helps with finding the feature you need fast and efficiently. It's also very smooth and fast, which makes it a pleasure to use. Boards are updated live, meaning changes colleagues make are instantly visible to everyone. We work remote so this is really helpful. Integration with other tools and the API is also very nice and the mobile app is pretty great too, which is quite the accomplishment for such a complex app. I can do anything on the road that I can do on desktop.

Cons

Reporting could be expanded. Also some better automated integration with git would be nice, f.i. creating a new branch for each story automatically (that's how we work anyway).

Pros

Fast. Easy to onboard. Easy to use.Clear

Cons

I like everything, even that one day their team called us to hear us out

Pros

Flexible design allows for different teams to work in different flows.
Labels are extremely unstructured and therefore flexible to be used in different ways as needed.

Cons

Write feature (documentation) is very important to us both for general documentation and for documents pertaining to specific projects / epics, but it's very buggy / not being developed anymore.

No more mobile app.

Pros

The features are great and help me organize my work. I like the Github feature that allows linking PRs to tickets and move them along the workflow at different states.

Cons

The organization of concepts is a little confusing. Like when things should be an Epic vs a Milestone etc.

Pros

Joy of use, low barrier to add/modify things

Cons

Priorization of tasks and epics could be easier

Pros

This product is simple and easy to use! The features Shortcut offers are intuitive. It is very easy to filter tasks or bugs and all the data looks very organized. Each task/bug story is very easy to drag and drop to a new workflow state, and you can see every workflow state and their stories at once which makes it very easy to assess the status of a project and see what features and bugs still need to be completed. It is also easy to filter stories by project or user, tag other users in a story, and link stories together in the order they need to be completed.

Cons

We just us this software internally. It would be cool if we could use this externally with our clients as well, and be able to hide certain workflow states or story comments from them, and/or hide client comments from the devs and let the project manager interface between the devs and clients.

Pros

- Superb UI
- Customisable without clutter
- Performant
- Incredibly easy to use

Cons

- Reporting and metrics could be better surfaced

Pros

Easy to use - intuitive, multi dimensional

Cons

I don't like the change of name - I think it's unnecessary