Pivotal Tracker

Pros

I liked the feature that allows you to track the progress of a project. It was very helpful to see how far along a project was and what tasks needed to be completed in order to reach the goal.

Cons

the UI can be confusing and overwhelming at times, making it difficult to navigate and understand.

Pros

Its very easy to understand once you've picked up on how to use it for agile.

Cons

Because it's strength is in being opinionated software, it's not very customizable.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Pivotal Tracker

Pros

Pivotal Tracker actually does most of what you need to track projects, or stories for sprints for a scrum team, which is what I used it for. You can write stories and add images and links to them, and assign things to people and change the status of each story as it goes through your process. However, (see Cons section)...

Cons

Pivotal does not use lanes for workflow. You get one lane, and stories can move up and down it vertically until they are done, and then they finally get to jump out to another lane. But the vertical workflow instead of horizontal is extremely non-intuitive. In fact, I found the entire software platform to be highly non-intuitive in general. I'm pretty savvy with learning new products, and it still took two weeks and multiple trainings for me to feel like I had a grasp of what I was doing. Furthermore, they only have 4 fixed statuses, so if those don't match your process well then you are stuck putting tags on all your stories to keep track of where they are in your process. It's doable, but very annoying.

In addition, PivotalTracker looks like no one has done any development work on it since the year 2000. The interface is old and outdated, and challenging to wrap your head around. My company was using it when I started working here, and fortunately they switched to ClubHouse about 3 months after I started. What a glorious transition! It took me half a day to learn ClubHouse and it is so much cleaner and intuitive to work with. I believe shortly before we transitioned that Pivotal was actually starting to roll out some improvements to their platform, so maybe it's better now. But in my opinion they probably should have started thinking about that about 5 years earlier.

Pros

Pivotal Tracker implements a lot of the finer points of agile and makes it very easy to run an agile workflow.

Cons

The UI of Pivotal Tracker is utilitarian if you're being optimistic, dated and hard to look at if you're being less kind.

Pros

Pivotal Tracker offers tools which allows me to save time by eradicating manual workflow when planning and scheduling projects.

Cons

Unfortunately, Pivotal Tracker has poor background integration capability compared to alternatives.