Ask HN: Are you using a Pivotal Tracker successor? Which one?

2 pointsantfarm5d ago3 comments

In my opinion, Pivotal Tracker was the collaborative planning tool with the best feature set, usability and presentation. It was highly opinionated, but on the flip side gave you a baked-in process that just worked (at least in my team (1 product owner + 3 developers)

A while ago, there already was a discussion on HN [1] about a list of projects that implement PT clones [2].

Does anyone here use one of those? Which one did you chose and what are your experiences, what is still missing?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378925

[2] https://bye-tracker.net

3 comments

izajahmad5d ago

Linear for anything engineering-focused. The keyboard shortcuts and speed make a real difference when you're context-switching constantly.

For smaller projects I've gone back to a simple GitHub Projects board — sometimes the overhead of dedicated PM tools isn't worth it when the team is under 5 people.

prxtl4d ago

+1 to Linear being fantastic. At this point, my biggest gripe with it (in comparison to Pivotal Tracker) is that I cannot put a limit on how many issues can exist in a certain state. Tracker used to do this very well with velocity.

I'd be very happy if I could set a max limit of 5 on the "todo" state of a certain team. Helps a lot with prioritization and poorly done planning.

muzani5d ago

I just ended up making my own highly opinionated tool, based on my workflow, but it's designed for 1 developer/owner. It exports into markdown for easy communication to AI agents. https://mandate.run

Since the future is AI agents, I'm thinking this works better than trying to retrofit an existing flow. I can just plug it into a MCP or something later to delegate the tasks to AI and track.

I feel like the problem with a lot of paid tools is that the money is in medium sized teams (~30 or so people). Solo types like Workflowy and Pivotal Tracker aren't very profitable and there's a strong pull to enshittification.

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