Trac vs. Redmine vs. JIRA vs. FogBugz for one-man shop?
- by kizzx2
Background
I am a one-man freelancer looking for a project management software that can provide the following requirements. I have used Trac for about a year now. Tried Redmine and FogBugz on Demand for a couple of weeks. Never tried JIRA before.
Basically, I'm looking for a piece of software that:
Facilitates developer-client communication/collaboration
Does time tracking
Requirements
Record time estimates/Time tracking
Clients must be able to create/edit his own tickets/cases
Clients must not see Developer created tickets/cases (internal)
Affordable (price) with multiple clients
Nice-to-haves
Supports multiple projects in one installation
Free eclipse integration (Mylyn)
Easy time-tracking without using the Web UI (Trac's post commit hook or Redmine's commit message scanning)
Clients can access the Wiki
Export the data to standard formats
My evaluation
Trac can basically fulfill most of the above requirements, but with lots of customizations and plug-ins that it doesn't feel so clean. One downside is that the main trunk (0.11) has been around for a year or more and I still haven't seen much tendency of any upgrades coming up.
Redmine has the cleanest Web UI. It's design philosophy seems to be the most elegant, with its innovative commit message scanning and stuff. However, the current version doesn't seem to be very mature and stable yet. It doesn't support internal (private) tickets and the time-tracking commit message patch doesn't support the trunk version. The good thing about it is that the main trunk still seems to be actively developed.
FogBugz is actually a very well written piece of software. However the idea of paying $25/month for the client to be able to log-in to the system seems a little bit too far off for an individual developer. The free version supports letting clients create/view their own cases using email, which is a sub-optimal alternative to having a full-fledged list of the user's own cases. That also means clients can't read/write wiki pages. Its time-tracking approach is innovative and good though. However the fact that all the eclipse integration (Bugclipse, Foglyn) are commercial. Yet other investments before I can use my bug-tracker! If I revert back to the Web UI, it's not really a fast rendering Web service. Also, the in-built report functions are excellent (e.g. evidence based scheduling)
JIRA is something I have zero experience with. Can someone with JIRA experience recommend why it might be a good fit for this particular situation?
Question
Can we share experience on this? Any specific plugins/customizations would that would best suit the requirements for this case?
