Can you suggest a replacement for Atlassian? Please?!?

For my company I’ve been using Atlassian for about four years. Jira, Bitbucket, and Confluence. At the time I started, it was the best choice for a project management tool that was accessible to blind colleagues using screen readers.

If you can recommend a replacement for these tools, I’d sure appreciate it. At a minimum, I’d like private repos and a simple ticketing system. Although I already use GitHub, and could move all my code to it, I’d like to know about alternatives for cloud-based services. Maybe you know of something new and cool that I don’t.

Every few years I review existing online tools and services, and I try to find the most straightforward tools I can find.

Monday.com was very good in many ways, but too expensive. It wasn’t accessible to my blind colleagues. I haven’t used Monday.com for a few years, so I don’t know how it may have changed.

Atlassian

Earlier this year, Atlassian notified users of their free service that total free usage would be capped at 1 GB. Total usage for my projects was several times that, but even as I deleted projects and tried to reduce project size, I couldn’t get under the cap.

So in order to maintain my repositories, I got the least expensive subscription.

Atlassian needs to make money. That’s understood, but that doesn’t mean I liked what felt to me like a bait-and-switch scheme, even if that hadn’t been the intention.

There have always been UI / UX problems with Atlassian products. There are pointless modal dialogs indicating to a user that the user has made a change. The last I knew from checking project settings, and from direct contact with Atlassian support, there was no way to disable modal dialogs.

Y’all can’t figure out status bars and non-interruptive feedback?

Atlassian products suffer from featuritis. The number of new features keeps ballooning.

On the occasion when I interacted most closely with one of their development teams, I was informed that (to paraphrase) I’d caused something of a stir. My comments about a new product were discussed in a team meeting. However, as far as I can see, nothing has changed.

What I Hope For: Please, Okay, and No Thank You

I’ll go read online reviews, test tools, and maybe post on other social media, but I figured I’d ask y’all here for your opinions.

What I’d prefer:

• Simple source control for private repos. My needs for source control are minimal. I work in small teams, and sometimes as a solo developer. If it takes longer than one to two hours to learn a source control tool, then that tool almost certainly isn’t the right one for me. (Hint: I never in my life need to hear someone talking about Git again. I’m glad it’s great for you, but it’s a pain for me.)
• Ticketing system that makes good use of screen space. Not Trello, but Kanban and Kanban-like drag-and-drop systems are fine. List-based systems are fine. Mantis and Redmine were both good. Monday.com was good in a lot of ways.
• (Maybe) A wiki for documentation. Markdown pages are fine.
• Light mode!!! Dark mode is terrible for me because of my vision. Even if most people prefer dark mode, and tell me (sigh) how great it is, dark mode makes work harder for me.

All these features together suggest GitHub is the right choice, aside from the need to use Git. But I can suffer through using Git.

What I’m not too happy with:

• Git. I’ll use Git for lack of choice, but I find it an awful mess. I’m sure it’s great for some teams, but it’s been more of a pain than a benefit in teams I’ve worked in. I actually prefer CVS even though that has problems, too. And Mercurial was largely pleasant to use. People with minimum UI/UX experience telling me how great Git is, and how it will all makes sense once I learn the commands for all the features [that I absolutely do not want], has not been an experience I wish to repeat.
• Bad UI/UX. So many design principles known for decades get thrown out the window for tools that are sometimes build from the low-level code up to the UI.
• Featuritis. Adding ever more features isn’t good — not for me, anyway. I’d rather use separate tools than have more and more features crammed into tools that already work for me.
• Agile-heavy tools developed by Agile teams. A joke I’ve made with colleagues: if Agile is so great, why are Agile tools developed by Agile teams so bad?

Yes, I’ve used Agile methods in my teams, but stripped down to just a few key practices.

And it’s great if Agile works for your team, or for teams you know. But I need very, very little of it.

To wrap up: thanks so much!