Michael Flanakin's Web Log

How about Gemini?
http://www.countersoft.com/Gemini.aspx

I only wanted to track open source tools that are freely available w/o limitations. In most situations, in my opinion, the open source community will pale in comparison to the big commercial companies. Especially when it comes to situations like this where there are tons of open source apps and not a single, more focused and supported effort.

It's great comparasion, but how about look good data sheet at http://www.helpdesk.com ?
Good luck!

I'm the author of BugTracker.NET. It's true that there is no demo available. You'll have to download it and install it.
I posted version 1.9.6 on Feb 6th, 2005.

Be aware that BugTracker.NET is very simple when first installed but can be customized. For example, at first a bug has very few fields but you can add your own custom fields in either a global or project-specific way.

BugTracker.NET was very simple when I first posted it. Right away folks started asking for new features so from that experience I have a sense of some important features that aren't in your comparision table above. Three important ones are
1) email integration
2) permissions
3) internationalization

1) Email integration

Can folks interested in a bug get notified when somebody else changes the bug? Or, can incoming emails to magic email accounts be automatically converted into bugs? Or, can you send an email and have its text be part of the bugs history? BugTracker.NET does these things. Inspired by FogBugz.

2) Permissions

The ability to limit some users' permissions to certain functions or certain projects. For example, some users are only allowed to report bugs, not change their status. Some users can only work on bugs for project A, not project B. BugTracker.NET supports this, but here and there the implementation is kinda weak.

3) Internationalization

In the emails, the database, the user interface. BugTracker.NET does NOT support Unicode in the emails and database yet. Maybe in 2005. I do hope to do that someday. It also does not support the user interface easily being translated using some external file. That's something I'll probably never get to do.

BugTracker.NET now does support Unicode.

Don't let a lack of knowing python prevent you from using RoundUP it's really excellent, and you can learn python in a day. Really.

Guys, a hugely critical consideration of any enterprise deployment is choice of the backend. Corporate heavyweights use Oracle. A ticket engine that goes nowhere is fine for MySQL, but as soon as you start talking integration and security forget about MySQL. Look, I'm an opensource proponent, all our stuff runs Linux. My point is OTRS can be modified for Oracle, there are notes on the web for this, and once you have a ticket engine up on Oracle anything is possible. My 50 cents. Cheers.

Mantis status (Version 0.19.2):
Demo available
File attachments supported
RSS supported
Custom fields supported
Full text search supported
Change history supported

Request Tracker does handle attachments and offer RSS feeds.
Not sure exactly what you mean by "notification service", but
you can get email notifications on all sorts of events.

Some updates regarding Mantis:

- Mantis 1.0.0a1 and 1.0.0a2 has been released during April 2005.
- Mantis has email notifications (not).
- Mantis has built in-reports (rep) which are mainly based on graphs, summary and "My View" pages.

Support for templates is on the agenda.

Regards,
Victor

Beside the facts you collected in your comparison chart you should also consider things like usability.

For example - even though MantisBT has no template support - it still has an outstanding user interface with options missing in many other systems.

SugarCRM has trouble-ticket/case module (rudimentary), Bug module (better), Projects (minimal). Supports custom fields, gui-painter, templating, full-search, export, etc.

It is open-source.

Features it lacks are good auditing (i.e can't change a case other than append, history, etc), export of custom fields, and it's relational model is a little too wide open.

But it's incredibly easy to install for such a powerful implementation.

Hi,

I was surprised to see OTRS in this comparaison. I think that OTRS is not a bug tracking system. It's an helpdesk. I think that can be used for bugtracking but in this case there is some feature who missed such as patch system management etc..

Interesting report because I didn't know half the trackers you mentioned.

We have Mantis running at the moment and I can tell you that the comunnity is pretty active.

I don't fully agree with the scores you hand out.
I think that userbase, maturity and ease of install should count as well.
PhpBugtracker is very easy to install, but is not mature enough to be used.
Bugzilla is very mature and widely used, but a real b**hc to install, with a lot of dependencies.
That's the reason I settled for Mantis, which is far from perfect, but it is well-maintained, stable and quite easy to set up.

I 100% disagree with the user-base comparison. For instance, IBM Rational Rose is the most used Unified Modeling Language (UML) tool, but it sucks. I could see showing it, but not basing a comparison on it. The problem with user-base, maturity, ease of use, and ease of installation is that there's no real way to determine that. I can put how old the project is, but that doesn't really say anything. If anyone can think of a way to measure these things (or any others) in a fact-based, non-opinionated manner, I'm up to the task. As I mentioned before, I'm open to any and all suggestions.

just a note that the 'Not', 'Rep' and 'Attach' columns should be filled in as 'Yes' for the Eventum bug tracker. It may support 'Templating' as you presumably define it, but I need to confirm. I am not an Eventum developer or anything, but just somebody who has incorporated it at their company and it is really amazing.

PloneCollectorNG-
Zopyx is the company that made the product.
Full Text Search Yes, RSS possible (as all plone products are), attachments yes, built in reports yes, custom fields yes.

I guess you just didn't see everything because there isn't a well known demo available at this time.

PloneCollector has excelent history tracking. Both for the tickect and the product. Plone/Zope is by nature a transactional system so it tracks changes and allows for rollbacks.

I am really interested in finding out more about Mantis. All I see at the moment though is PRO feedback reg. Mantis?! Has anybody had any negative experiences?

We have not started using a Bug-/Issue-Tracker yet, but there always will be a fight between the OpenSource fraction and the Commercial Tools fraction.

Just to make sure that I don't run against any walls when talking about Mantis as an OpenSource choice (I agree with mGerben reg. Bugzilla), can anybody also give me any drawbacks in Mantis, especially for large scale projects involving 50+ global developers?

Is there any low-cost, preferably open source) tool available which has test case integration with the bugs reported and pull out reports for test case statistics?

What do you think about tis one?
"Zentrack is a fully customizable help desk, bug tracking, and project management system. It is designed for systems with less than 10,000 users (until the 3.0 release!)."
HTH
Andrzej asd@zxc.se crazyspirit.se

useful rating!

Michael,

Thanks for the pointer about Eventum. I should point out that Eventum does support templating (through the use of Smarty for all pages) and it also provides RSS feeds for saved filters. I'm not sure what's up with the black background on a few of those columns, but Eventum also supports custom fields.

--Joao

nice table but the data is a bit dated. can we submit updated information?

also, can you make the table a bit wider and add a column for license type?

What about GForge?

Wow, this is a bunch of work. It's not clear if you're only doing open source tools or not, but if not I'd love for you to take a look at my companies request tracking tool. I think it would hit a lot of yes's on that chart. If you need anything from me, just drop me a note.

http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/

BugTracker.NET doesn't use templates but it's look IS very customizable via .css and other config settings. You can rename the app itself and call what it tracks "bugs" or "issues" or "tickets" or whatever you want.

Small correction:

Trac has an ability to add custom fields and has e-mail notifications. I'm not sure what you mean by templates, but Trac also has templates for Wiki pages.

Thanks for you great work!

It would be nice if the *degree* of localization / coustomization / internatinoalization is included
comparison. What I mean is that the above three are all about the same problem. Even in English I could want to use specialized words or sentences instead of preset ones anywhere on the UI. For example for a certain module I might want to use "SPR" (system problem report) instead of the word "issue", sometimes I want "bug", sometimes I want “??” (that is chinese), I might want these in one or more labels, in buttons, or a whole page. Basically anywhere on the UI. If I changed the whole page to Chinese, that is internationalization; if I changed it all to movie-production jargons, it is customization.

Without these feature a piece of issue tracking software is easily limiting itself in a specific domain (not to say in a specific language apparently)

Please see if you can evaluate JTrac ( http://jtrac.info ) also. This is open source, and uses the very latest Java EE frameworks such as Spring WebFlow, Acegi and Hibernate.

Disclaimer: I am the author :)

JTrac is designed to be easy to evaluate, just drop the WAR file into your web-container.

JTrac is being actively developed and I am looking for feedback. Would like to hear from you if you get a chance to try it out...

If you ask me, Eventum is the better option... just because is growing much faster then mantis and the future direccions looks much better the eventum team sight.

Another thing to considerer is the quality of the codes, Eventum has a much better code structure and is easy to change to your needs.

Today Mantis probally is just a inch ahead, but if you want my cnosideration, in a short time you will see a much big eventum...

M.

Hi, you have a blank for notification on trac...
see:
http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/TracNotification
for more information...

Here is a compilation of defect tracking products Agility (AgileEdge), WebAlexsys Team (Alexsys...

Any serious bug tracking should allow to enter :
- which version the bug was found into
- which version developpers pretend to have corrected
- which version was verified by the QA team

None of your top-rated apps have that !

About test case management, I recommend ApTest Manager. The guys who built this actually know what industrial tests are.

thierry.jousset@almerys.com

Thanks for this article! I had the same dilema, what web-base tracker to choose. I had already 3 years experience with bugzilla and wanted to touch something else. Depending on your article I have tested following trackers: Eventum, Mantis, Roundup, RT, Trac. And you know my favorite from this list is Trac! I was wondered that you set only 6 as a score to it. It is a full featured ( all features from your table are supported in it, so table need correction ) issue tracking system with wiki integration and direct support of Subversion VCS with changesets and diffs viewable online! It also have Google like search and very flexible issue reporting based on SQL querries... Also wiki pages are versioned, so dont worry that someone change something and you'll not know about ;) I think Trac's score should be at least 9. Thanks.

Thierry,
One of my requirements was to be able to define custom fields. Whether the trackers included the fields you mentioned by default wasn't my concern. Whether they had the ability to expand to that was, hence the custom field check. I think I've covered what you're looking for. If you don't agree, please let me know why. I'm all for any tips on how to better organize this list, but know that I'm looking for a tool that goes beyond simple bug tracking.

BugTracker.NET (i'm the author) does support custom fields. Thierry, you can have your three version fields.

The reporting kitchen provided in the bugzilla is more rich compare to phpbugtracker, like Charting facility(bar, line, pie) is not there in phpbugtracker.

Thanks for a great page. Have you had a look at DevTrack http://www.techexcel.com/products/devtrack.html
We are currently using Roundup, major shortcoming at the moment... reporting..

Just an update regarding BugTracker.NET - it now includes a tool for taking a screenshot and posting it as a bug. (inspired by Fogbugz). Takes just 3 clicks. I've also gotten fashionable and added some AJAX effects, including something like Google's "Suggest" in the search function.

Michael,
Please check out <a href="http://www.supportfusion.com">Support Fusion - Help Desk and Customer Service Solutions</a>, this tool, which you can get for free, gives you a great deal of flexibility. There are also links on their site to their blogs where they write articles relating to Help Desk in general and their software.

Please note the Request Tracker is now available for windows, in an easy to use Installshield package and it is still Free.

Go to <http://www.netvigilance.com/winrt> for free download.

LibreSource, a versatile collaborative forge, also includes her tracker.

J2EE based Open Source software, please enjoy : http://www.libresource.org/

How about BugNET?

http://www.bugnetproject.com

Anyone tested out BugNet yet?

We're about to start using BugTracker.NET but now I'm wondering whether to forget that and go straight to BugNet. Does anyone have any experience with BugNet?

Does mantis has a good permission system that can restrict/allow users from viewing bugs per project basis?

Please discuss trackers on the new forum, which should be more conducive for collaboration: http://www.michaelflanakin.com/Forums/tabid/211/forumid/25/scope/threads/Default.aspx

Features it lacks are good auditing (i.e can't change a case other than append, history, etc), export of custom fields, and it's relational model is a little too wide open. Agreed

There is now a demo available for BugTracker.NET, at http://ifdefined.com/btnet.

Is there any low-cost, preferably open source) tool available which has test case integration with the bugs reported and pull out reports for test case statistics?

Nice post.

Really helpful info. Thanks for your contribution.

Thanks for great information.