Hi everyone,

Me and some friends have been developing a game and associated tools for a couple of years now, on and off. Due to work and life in general, our time to work on it is limited and while we try to dedicate one evening per week, something often gets in the way, leaving us with multiple weeks in between sessions. We are also reaching a point where we are having an increasingly hard time to keep track of tasks, decisions and what not. We have a MediaWiki instance, but it's too cumbersome to use for stuff like task/issue tracking. Since it's self hosted, I also spend more time updating/maintaining the software than actually using it, which is a bit annoying.

So my question is basically, what are some of the best options for tiny teams (<5, currently 2.5) with extremely low budget 2018? We are using JIRA/Confluence at work, and while it works, performance is awful, it's kind of overkill and not free. It's not completely out of the question at $20 per month, but that's money we could instead spend on assets or similar, so cheaper/free is preferable, especially considering our rather limited needs at this time.

I've been using trello for the last 2 years, and it's been great.  I use the free version and haven't found that I need anything else.

I use a text file as a todo/scehdule/agile/ideas.

Works for me.

Are you using a VCS?

Github and bitbucket have an integrated issue tracker.

I also use a notepad++ text file for all of my tasks. It's super simple to setup, super simple to manage, and you can instantly change the task organization to exactly suit your needs. If you need to share tasks with team members, just take the plain text and put it onto a google docs file and share it with team members. For small teams of 2-5 people, this will work great and not cost anything.

If you have a bigger team, you'll want to use something a bit more structured. Even Todolist might be sufficient for 2-10 people? 

We are using self hosted SVN right now. We thought about Github just for tracking, but I haven't been overly impressed with it so far, based on experiences with other projects using it etc. I haven't tried Trello, will take a look. It looks very Kanban-ish?

Does anyone have experience with JetBrains YouTrack?

[Edit] Also, thanks everyone for your tips!

Jira is $10 a month for up to 10 users, which is pretty much nothing in the scheme of things. If you use Bitbucket the integration is pretty simple, and that is free for 5 users or $2 a user. There are other options, but generally found them to be much nicer than self hosting SVN/Git since those often lack features, and self-hosting is still more work than people often predict. Bitbucket and Github of course have their own issue trackers which are enough for small projects, and have very useful integrations (referencing issues in commits, commits in issues, etc.), a project can quickly have hundreds if not thousands of features and bugs to track.

Using a text file with any sized team seems like some sort of nightmare to me due to the scale.

You can self host them for just $10 each one-off, but the price is so cheap I am not really sure the benefit, only seen it done at very large organisations that insisted on not letting source code off their devices.

30 minutes ago, SyncViews said:

You can self host them for just $10 each one-off, but the price is so cheap I am not really sure the benefit, only seen it done at very large organisations that insisted on not letting source code off their devices.

^^This!

And don't forget the trouble of hosting and updating multiple (Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Fisheye, Crucible .... ) Java apps on your own server.
I did this in the past and it's really no fun if don't have a powerful server running anyway.

In the end I spend more time on managing the project managing systems than actually doing something for the project. That was the time when I moved to hosted solutions.

For something with more features than a text file (and more than one user ) you could use something like Microsoft OneNote. It's made for that sort of thing: You can take textual notes and organize them the way you want, it supports mixing text with images/links/drawings, plus it's got a web/mobile version and supports sharing/collaboration. And a bunch of other stuff.

Here's some marketing material an explanation video that introduces it better: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/video-what-is-onenote-be6cc6cc-3ca7-4f46-8876-5000f013c563