I mean succeeded in replicating it, not necessarily as a business.

It doesn't seem so. I tested all I could find, LiteTracker seems the best, but still extremely buggy even in the initial demo project changing task status fails. The rest appears either half-finished, untrustworthy or has a very sketchy interface. But would really like to be surprised.

I am very rarely willing to pay for software and this is one case I really want to, but cannot find anything.

This thing kinda feeds my pet theory that the art of making functional software has been lost by late 2010s. People say Linear is fast but it's nothing compared to how well Pivotal worked. Any half-skilled indie dev could have made a killing on making a good replacement, but no one has been able to?

They spent A LOT of time building PT. It isn't something easy to replicate, especially if you didn't work at Pivotal Labs and get their knowledge of how to use it. But, you're right, I was just lamenting the other day that there is nothing like it. I wish Rob had just open sourced it.

> People say Linear is fast but it's nothing compared to how well Pivotal worked.

My company switched off Pivotal Tracker because it would slow to a crawl and require several seconds (!!) to load the page, with individual actions causing a DOM cascade that frequently hung browsers. Maybe it worked at small scale but it definitely didn’t work at a large scale.

It’s been a few years since I was at a company that has used it, but I very much enjoyed Shortcut (née Clubhouse).

We're developing a do everything productivity app. We were using PT as our product management tool... 75 developers, 50 projects, 20k stories. We added PT functionality to our own app and migrated everything over in April. It works well now (we have a million hours of development time in the app so we understand what it takes to make something that is reliable and easy to use. Also had a daughter who was a PM at PL who taught me how to use PT.) There is more info and a beta sign up form at at getflo.com.

My company (Singlebrook) built a PT workalike that works really well (in my humble opinion - ha). We're only using it internally and with our customers, but we use it every day and are really happy with it. It's not a feature-complete clone, and we don't intend for it to be, but we've probably built 70% of the features and have covered all of the basics of the project UI.

We haven't been planning to release it commercially, but if you're interested in trying it out, please reach out via singlebrook.com/contact and I'd be happy to set up a test account for you. If you happen to really like it, we can probably figure out an arrangment for you to use it.

I run https://bye-tracker.net and am also working on https://lanes.pm (still closed beta but open for more users soon). I just retested all of them and it really seems none are fully usable. I also see few improvements since April, it seems many of the teams either burned out trying to finish in time, were overwhelmed seeing what it really takes to make the details work after the fun parts are over or were disappointed seeing how low user numbers are from direct switchers.

I disagree with your 2010 theory, back then it would have been even less fruitful to make a viable alternative with the limited time and resources available. Especially as things like the UI state handling and some of the architecture was unheard of back then, years ahead of its time and even linear now does not fully match many aspects.

Similarly "Any half-skilled indie dev could have made a killing on making a good replacement" is just wrong, a) you need to be a really great developer to make something that even nearly matches PT, there is more than is obvious to someone not deeply familiar with the internals of the product and 15 year of refinements that went into it. A few of the cloning teams were some of these indie developers who thought it would be fun and easy which was obviously very naive.

b) "Make a killing" is equally misleading. I would be surprised if its possible at all to break even on something like a pure PT clone. There are maybe 200 original users who are super loud and "in love" but this can easily mislead to thinking there are millions of users that would be immediately jump on and start paying. It takes probably 2 orders of magnitude more addressable market to make the financials work just by providing a PT clone (Which is why lanes.pm is focusing on making what tracker would need to be today not just catching up on what it was.)

Just give it a bit more time, there are at least 2 teams including lanes working on this and we all decided not to launch something half baked and buggy that loses your data.

Pivotal was far from a perfect company (if there can even be such a thing to begin with), but sadly, a lot of good things were lost in its latter days. This was one of them.

Are there particular attributes, behaviors, or properties you feel are important that you can't find elsewhere? I see you mentioned latency, for example — what else is key to you?

Man, PT was so good. Linear is okay, but I find it really slow - more than once I've opened an existing issue and started editing it, only for a few seconds later the actual content to pop in and make a mess.

We're using gitlab issue tracker and it's not even close.

So far I have not found any of the attempted PT reboots inspiring. All of them are just rebuilding the PT interface, but nobody has innovated so far and done anything really new and different.

I think a lot of "Pivots" are still in bereavement over Pivotal and Pivotal Labs being gone.

What was special about Pivotal Tracker?

What is your use case? (how many users, for what type of project?). Asking because tracking building a CRUD app is different than building an OS, a movie, a video game, building, etc..

We use Zube.io these days. Everything is just a GitHub ticket under the hood, it just slaps a PM friendly UI on them. I'm a fan.

JIRA and its interface is incredibly slow in comparison. An extra 30-60 seconds per task to create assign and organize

If you continue to not find what you need and are willing to be a subject matter expert on what Pivotal actually is (because I never saw it), I would be interested in building this. A lot of people share your sentiment so it could be successful, but it's hard to clone something unless you know the thing.

My partner built Velocity Tracker [1], not a clone but it aims to implement the core philosophy of Pivotal. Any and all feedback would be most welcome.

[1] https://app.velocitytracker.co/

I still like redmine

I really loved Pivotal Tracker but sadly a lot of people want to make everything so complicated.

CM42 Central is a workable replacement and FOSS but there's definitely room for improvement.

How much would you be willing to pay for a replacement?

List of teams trying for reference -

"10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement" -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378925

Project management is one of the use cases we plan on excelling at Proma.ai

We are launching in 2 weeks.

I would love give a demo to anyone interested. Email is in profile.