The perfect tool for software projects using Kanban

Clubhouse helps us manage agile software projects better than ever before. With other tools it feels like we are forcing it to try to accommodate our workflow, but with Clubhouse it feels like it was designed exactly for our use.

Pros

Clubhouse brought us a new set of features and ways to organize stories and tasks that we didn't know we wanted/needed. We have always stuck with tools that were able to help improve our kanban based workflow rather than the simple project board tools like Trello that cater to everyone more than software/product development specifically. There are few tools out there that provide what we are looking for: the ability to organize and label stories with more granularity than a single label (estimates, types, project, priorities, epic, etc), and the ability to have reports like velocity and burndown charts.

Cons

It is a very small thing, but it would be nice if we could adjust the color scheme of both things like labels beyond the default options, as well as adjust the overall interface colors.

Clubhouse is all the software project management you need without the clutter and noise

Clubhouse has been a game-changer for us since we migrated from JIRA. We looked for something that was more lightweight, but still afforded us all the features we need to track our software projects. This is exactly what Clubhouse delivered, and more. I love the fact that Clubhouse gives you everything you need to track a project from the granularity of a sub-task, all the way up to milestones. This makes it easy to distinguish the forest from the trees, and present the relevant story to stakeholders at different levels. We haven't regretted the move to Clubhouse for a single moment, and we're always delighted with the new features that are regularly released. Simply put, Clubhouse gets out of your way very quickly and lets you get on with your actual goal: creating great software.

Pros

- Clean user interface - Fast search - Continuously adding of new, useful features - Great integrations - Free for teams of up to 10 users

Cons

- This is mostly me nitpicking, but I'd say reporting. It has been improving over time though. - It would also be great if there was a tool for simplifying backlog grooming

Good software

The overall experience is an Enjoyable one interfacing with the platform and I would definitely encourage anyone will to try to do so.

Pros

The cost of the software was so low in relation to the others in the market and you get so much out of the application it’s unbelievable.

Cons

There is no invoicing or tracking time so this was a bit of a turn off for me if this feature is upgraded the overall experience would be top notch

While Clubhouse can do some things well, it is lacking in many areas

My experience with Clubhouse was not great to say the least. While the UI is promising, and the price per user is much lower than others, you get what you pay for. Like too many other project management apps, there is not enough focus on the time being tracked vs a budget for the project you are working on. The project layers overlap in a way that would be good if you were working on individual projects for a larger product, but not if you are working on individual projects geared towards individual clients.

Pros

I think the best part of Clubhouse is the robust API that can allow a dev team to add or complement to the existing platform. Clubhouse seems designed for teams focusing on a product or a small portfolio of similar products or complimentary features. It does not seem designed for a consulting or agency style development shop.

Cons

Clubhouse is lacking in a number of areas that should be expected features in agile project management software. Completion dates are buried, no project budgeting or hourly rates, no invoicing or adding expenses, time tracking, resource management, personal task lists, custom fields, dependencies. It also seemed overwhelming to get set up and running.

Has huge potential, but needs to open up or differentiate

Clubhouse offers a very unique and engaging way to socialize, compared to the text model of other apps such as Discord. However, as apps such as Discord are beginning to offer similar experiences to Clubhouse, I think Clubhouse should try to find more ways to keep conversations fresh and unique.

Pros

Clubhouse came out with a really unique concept at the time. I like the idea of drop-in audio; especially during the pandemic, Clubhouse really helped simulate a real interaction. Clubhouse has a great community partly due to the invite-only nature of the app, and I've enjoyed the interactions I've had.

Cons

I think Clubhouse should offer more ways of interacting besides just voice. Having someone stream something to watch, or offering some quick games would be some examples of really boosting the experience, as sometimes conversations can feel stale or repetitive. This may also be due to the app being invite-only, which contributes to lack of diversity.

Simplest Project Management tool in our business

It's the best tool for our software engineering team

Pros

It's super simple and opinionated in all the right ways. The user interface is extremely fast and responsive.

Cons

My only ask would be to view EPICS in the stories view but it is a minor annoyance. Integration with our documentation

A visually pleasant alternative to Pivotal Tracker

Overall my experience with Clubhouse has been great. It's got a nice UI and is intuitive.

Pros

The biggest win for me personally in the switch to Clubhouse was simply having a nice user interface to look at when dealing with tickets.

Cons

The only issue I've had so far has been that I'm not always aware when a ticket has been reviewed. As a customer success manager, I file ticket reports and sometimes they get closed without my being alerted. We've attempted to solve this with a slack integration but I'm not sure that it's working as expected. Also, it would be nice if they didn't use markdown when you uploaded an image to a ticket comment.

Does its job!

Pros

Great tool for managing the team's tasks and it's especially good for teams working with Scrum. It offers a lot of customizability, thus, you can change it to tailor your needs.

Cons

The learning curve for someone who never worked with it can be steep at the beginning. But after learning the basics it gets easy.

Great to manage our design team priorities

Great product. Easier for us to use that Github for task management (which is what we used before).

Pros

We use Clubhouse to manage priorities in our design team and it is really easy to use in this respect. It's easy to create stories, boards and tasks and to steer our team to be more productive.

Cons

I'd love to be able to format text without the need for markdown. That would be great!

Easy to follow deliverables

Overall, it's been a great tool to be able to bridge expectations with our users. It's been very useful from a product/development to customer success/support point of view.

Pros

It makes it very easy to follow where we are at on projects and bug management. This makes it easy to convey to our users what timeframe they can expect to have things resolved and new features released.

Cons

Once you have a number of stories on the board, it can get hard to keep track of everything. I recommend having a naming convention that is easy to follow so you can find what you are looking for quickly.

Clubhouse vs Jira? Clubhouse wins.

I have previously used Fogbugz, Jira, Trello, and a few others, and Clubhouse is the clear winner. You will find some of what I mention here applicable to something like Jira; contains depth, customer service request and issue tracking are highly visible, can be simple to use. But it would be like saying a burger from McDonald's is the same as the burger from Raoul's in NY; they both have buns, a meat patty, and you can create depth with the condiments! You could say that, but you'd be a fool. Are you a large org with cash to burn, needing extreme amounts of control, and customization, with mandated workflows? Jira has your answer. Are you a small/medium team that needs a fantastic feature & project tracking tool that works great out of the box? Clubhouse is hands down the best.

Pros

I find the product to be very simple at the surface with deep capabilities. Previously, we were using Jira and I found the software to be overkill for many of the tasks that we perform. Additionally, so much of Jira's useful functionality (and the Atlassian suite as a whole) is hidden behind paywalls, 3rd party addon services, and little gouges along the way. I absolutely abhor that practice so finding Clubhouse was a godsend. Customer service has been prompt and helpful, and though they have not implemented my feature request, I at least know that it has been prioritized. Team collaboration is great with their Slack integration. My team posts bugs, hotfixes, feature requests in the proper project, and I am automatically notified via Slack. The whole team has visibility to their request's progress.

Cons

Navigating the nomenclature of Stories, Epics, Projects, Milestones, and how they should fit together is a bit taxing at first and takes getting used to. It would be helpful to have visual guides for someone like myself, but the documentation is available and well written. This is where I discovered the depth of capabilities in Clubhouse. You can very simply manage your project with Stories, and you can very finely tune your progress and visibility by getting to know these different groupings.

Perfect Balance Between Simplicity and Power

Clubhouse has given us a great workflow which minimises the reliance on human input while maximising the oversight we have on the work we have in progress. For our team it strikes the perfect balance between the simplicity of Trello with the best bits of more powerful tools like Jira - minus all of the bloat. I would highly recommend it for the sake that because it's developer focused, our developers actually don't mind using it. At the end of the day, your tool is only going to be as good as the effort your team is willing to put into using it so this is definitely something that isn't to be overlooked.

Pros

Unlike other agile management platforms, Clubhouse is setup that you can get a lot of value from the simple Kanban board with the option to go deeper and track more in depth insights into the progress of your work. We moved to Clubhouse from a setup of Trello with a ton of extensions to help manage the extra tracking we wanted to be doing, and I think the best analogy I can make is that Clubhouse is like Trello on steroids. But in saying that, it's far simpler and more effective than other bloated tracking software like Jira or Pivotal Tracker - which in my opinion try to please the managers who want a lot of fancy yet ultimately meaningless metrics at the expense of user experience for the development team who ultimately has to spend time keeping it up to date. The GitHub integration which automatically moves cards as they progress through pull requests is a great example of how Clubhouse has considered that the development team is ultimately the user of the platform, and should be designed around getting them to use it effectively rather than bloating it for the sake of what management think looks good.

Cons

There isn't anything major that I would complain about, but there are some improvements like showing epic burn down charts by points instead of the number of stories that I've asked for a few times but haven't been implemented. The reporting functionality also has a few bugs, but nothing major that stops it from being valuable.

Clubhouse is the Goldie Locks Level of JUST RIGHT!

When I started at this company they had no real process and no project management. They were using a collection of about 70 Trello boards to categorize and track work, but there was no roll up view of everything and the sheer flexibility of Trello was too much to manage. I have worked in JIRA and similar platforms before, they are cumbersome to set up and require that you utilize their entire eco-system for more rich-features. Clubhouse is the perfect middle ground. It helps us organize our 6 teams and their workloads, prioritize work among the many company priorities and work with the owners to come up with roadmaps for the future... ALL IN THE SAME TOOL! As we are able to build in our branching and deployment process into Clubhouse, it will be even better for us. We are truly working toward standardizing our work items, planning and estimating and could not have done that without Clubhouse.

Pros

I like the ease of use, from day one of setting up Clubhouse it just made sense and was easy to configure for our purposes. It was easy to jump in and start using without much learning curve for all of the team members as well. We love how much work we can have in a single work space and with powerful filtering, searching, everyone gets their perfect view for their purpose!

Cons

I wish there were more canned reporting features for Kanban workflows, but honestly it's not the end of the world since we have access to the REST API for building our own custom reports! Right now our private Gitlab integration isn't working but what is amazing is that Clubhouse support and engineering is working through it with us. I love that about Clubhouse. (Can you tell it's hard for me to find something negative about the software???)

Great Project/Product Management tool

I have personally used Clubhouse at 2 organizations, as well as other competing tools. Clubhouse has provided the best overall tool for ticketing and project management without a steep learning curve. Organization and searchability is key when managing several developers, stakeholders, teams, and business. Therefore, Clubhouse keeps me on top of stuff while prioritize and deprioritize easily and quickly.

Pros

Flexibility and ease of the software - Clubhouse is extremely easy to learn and provides the ability to mold the software and functionality to your team's workflows. Additionally, the Clubhouse team is continuously adding new integration and features that are best practice for most modern and agile product & tech teams.

Cons

Not necessarily a specific con to Clubhouse but in general for all project management tools. Given the need for detailed requirements, it is necessary to write a lot of content on tickets. As such, the mobile experience is not on part with the browser desktop experience. That being said, I tend to create shell tickets on the mobile app or mobile view, then complete the tickets on a desktop when I have full functionality and familiarity.

A perfect balance between the complexity of JIRA and the looseness of Trello

Years ago we started with JIRA, it did the job, but was so complex to administrate that we could not adjust and reaccess our process as we learned and grew. So we moved to Trello. Trello allowed a large amount of freedom to try new ideas on how we work. However, in the end, it was frustrating that Trello did not understand what software development was, and we had to rely on hacks to get proper reporting and insights. That led us to Clubhouse, which is a nice happy medium. It is opinionated on what software development looks like, but it gives just the right amount of flexibility so we can adjust as needed.

Pros

* It embraces the modern development process * It's fast and responsive * Almost all you need is in one screen * It has multiple layers of organization (story, epic, milestone)

Cons

* The higher layers of organization do not 100% align with our process * Some features are not available on different layers and it seems arbitrary. For example, you can't get a burn down on a sprint if that Sprint is not tracked as a "milestone". So if you are using Milestones to track large scale projects (maybe quarter goals or multi-epic initiatives) you have no way to track how your Sprint is going. Either they need a first-class Sprint concept, or allow burn downs on labels.

Associate Product Manager

It has been a great experience from onboarding until now. The global search functionality is great and always helps me find what I am looking for. Ability to attach any files to my tickets is great. And the GitHub integration where I can keep track of the pull requests for the assigned ticket is very helpful.

Pros

- Ease of use - The UI is easy to navigate - Perfect for our team structure

Cons

Have only ever run into a few minor issues: 1. Setting up the backlog of our stories to prioritize - Solution: If you have a ticket that you would like to appear in the backlog. Set the owner as yourself(Product Manager) and set the state to Unscheduled. And we also set up the filters for the backlog to display tickets that have a PM as the owner and are unscheduled. 2. Estimate section of ticket creation - would attribute one point to one day of work, but not having the ability to set half a day of work because there is no 0.5 option 3. When copying plain text from a word file and pasting it into a ticket, I would like it to also appear as plain text

A Reliable, Scalable, Continuously Improved Product

Pros

As a product manager, I love the usability of Clubhouse (CH). Having come from competitive products such as JIRA, Rally, Pivotal Tracker, etc., CH feels far more intuitive and the user workflows well thought through. I greatly appreciate the ongoing development by the CH team. It's always a pleasure seeing regular alerts come in with rather material improvements.

Cons

Greater attention to how cross-team and cross-account collaborate using the software is a gap for me. Our business has a 2 or 3 different CH accounts mainly due to security needs (limiting certain access for groups of individuals). Which leads me to an additional thought which is, the ability to configure more granular security levels within CH is limited. Especially for an organization working predominantly with enterprise customers, we tend to have highly regulated standards related to third-party approved solutions.

Excellent agile tool for single or multiple teams

We're a small team that had difficulty with roadmapping and mid-term planning with Trello, yet all strongly dislike the overhead and UI of Jira so we figured we'd give Clubhouse a shot, if it worked great, if not it was a worthwhile experiment. After switching we have no plans to move or gripes with Clubhouse and how it currently works. We've adapted our product planning to fit Clubhouse for the better as it brought just enough structure without being way over the top. Highly recommend this product!

Pros

Clubhouse has been really easy to onboard to, curate our roadmap of epics and milestones, track stories across projects, itemize our projects (website vs marketing vs platform vs api vs apps) and segment our work across them but rolling up under the related epics with per project/epic/milestone velocity reporting.

Cons

Figuring out the expected associations between Projects, Milestones -> Epics and how it fits into your product structure took a little trial and error. The main thing I like the least is that as a developer, I'm part of several teams (segmented by Product, Engineering, and Marketing, etc) each with different workflows, and that means I lack a continuous backlog to know "whats next" - I end up having to check each Team to do some mental prioritization to know whats next.

Get up and running in 1 day

Clubhouse is allowing us to capture user stories on the fly, and keep those stories organized. We are able to create custom swim lanes that match our process perfectly, so that the stories can flow from one step to the next easily until they are done. We use the reporting on a daily basis to look at our burndown chart, and to track our stats for each sprint. It is easy to add tasks for each other to complete, and to leave notes and comments for each other within the stories. It helps keep all the communication for each story in one place, and lets us easily see what is going on with them at any point in time. And it's REALLY easy to use, so we actually use it! Also, we love having the Milestones feature where we can keep the big items on our roadmap and easily see our progress towards them. SO much better than having a separate roadmap tool that we never look at. I recommend it to anyone.

Pros

We're a scrum team developing software in the news industry. We switched from PivotalTracker to Clubhouse, and the ease of setup and how quickly we were able to learn the product was amazing. It took me weeks to get a grasp of PivotalTracker, but within a morning we were up and running on Clubhouse and loving it. The software looks clean, appealing, and intuitive, and it is so easy to learn and use that you will wonder why you used anything else ever. And the price point is easy to swallow, too. We love it!

Cons

Clubhouse is still missing robust sprint related tools. There are great workarounds in place, and they will be releasing those soon, so no hesitation on recommending it. But once they roll those features out it will be even better.

Clubhouse at a growing company

Overall we enjoy clubhouse. It is lean and less complex than other work tracking tools. Additional reporting would be a huge win, but as mentioned above, we have utilized Clubhouse's API to create our own custom metrics.

Pros

Clubhouse makes it easy to view and organize work across projects. I like the ability to label things by Epic and create custom workspaces is super helpful. The Clubhouse API is useful for getting information about activity and creating our custom metric reporting.

Cons

The reporting isn't very useful. I feel it is geared toward project management reporting and we don't use project management. I would like to be able to see quality related reports (how many bugs were created/resolved, projects with the most reported bugs, number of bugs created by epic/project. It would also be nice to have the ability to set a Release Date and Production/Testing field on cards so that we can track when features/projects go to production and whether bugs were released as well, or caught during testing.