Interestingly I assumed (due to personal and anecdotal experience fro colleagues) it’s not a good experience and that was part of what the parent was referring to.

Coming from ClearQuest, Jira was a breathe of fresh air some years ago. We can run projects with several hundred to thousand people with it (the on prem version) without problems and UX is ok IMHO. Maybe it's easy to screw up the config?

It's slow, but so long as you don't do anything “out of the ordinary” (i.e. try to act like the average sort of person who would use Jira), it's decent enough to use. I've personally had no workflow issues, though I could tell there was something deeply wrong with the internals.

Then again, if you're only using the “ordinary” features, Jira doesn't have much advantage over any other bug tracker; Gitea can integrate with Jira just as well as with any other bug tracker, and well enough that the Jira / Confluence integration isn't necessary.

The Atlassian softwares are okay, but (from my limited experience) worse than their alternatives. On several occasions, I expected a bug, but it refreshed or redirected, and there wasn't a bug. I have found no bugs while using Jira, and not unusably many while using Confluence… but I can say the same for Gitea, GitHub, Gitlab and even Bugzilla. (Gitea's native issue tracker is actually good enough – and therefore better than Jira – for everything I ever used Jira for.)

> Jira doesn't have much advantage over any other bug tracker

Ohhh found the non power Jira user! Gitea is good enough for your org. Without knowing your requirements this is pretty much a blanket statement. Gitea is nowhere near good enough for a large engineering org.

Example: groovy integration with Jira allows an enterprise to build their own custom workflows. Like integrating with your Vcs to enforce funded work (requiring an open Jira issue in git commits). Features like this, until recently, left them in a league of their own. GitHub Actions has leveled that playing field. Gitlab and gitea can fight it out with bugzilla, but you won’t find them in most engineering orgs.

Another example: building out complex dev roadmaps ahead of time with constraints and relationships. Bridging the gap between dev, product, and project management

> Not trying to dig on your usage of issue tracking

> but you won’t find them in any worthwile engineering org.

sure.

Examples?

It's an ok product until you run into performance issues. Which due to said horrible backend engineering is numerous. Also their support is awful.

Don’t worry, the datacenter edition takes only 200ms to load their HTML, and then another 15s to generate their JS package on every single page load.