I’ve been using Unfuddle for a few months now, and it has been great. It’s the (almost) perfect all-in-one project management tool for me. Since Unfuddle provides Code repositories as well as bug tracking, it makes it a great tool for developers. A lot of people have been asking me what the advantage of Unfuddle is versus other tools available. Well here is a short list:
Unfuddle Vs Basecamp
They both have similar features regarding messages and milestones but Unfuddle has all the other features that are great for developers such as code repositories and time tracking. One minor difference is that Basecamp has To-dos and Unfuddle has Tickets. To-Dos are great when setting low level development tasks but are not very useful for bug tracking. On the other hand Tickets are great for bug tracking but are hard to use as a Task list. This is my main issue with Unfuddle, but I understand that it wouldn’t make sense to have to-do lists and tickets in the same app. It would be very confusing for the users.
Unfuddle Vs GitHub Vs Beanstalk
Unfuddle provides an unlimited amount of private SVN and Git repositories for free but you are limited to 200MB. Beanstalk gives you one repo with 100MB for free and GitHub only provides public repositories for free. Sure Beanstalk has integration with a bunch of other sites, and Github has nice visualization of Commits. But if all you need is a place to commit your code and be able to browse it later, then Unfuddle will do, and it has the added bonus of being a Project management tool as well as a bug tracker (with very nice integration between the bug tracking and repository, you can close a ticket by putting comments like “fixed ticket #123″ in your commits).
Unfuddle Vs Lighthouse Vs Track
If you want to host your own bug tracking software then Trac is for you, but if you want a hosted solution, Unfuddle and Lighthouse are some of your options. I’ve used both Lighthouse and Unfuddle equally in the past year and I don’t really like Lighthouse. In Lighthouse, I find it hard to find which tickets are assigned to me and that are either open or new. In Unfuddle there’s the My Active Tickets list that does just that. Also, I work on multiple project at the same time, and Lighthouse doesn’t make it easy to switch between project. Unfuddle makes it easy to bring the tickets to the next status (New->Accepted->Resolved->Close) and it has a resolved Status, which is great when the developer has fixed it and needs the client to test and close the ticket. Lighthouse doesn’t have that feature, and I find that sometimes, clients end up recreating the same ticket if it wasn’t fixed or they “un-close” the ticket. Another cool feature with Unfuddle is that you can close or comment on tickets when committing your code to the Repo.
Unfuddle Vs Assembla
I know Assembla has similar features as Unfuddle, but Assembla didn’t fit my budget at the time so I can’t compare it to Unfuddle. Please leave comments if you have experience with Assembla and think it is better than Unfuddle. No flame wars pls.
Some say Unfuddle does too much
Even though Unfuddle does a lot, it isn’t too bloated and no details seemed to be overlooked. So if you like to have all these tool in one place I would suggest Unfuddle. It might not be the best for all of these features, but it is better at some than other sites.
Tags: assembla, basecamp, beanstalk, git, github, lighthouse, Project Management, svn, trac, unfuddle
I used assembla (before it became a pay only site) for some school projects, I do miss the “fixed #1234″ commits, but github works fine for me at the moment (I haven’t created any private repos, only public ones).
We have been using Unfuddle for the development of kumutu.com for over a year now. So far, it’s great. The unlimited repositories really work for us as we sometimes have some small side projects that simply need a globally accessible repository and we do not mind clumping all the tickets together under 1 of the our 4 Projects. The price and funcitonality of Unfuddle is really what did it for us. We also use Basecamp (Unfuddle integration would be a great bonus.. hint hint) for higher level tasks and Milestones such as allocating tasks to our information architect for wireframing, tasks to our designers, general business todos, etc. This lets us keep Unfuddle focused on development and normally only used by our coding and testing team.
One of our favourite features of Unfuddle is how well Tickets integrate with code commits (we use Git as apposed to Subversion). For example, if we create ticket number 355 to fix the homepage, once the developer handles that bit of work, he can quickly add a messages in the Git commit message similar to “fixes #355″ and this resolves the ticket number 355 once he has pushed his changes up to Unfuddle. This means that our project manager can quickly create tickets and the developer can quickly fix the tickets without any time wasted between programming and using the ticketing system.
Unfuddle was made with a team of developers in mind and does this better than any of the other systems we reviewed (GitHub, Beanstalk, lighhouse, etc).
With all these great things said about Unfuddle, we would love to see a design improvement to unfuddle.com. The design of github simply makes the whole process feel easier to use and some small aesthetic design enhancements to unfuddle would make using the app a bit more appealing. They could also use a few enhancements of viewing commits, speeding up the site, etc.
With this said, we are very happy with and will keep using Unfuddle, but we still continue to evaluate Github every so often and are tempted to switch over for the nicer design and popularity once Github has comparable technology. Github was really made for the mass market open source community, where Unfuddle was made for internal development teams.
Concluding, if you start an open source project that you would like to share with the world, we would recommend GitHub. If you have an application developed by a global or internal team, then Unfuddle is for you.