[HHad3]

Using Atlassian cloud products is a business risk. They previously let customers sit for weeks without access to their data [1]. Cloud-hosted products do get early patches for unsecured /setup routes though [2], so there's that.

At this point the decision has been made in our org to firewall their products off the internet and internal networks, and migrate to something else by 2024.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlassian

[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/security/cve-2023-22515-pri...

[neovive]

We're in the same boat. I brought Confluence into our org almost a decade ago — it was the best collaborative wiki tool at the time. Over time the price has increased while the quality of the tool has not kept pace with other options. This seems to be the trend as software companies grow into large "enterprise" providers.

Looking at our Confluence usage over the years, I noticed that we use it primarily as a knowledgebase/documentation tool and less for collaboration. With our on-prem license expiring, we are migrating to a dedicated knowledgebase for our FAQ and frequently changing content and switching to a Markdown tool + Git for our more formal documentation.

[unethical_ban]

>I brought Confluence into our org almost a decade ago — it was the best collaborative wiki tool at the time

I respectfully disagree with that assertion! I remember 2012 (okay, 11 years ago). I had just joined a new team at work, and the documentation for the team was a lot of vendor PDFs and some .txt files from the lead stored on a network drive.

The company was just implementing Confluence, but it was slow on client and server side with no HA. That is the fault of the server team, not Atlassian, but still the software was ick.

I spun up a shadow-IT Dokuwiki server that was much easier to use for a small team with text-based documentation needs. It had a naive "calendar" plugin that allowed the quick creation of pages based on date, which we used for oncall hand-off. Backup was zipping the data folder on the server.

It was probably 3 more years until our hand was forced to use the "enterprise standard" for business continuity purposes.

[gwright]

Could you share what markdown/git tooling you've identified?

[dangus]

As a former Atlassian administrator, I believe the opposite. Maintaining the system on-premise was a bigger risk.

The products are too complicated to be packaged nearly with a bow for sysadmins. You inevitably start having to become at Atlassian SME just to keep that shit running.

I’m all for your company going with an alternative product, but for a company who would rather stick with Atlassian products, you’d be insane to prefer the on-premise version.

Either insane or you’re a giant company with heavy compliance requirements and you don’t mind hiring a dedicated person/team to operate the data center product and babysit other on-premise vendors’ services.

In my experience, I was running an on-premise Jira installation for a <100-person company, which was an insane waste of my time compared to the other tasks I could have been doing to help build our core product.

[dzikimarian]

Completely opposite here. We ran jira for many years on-prem, it was mostly effortless - maybe a few man/days per year? (user accounts in low 3 digits, but we kept workflows simple and ran light on plugins).

I'm curious what were actually tasks that wasted your time?

[Aeolun]

How is the product so terrible that running a 100 person instance is a pain in the ass?

[kwanbix]

While Jira does many many things right, it is also horrible in so many ways.

What options are you evaluating?

[preisschild]

Not OP, but we moved to Gitlab Issues.

Project Managers are missing some features, but the devs (including me) like it a lot more due to integrating so well with PRs/commits.

[HHad3]

We've moved to plain markdown in Git(Lab) as Confluence replacement. A CI pipeline compiles it to HTML and hosts it on the web via Material for MkDocs.

It lacks most collaboration options for non-developer users, but we found that they are rarely, if at all, used anyway. Non-developer users can still use an edit button that points to GitLab's web editor and update the docs that way.

I can't suggest a replacement for Jira at this point. I don't think there is one tool to recommend that fits every company's workflow. The other comments seem to have some nice tools to try.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Despite the "Azure" name, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server), is still a rock-solid on-prem system for git repo hosting, issues/stories/projects, build automation, and the rest - though I feel it has stagnated somewhat, and git integration still feels half-baked compared to TFS's previous SVN-clone, but is still my first-choice for on-prem installs (granted, I'm still wedded to the MSFT stack).

[brobdingnagians]

YouTrack by Jetbrains is very good

[rpy]

Linear is awesome

[tedivm]

Slab is an excellent replacement for Confluence, although it doesn't help with Jira.

[zeroonetwothree]

Jira has like 100 alternatives. The best one depends on your exact needs.

But Linear is goated

[ozim]

I would say using on-prem products and never updating them because of penny pinching is much bigger business risk.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

What business risk does that incurr?