Shortcut Reviews

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.

Pros

- Simple to learn and navigate so the team could quickly start using the product after switching- Love the dark mode and the colour coding of different story types i.e bug, feature or chore so it's easy to see things at the high level- Easy to create sprints and I like the summaries provided on the story points

Cons

- You can only write stories in markdown text. Not a big issue since I've become really good at it! But it'd be good if there was a text editor instead- Sometimes when I create a story and I accidentally click out of it, I lose the progress. It'd be good if they had a draft functionality where the stories get created as a draft straight away

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

We needed something that was more focused on sprint management

Switched From

Notion

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

JIRA has a quite suite of features however it was too complex for what we were looking for. We need something to track our sprints and features and shortcut was perfect for that.

Pros

This is an adequate task management/tracking software. It has a fantastic Zendesk integration and multiple customizable fields. It also boasts decent search and filtering functions but it isn't particularly user-friendly and filling out all the fields that make it function well takes a great deal of time (hence the title of this review).

Cons

There are no AI/smart suggestions for related epic/team fields so every time you make a new ticket you have to search through them by scratch. They also don't offer a great tag database or tag definitions so you have to create naming conventions separately offline. You also can't use rich text in story descriptions.

Pros

Many of the features of this software are useful to our company. Our team has come to heavily rely on the roadmap view and reporting tools. These features have kept our company on track and increased our velocity in immeasurable ways.

Cons

A few of the features our team feels are missing from Shortcut are custom fields and release management. If our team was able to have a reliable release management system, it would be very impactful to our team and customers.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

This software simplified the product management pipeline and offered the best toolsets for our light touch pipeline.

Switched From

Jira and monday.com

Pros

Shortcut does a great job allowing us to manage all facets of our product and being multiple teams together for what is most important, client and end user satisfaction. It follows standard agile flow but allows flexibility where engineers and non-engineers can use it alike.
We also utilize their API for templates epics and stories and it is great to work with.
Support team and client success managers have been a pleasure to work with when we’ve had conversations. They always are able to handle a situation or get us in touch with someone who can.
Lastly the product is always evolving and they are very transparent through their website and slack channel of what is coming next to make your life better!

Cons

Some things were less flexible such as naming conventions and required fields on stories/epics, but these are getting worked out over time (for ex projects are not required any more)

Alternatives Considered

Jira, Basecamp and ClickUp

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Wanted one tool with more power and better price.

Switched From

Trello and monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

Most flexible and best bang for your buck.

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

Alternatives Considered

ZenHub

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

JIRA felt feels like an oil tanker, where most companies we need a tugboat, i.e. lean, powerful and agile. JIRA also gives you infinite customizability options, which often leads to over-complication and analysis paralysis.

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

The other tools we evaluated were either too simple for our needs (lack of features) or lacked in usability. We often underplay the importance of the joy of using a certain software product. I continually found that I had to beg people to keep other tools updated with the current state of affairs, wherewith Clubhouse they simply opted to do it themselves. The other options just didn't compare to Clubhouse.

Pros

The software is so easy to use and was really easy to set up. Almost every integration you could need is also available to make workflow quicker and more automated.

Cons

Switching from Projects to Teams has been quite difficult and required that we rework our custom board and views used for our normal agile ceremonies.

Alternatives Considered

Trello and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Jira was too expensive and everyone hated it.

Switched From

JIRA Service Management

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

More flexible and cheaper

Pros

The ability to use Shortcut the first day, integrate with our process easily and nicely, search items successfully every time, link items, all without a hiccup!

Cons

I wish more people in our organization could use it!!!! Just doesn’t fit their processes at the moment… I am working on it though!

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio, Jira and Microsoft Project

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Cost, ease of use, simplicity and yet the depth of the product was exceptional!

Switched From

Microsoft Visual Studio, Jira and Microsoft Project

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

Shortcut hits all of the notes for us! It’s simple and yet offers so many features!

Pros

Whether you’re part of a small software team or you’re integrated into a collection of agile teams at an enterprise software shop - Shortcut makes it easy and intuitive to manage the many integrated software projects of todays micro services oriented development style. We’ve found that Shortcut grew with us from 2 devs to 10 and we expect it to grow with us as we grow to 50.

Cons

Story management sometimes feels like a full time job, but at least Shortcut makes it a joy. For our open source projects we have a hard time integrating with issues on GitHub where public issues are generated, but for our private projects, the GitHub integration is lightweight and effective.

Pros

Seems silly, but for me, it's the ability to create tasks under a ticket, and be able to convert those into tickets on their own. Jira did not have this, and still doesn't as far as I know, but wouldn't matter - Shortcut is simple to use, and ready to go out of the box.

Cons

Doesn't have the brand recognition, so hard to convince others that its the correct solution to use.

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.

Pros

I manage engineering workflow as well as my own as an individual contributor in Shortcut. I also keep track of ideas and requests for when I set out to build new products. I love using labels in Shortcuts for managing my own workflow - requests that come from different teams get different labels so members of that team can see everything I'm working on for them and reliably know what state projects are in. I try to keep as much communication in Shortcut stories as opposed to emails because being able to reference it in Shortcut is very valuable to me. The search functionality is really good and unless I've named something really weirdly I can always find what I'm looking for.

Cons

I haven't gotten familiar with using notifications in Shortcut and I rely on email notifications. This isn't to say that Shortcut doesn't have the right capabilities for notifications (commenting on stories is what I want notifications about), but just that I haven't really explored/figured it out which says something itself.

Pros

As a solely Kanban tool it's really useful, but the different tags features (labels, projects, milestones) help to turn it more useful when working in a SCRUM process. I think it's the most complete kanban board that I tried, with nice points assignment for the stories, filters and search that work well. Integration with github also works very well, allowing to integrate PRs and commits with the stories.

Cons

I miss some feature like editing content as Notion offers, but still I think the purpose of this tool is different.

Pros

- I have like many in product at one point or another used Jira
- It's way smoother and way less. clunky then jira. Pages are more responsive and load quicker with less jumping
- Creating tickets is easy
- The UI is visually appealing

Cons

- Lacking integration compared to Jira
- Sometimes the auto-save fails and you lose work
- sometimes tickets you create are lost in a void if not triaged correctly

Pros

I like the visuals, the ease-of-use, everything is pretty intuitive even the first time you're using it. It's been a couple of years since my team started using it, and it works very well for us.

Cons

The name change recently forced us to adapt a lot of our automation regarding the app, but the reason for it was understandable.

Pros

Can branch out the epic easily from origin when too much topic / stories relate to one single task, easy to manage.

Cons

Report : difficult to view milestone and every team member epic / stories completion, declared start and end date vs actual end date.Charging fee : I have team member join and leave, empty seat is a waste of money.

Pros

I have found that the ability for me to create story templates for my team has improved the quality of the requirements for features, increased the number of test cases we identify before implementation, and has decreased the amount of time it takes my engineers to push fixes for bugs.

Cons

I would say one thing I feel is missing is the ability to see status of team members across multiple workflows. I can click through each one and jot down notes, but when there’s a critical bug it would be nice to just see a birds eye view of who’s working on what so I know who to give it to.

Pros

I’ve used more complex software for ticket management and simpler tools, and Shortcut is the right balance of features, cost and ease of use.

Cons

Shortcut recently added Teams to their system which doesn’t work well with our workflow.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Pros

Flexible design allows for different teams to work in different flows.
Labels are extremely unstructured and therefore flexible to be used in different ways as needed.

Cons

Write feature (documentation) is very important to us both for general documentation and for documents pertaining to specific projects / epics, but it's very buggy / not being developed anymore.

No more mobile app.

Pros

It's easy to use and organize, and there are a lot of customizable features that the previous software I used did not have.

Cons

I wish you could add blockers that aren't other stories, i.e. if I am blocked on something because I need to go confirm something with a Stakeholder, that's not easily indicated within Shortcut. We end up using a Workflow State for "Blocked" stories instead of using the Relationships feature.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Switched From

Pivotal Tracker

Pros

We love the team collaboration and flexible storyboard features. It works well across disciplines such as scrum and kanban.

Cons

It's difficult to rank and order the importance of UserStories relative to other systems I've used.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Pros

Compared to other similar systems, I've found Shortcut's UI to be welcoming and intuitive. Their feature releases are innovative, and their product team has built something that makes work feel more fun. I especially love the Git widget that makes it easy to copy suggested branch names.

Cons

The GitHub integration seems to still be linking to CH- prefix tickets. But that is very minor.

Pros

Joy of use, low barrier to add/modify things

Cons

Priorization of tasks and epics could be easier

Pros

It is very easy to use. I really like that it supports Google authentication and that other than simple cards you can create Milestones and Epics. We are very early adopters of Clubhouse (and even wrote a post about why we moved from Trello to Clobhouse) and it's incredible to see the amount of new features and integrations they have came up with in so short time.

Cons

Nothing that I can think of. The experience on mobile was poor at some point, but it's been hugely improved in the past year or so.

Pros

I like that they provide you with so many different views of projects. For example, I can easily track burn rate for projects, individual contributor process, story progress, etc. It is feature rich, yet lightweight. I have never found myself needing something that Clubhouse couldn't offer.

Cons

As a negative person, I honestly can't think of anything!