With pleasure...

Bugs, bugs, bugs galore. Not joking but I'm sure they have no tests. We regularly fall over trivial shit that should work but doesn't.

Page state problems everywhere. You eventually learn not to use the browser back button.

Upgrades are hell due to the tinkering you have to do with Java settings and the container to get it performing properly. we have to stick it behind an apache mod_proxy setup because it falls over when shifting SSL. In fact their documentation says they won't support it of you use SSL (seriously!!).

It needs an 8 core Xeon with 32Gb of RAM and 15k SAS disks to get reasonable performance out of for 100 users barely doing anything (WTF).

Set it up to use InnoDB as the schema type in MySQL and it doesn't even add FK constraints reliably. Some are added, some are not. This results in random key violation failures that you have to go and manually fix or the ORM in it falls over and takes the entire JIRA instance out.

Plugins that you rely on because the basic feature set is rubbish suddenly start costing lots of money when you upgrade. There is no notice of this. Basically pay up fuckers (at least $93/plugin/year) or lights out.

We have just over 105 users but that's over the so have to fish out for the 500 user version which costs twice as much as the 100 user version. And its not cheap. Basic JIRA one off installation with greenhopper/crucible/fisheye costs us $20000 up front and a bit less every year in maintenance for which we receive broken crap.

Crucible is so slow it takes nearly a week to index our repository which has to be done regularly because it craps itself reliably and corrupts the indexes. It doesn't even run as a service on windows reliably relying on some pile of crap documentation on Confluence that doesn't work.

Clean upgrades are a week-long project on average.

You have to reindex it regularly because minor process changes cause faults and anomalies everywhere. Reindexing (until recently) blocked the server entirely for up to an hour.

The crucible web interface is so slow it doesn't actually work properly. People have to wait up to a minute for a page hit on a good day. It has a giant lock inside it somewhere apparently that they can't get around.

You can't trust their OnDemand service either - they have admitted massive customer data loss from their previous platform. Google for reference.

The whole thing is a house of cards that I wouldn't go near.

To any Atlassian employees who will probably read this and start the marketing spiel: don't give me the "we're aware and are improving speech" because I've been promised that for 3 years and it hasn't happened. It's just got worse.

Also, to those who do the "it works for me": it worked for us long enough to get through the evaluation but it doesn't scale as promised, doesn't work at all well and is not fit for purpose.

To those who say "you've set it up wrong": we've had Atlassian on the case and they can't make it any faster.

Atlassian have a reality distortion field like Apple do as well I've experienced. They have great marketing but that is all.

To be honest, I'd directly compare the space they're in with JetBrains (we use Team City as well). Nothing we've had from JetBrains is like this - it's orders of magnitude better in every way. It just works. We haven't tried YouTrack from them to be honest but I'd start with them if you're going to evaluate a product in a similar space. Either that or trac which I've had precisely zero problems with 50 users on a SQLite database!

I did this because it annoyed me: http://imgur.com/14vQrlg