FogBugz Reviews & Insights

Score2.6 out of 10

6 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for FogBugz are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive and Easy to Use: Users have consistently praised the software for its intuitive and user-friendly interface. Many users have mentioned that the software is easy to learn and navigate, making it suitable for both experienced software teams and small businesses with minimal functions.

Effective Communication and Collaboration: The software has been commended for its ability to facilitate communication and collaboration within organizations. Reviewers have highlighted how the software makes the process of requesting help across different departments organized and seamless, resulting in improved teamwork and efficiency.

Flexible Customization Options: Users appreciate the flexibility of the software, particularly in terms of customization options. The incredible search system, platform flexibility, and built-in functionality for item, date, and data tracing are highly valued by reviewers. Additionally, users find it beneficial that they can add suitable fields, integrations, and extensions to enhance usability and performance.

Reviews

4 Reviews

A great fit for software development teams

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FogBugz is used primarily by our Software Development Team for Issue Tracking, Source Control, and Wiki. Our Support Team will create Cases for Dev to look into, as they need more feature rich services for Customer Support. The entire company will reference the Wiki for internal documentation. We also have a public Wiki which serves as a place for us to post information/steps to our customers.

Pros

Evidence Based Estimates for scheduling (This alleviates issues that arise due to people who estimate time poorly)
Made from the developer perspective, versus others that are by C-Suite who are so far removed from the actual development process they just contribute to the disconnect or inaccuracy of the system
Direction/Ambition/Transparency of DevFactory after their purchase of FogBugz/Kiln is refreshing

Cons

Workflow capability is very limited to the original implementation, could use a refresh and extension of the capabilities
UI/UX needs improvement. This was in the works prior to purchase by DevFactory, and has taken a back seat to backend improvements that rightfully needed to be fixed first.
Pricing model doesn't fit our usage very well, so we're paying for full-featured users for everyone even though the majority of Users only need to submit Cases and modify the Wikis, and our small percentage of Users are in Dev and need all features.

Likelihood to Recommend

FogBugz has been a very useful tool to our organization, and much preferred over other options we reviewed, mainly JIRA. There are still some improvements needed, but with the fairly recent acquisition by DevFactory, we have a great deal of hope for what is in store given DevFactory's focus and transparency. It seems like both DevFactory and FogBugz customers are eager for substantial improvements on the front-end, but there is/was a great deal of backend housecleaning that definitely needed to take place first.

Verified User

Director in Research & Development (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Fogbugz - Great for all users and a large amount of projects

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 18, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Fogbugz to manage books that our company was converting from paper to digital versions. For us, Fogbugz was a way to track not just bugs or software improvements, but projects and assignments that the team at large was working on. I oversaw a queue of book projects for five other workers, as well as running my own queue of fogbugz tasks and subtasks.

The case and subcase flow in Fogbugz works well if you want to visualize multi-step processes and how the processes are materializing. It was also good for users to self-refer to their tasks each day.

Pros

Tasks, Subtasks, and notes. All three of these areas were critical for our team. Tasks in Fogbugz were a bit easier to see than in more bug based software like Trello or JIRA
The entire screen is used to view a task or case. Clicking on a task or case will open up and take up the entire screen, aside from the sidebar nav columns. I like to see details and I think Fogbugz does this very well, using up as much digital real estate as possible.
Flowcharting in Fogbugz with Creately is nice - instead of getting an exterior flowchart software like Lucidchart, Creately works right in Fogbugz.

Cons

Personal dashboards could be a bit more customizable - i.e. if I log in, I'd like to see some of the cases more at the bottom of the screen and notes at the top. This is a minor minor quibble.
I wish projects and cases within projects could be viewed in another format aside from list view. Perhaps a panel view or a card view would be good. That said, the list view is compact and agile.

Likelihood to Recommend

Fogbugz is great for case-and-task based businesses. If your business has hundreds of weekly anticipated tasks that exist, such as processes to get files converted, Fogbugz can manage these processes very well. For our team, we knew each week that we would have about 500 tasks or orders to get processed. Fogbugz helped us break down these projects, get them assigned evenly throughout the team, and easily see who is working on what task.

FogBugz is also good for tracking unanticipated tasks like bugs, making notes, flowcharts, and categorizing if the problem is a bug, feature request, etc. For us, it was just the best at nailing down those anticipated tasks.

Becky Jewell Laughton

Customer Experience in Professional Services at Becky Jewell Art (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

FogBugz

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

March 29, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Use to track bugs that were found in projects. Used to track the fixing of bugs found during testing. Used to communicate the specs of new projects and to answer questions asked by business owners and QA. Used across whole organization. Addresses teh business problems of communicating with different employees across different time zones and countries.

Pros

Good for documenting
Good for attaching things

Cons

Missing keyboard shortcuts
Missing a good way to link external documenations

Likelihood to Recommend

Fogbugz is ok. It's good for bare bones bugs and projects, but lacks the functionality of Jira. I hate not having shortcuts. I don't like the way the cases are laid out. I don't like the search. I don't really like much about it. It's very simple and bare bones, and just not enough for me.

Gillian Hughes

QA Analyst in Quality Assurance at TK Interactive (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Fogbugz is simple, flexible and easy to maintain. Great for SMB's, not great for large organizations.

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 17, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using Fogbugz for our internal Production, Development, and Project Management teams. It is serves as a light weight task management system to move/track jobs between departments. it is effectively a virtual job jacket for our creative agency. We introduced the tool to support our teams with tracking fast moving jobs and keeping individuals accountable for responsibilities for a given job. It also helps team member transitions and coverage by showing a quick summary of the job history.
We selected the tool for it's simplicity, flexibility and ease of management because it would be used company wide accommodating varying experience levels of task management literacy.

Pros

Simplicity: Compared to other tools like Jira and even Bugzilla, Fogbugz minimizes the number of fields. The general workflow and status' of a given task works well for us. (Assigned, Resolved, and Closed).
Flexibility: The list views are highly customizable. This allows for many ways to display information and create custom lists for teams and departments. It has prebuilt queries, and basic boolean syntax that you can stitch together to build a list.
Easy to maintain: There are just two types of access rights. Regular and Admin. With some training, administration of the tool is done by project managers and a general user admin. We have a self hosted version, so there is an IT component in our maintenance, but it does not requires much attention.

Cons

The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.

Likelihood to Recommend

Do you have trouble keeping track of work in progress?
Do your jobs jump around alot and often sit idle?
Are there process bottlenecks where better access to job/task transparency will help move a job along better?
Are there common issues related to coverage and you find yourself digging through emails to figure out job status?

Ted Shimizu

Digital Producer in Information Technology at JUICE Pharma Worldwide (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Fogbugz is simple, flexible and easy to maintain. Great for SMB's, not great for large organizations.

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 17, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Simplicity: Compared to other tools like Jira and even Bugzilla, Fogbugz minimizes the number of fields. The general workflow and status' of a given task works well for us. (Assigned, Resolved, and Closed).
Flexibility: The list views are highly customizable. This allows for many ways to display information and create custom lists for teams and departments. It has prebuilt queries, and basic boolean syntax that you can stitch together to build a list.
Easy to maintain: There are just two types of access rights. Regular and Admin. With some training, administration of the tool is done by project managers and a general user admin. We have a self hosted version, so there is an IT component in our maintenance, but it does not requires much attention.

Cons

The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.

Likelihood to Recommend

Ted Shimizu

Digital Producer in Information Technology at JUICE Pharma Worldwide (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience