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Pivotal Tracker

Score7.2 out of 10

80 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Pivotal Tracker?

Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.” The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Pivotal Tracker.
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Pivotal Tracker Delivers on Tracking Development Projects

Incentivized
Angela Goldsmith, PMPView profile
Director of Systems Development in Information Technology at Dark Horse Comics (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Project task tracking
  • Visibility of work

Cons

  • More project management features like Gantt Charts
  • More reporting

Return on Investment

  • Able to easily track projects and prioritize the work to meet milestones
  • Able to easily manage work priorities and assignments for local and remote employees

Alternatives Considered

Wrike

Other Software Used

Mattermost, Evernote

Great for software devs teams

Incentivized
Brad HendersonView profile
Co-Founder at Droplii (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • In my opinion, it's geared more towards developers and was useful for them to be using a tool they like.
  • It allows for gauging the estimated time required for each task so that a project manager can correctly weight how much time each task will take.
  • It's more specialized in its application than a number of other project management software that are for more general project management.

Cons

  • The UI isn't very appealing. For many, this isn't important but I appreciate using software that is appealing to the eye.
  • This isn't necessarily a negative, but it isn't a good general project management software, which in my opinion is a strength that they've chose to hone in the focus of their product.

Return on Investment

  • Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
  • The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.

Alternatives Considered

Asana and Trello

Software project management made easy with Pivotal Tracker

Incentivized
Juan Palma
Software Development Manager in Engineering at Ventus Wireless (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Managing multiple software projects using an agile methodology.
  • Usability of creating and managing 'stories' within the projects.
  • Lots of integrations into other applications.
  • Rich reports and analytics to track project progress.
  • Mobile app makes it very easy to check project status and update it on the go.

Cons

  • Managing active vs. temporarily inactive tasks/stories.

Return on Investment

  • Pivotal Tracker has had a huge positive impact on our business by allowing us to easily manage software projects and not be worried about the maintenance of a tool to manage projects.

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft), GitHub, Redmine and Wrike

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Google Drive, Dropbox

Keep Your (User) Stories Straight with Pivotal Tracker

Incentivized
Benjamin Plotkin
Technical Project Manager in Information Technology at California State University, Northridge (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Pivotal Tracker makes it relatively easy to manage project team members, including inviting new members, as well as managing existing member roles.
  • I appreciate how Pivotal Tracker supports the planning and estimation aspects of agile project management, including support for linear and Fibonacci sequence point systems for effort estimation on tasks.
  • Analytics are just a click away with Pivotal Tracker, making burndown chart spreadsheets and manual tallying a thing of the past.

Cons

  • While Pivotal Tracker takes a lot of the drudgery out of managing agile-type projects, it can be an "opinionated" product, which can make end-users feel like they have to conform their workflows to the product, rather than the other way around. Automated velocity reporting is one example of this.
  • Pivotal Tracker has a lot of features, and while this is generally a good thing, it makes the product a challenge to master, for many, regardless of end-user technical abilities.
  • The visual interface is extremely information-rich, requiring lots of drill-downs and accordion expansions. It would be nice to see a simplified interface for general use, akin to the old-school Scrum board and Post-It notes.

Return on Investment

  • Our software development team and customers are not colocated, so Pivotal Tracker saves us time and money by supporting web-based access to our projects, allowing devs and end-users to collaborate remotely, and asynchronously as required.
  • Pivotal Tracker's "all in one place" accessibility helps us to avoid rework by centralizing our tasks, bugs, and user stories.
  • Being a cloud-based product, Pivotal Tracker gives our organization the ability to run a sophisticated project management system without having to pay for the infrastructure or staff that a home-grown system would require.

Alternatives Considered

JIRA Software

Other Software Used

AWS Lambda, Navicat Premium, Tableau Desktop

A highly capable tool to implement a process

Incentivized
Willian MolinariView profile
Backend Engineer in Information Technology at Doist (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • If you're implementing a new process on your team and you like what Pivotal Tracker provides, it works well.
  • The kanban view is good and compact.
  • It was not expensive for our use case.

Cons

  • If you find out that you prefer to work in a different way, the tool starts to fall apart. You have to follow its way of working.
  • It's not flexible at all. You have some configurations to do, but it is what it is.
  • The web app feels heavy, it's not simple at all

Return on Investment

  • The team realized that scrum will not work in the way we are working.
  • The tool did the job as expected but in the end, we found that we will not need it because that's not the process we want to have for ourselves.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

KanbanFlow, JIRA Software, Trello and Todoist

Other Software Used

Todoist, KanbanFlow, JIRA Software

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