Best tool I've used so far in this field has been Linear. It's simple, and a great balance between opinionated and customisable. The UI is simple and snappy too. It's like a polar opposite of Jira.
I loathe Jira. People should be allowed to have that many fields on a screen, its ridiculous what is allowed. What sets linear apart from it?
I think what sets it apart from Jira is the balance between customisation and opinionated features I mentioned earlier. It will be useful a tool out of the box, but you can progressively enable a few extra features as your team grows.
I know on the surface it sounds a lot like Jira, but the execution is subtly better across the board. A lot of it is design/UX related too.
And lastly, it's very snappy. At previous job I had to wait seconds for between clicks for Jira to update. I don't know how that's considered okay by Atlassian (but I'm not sure if they upsell you "faster Jira" lol)
Another thing that stood out to me was their "Linear Method" posts https://linear.app/method
We recently migrated to Teamcamp.app, within an afternoon, everyone was clicking through tasks without needing a tutorial.
The interface felt so intuitive that our team actually spent time building instead of figuring out the tool.
Whatever the team I'm working with is currently using. Chasing the most recent tool doesn't add value until you see a process problem that a new tool obviously fixes without breaking everything else.
fibery.io - it is excellent.
You need to configure it, although it has various templates to get you going out of the box, including sprint-based development.
The nice thing about it is that you can add whatever you like, however you like. Want components with default owners for tasks? Want milestones? Want stakeholders? Want sign-off reviewers? Want to integrate with existing tools like Linear or Notion or JIRA or even email inboxes or Slack messages? Add entities for Incidents, that automatically make a dedicated Slack channel when you create them?
Want proper 1:1 or 1:manu or many:many links between Tasks and Milestones and Sprints and Incidents and Teams and Components and whatever?
Want single assignees? Or multiple ones?
Want flexible custom reports on all of it?
Or just want a simple flat Todo list, that can evolve later to fit your needs?
Stop having the tools dictate to you how you work and instead set it up how your company actually wants to work. That's Fibery.
(I am not connected to the company, just a very happy user.)
OkNext.io - no flexibility, no sprint planning.. get shit done and the tool will fit into your next week tasks based on prior weeks' performance.
I’m using plane.so it’s got the basic features you need (tasks, sprints, epics) and that’s it. Generous free tier too
physical post it notes from eg OfficeMax