Project Management

Free Issue Tracking Software for a Happier, More Productive Development Team

May 25, 2017

What are the top free issue tracking software solutions to help your team manage issues and bugs? Discover the top options and what "free" really means.

James ThorntonContent Manager

Whether you're developing software, managing IT support, or building web pages, keeping track on bugs and issues is the stuff nightmares are made of. By choosing a bug and issue tracking software to implement within your team, you can speed up both request handling and boost development times.

In this article we'll look at some popular free issue tracking software solutions that allow you to keep track of bugs and errors submitted by users and ensure that the team is responding effectively to requests. We'll then take a look at a couple of free bug tracking tools that can automatically collect and store bugs as part of application monitoring process.

Free issue tracking software solutions

The following three apps all offer free solutions for issue tracking. They allow you to manage development teams working on bugs and issues in a project management-style environment.

Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management solution for developers. It allows all members of a team to get a real-time view of the status of each project and what needs to be done next.

The software's agile, iterative workflow and story management supports full text search and supports more powerful, structured queries, too. Pivotal Tracker includes built-in charts, including release burn-down, iteration burn-up, story type breakdown, and historical velocity.

Pivotal Tracker has a minimal set of important bug tracking features, such as assignees, task states, and subtasks. For expanded bug tracking functionality, Pivotal Tracker has integrations with tools such as Bugzilla, BugHerd, and Bugsnag.

What do you get for free?

Pivotal Tracker is free for teams of up-to three people. You're restricted to 2GB of storage and two projects with the free plan.

What other pricing plans are available?

Moving up from the basic version, there are several pricing plans available for Pivotal Tracker, bucketed into three main plans: 'Startup', 'Pro', and 'Enterprise'. The Startup plan begins at $12.50 per month for five collaborators, five private projects, and 5GB of storage. As you move up the pricing scale you unlock more collaborators, projects, and storage, as well as added extras such as unlimited viewers and priority support.

What are users saying?

"I like that you can "start" a bug task, and easily tag people," one reviewer writes. "Also the notifications are very helpful so I can instantly see when my attention is needed on a particular story. I also enjoy being able to look at my projects one by one, so I can focus on completing one project at a time."

Average GetApp user rating: 4.54/5

Yodiz

Yodiz is billed as a "simple yet comprehensive" agile scrum tool and issue tracker, designed to help you manage agile projects of all levels of complexity.

It features a colorful kanban-style issue board with moveable issue cards designed to make things as visual as possible. The issue tracker in Yodiz supports MoScoW prioritization and has several severity options. Other features of the issue tracking tool include the ability to associate issues to other items, issue exporting, and a complete history log.

Yodiz integrates with a number of different development platforms, communication tools, and browsers. For example, you can link it up to GitHub so that whenever code is committed the status is updated in Yodiz; sync with bugs or tasks created in Freshdesk; and view your activity feed from Yodiz in Slack.

What do you get for free?

Yodiz has a "free forever" plan for up-to three users. This plan includes cloud hosting, unlimited projects, all product features, as well as access to all the Yodiz mobile apps and browser extensions.

What other pricing plans are available?

Outside of the free, 'Starters' package, Yodiz's pricing plans come in 'Professional' and 'Enterprise' flavors. For $5 per user per month for the Professional plan you get a dedicated account manager and two-months free if you take the yearly payment option. The Enterprise plan costs $20 per user per month and unlocks premium support, enterprise network hosting, and more.

What are users saying?

"I have used Yodiz for tracking sprint, issues, releases, and overall project progress. I found it appealing for the reason, that it supports all agile processes and gives Quick ways to do daily tedious tasks," says one reviewer.

Average GetApp user rating: 5/5 (based on four reviews)

GitHub Issues

GutHub is a platform for developers to store and share code, store version control information, and access tools for project management, code review, and integration. Among the handy utilities in its arsenal is the GitHub Issues feature, which has its own section in every repository.

GitHub's issue tracking section is designed with collaboration in mind. The interface consists of a title and description of each issue, color-coded labels to help you categorize issues, milestones that act as containers for issues, and the ability to create assignees for each issue. There's a comments feature so that anyone with access to the repository can offer their feedback.

One handy feature of GitHub Issues is the ability to use @mentions to notify teams and other GitHub users and cross-connect issues. The idea being that you can make sure the right people are kept in the loop to help resolve issues.

What do you get for free?

GitHub is free for public and open source projects. If you want unlimited private repositories then you'll need to take up a paid plan.

What other pricing plans are available?

GitHub has three main pricing bundles, allow of which include unlimited public and private repositories. The 'Developer' plan costs $7 per month for a personal account with unlimited collaborators (it's free for students as part of GitHub's Student Developer Pack). The 'Team' plan costs $9 per user per month for an organizational account with team and user permissions. Move on up to the 'Enterprise' plan ($21 per user per month) and you'll get all sorts of other features such as round-the-clock support, access provisioning and a variety of hosting options.

What are users saying?

"Github has been adding great things on top of plain old pull requests and diffs," says one reviewer. "The issue tracking and gist features work wonders for making a smooth workflow."

Average GetApp user rating: 4.72/5 (based on 124 reviews)

Free bug tracking software

The following tools are aimed at software developers who are looking for a way to better manage bugs within applications they are developing. This type of bug tracking software can help your teams detect and respond to bugs within code quickly and efficiently.

Rollbar

Rollbar is a full-stack bug and issue tracking and monitoring solution designed for everyone from freelancers to large enterprises. The software allows you to detect, diagnose and debug errors, with analytics and insights to help you assess problem areas.

The solution is able to automatically group application issues, and allows you to apply custom grouping roles to help you reduce clutter. Rollbar features support for email notifications and alerts to notify users in real time of updates to reported issues. You can also setup notifications for regressions, where a "resolved" issue returns.

Rollbar allows you to monitor particular users who are experiencing a certain error and reach out to them directly. Rollbar query language offers a robust querying interface, and has an API to help integrate with other systems.

What do you get for free?

Rollbar offers a free plan for personal projects and prototypes. It allows you 5,000 rollbar events per month, and is restricted to 30 days of data retention.

What other pricing plans are available?

Outside of the free plan, Rollbar offers five different payment plans, ranging from 'Bootstrap', which costs $49 per month for 100,000 events per month and 180 days of data retention, to its 'Enterprise' package which delivers highest volume, enterprise-level security, service level agreements, and more.

What are users saying?

"We use Rollbar free to debug our product errors. It is pretty easy to use and offers all the functionality we need to fix our production exceptions," says one reviewer. "The design is not always the greatest (you can see a Bootstrap template) but it does the job!"

Average GetApp user rating: 4.83/5

Zoho BugTracker

Zoho BugTracker is designed to help your team better manage bugs and issues. The solution allows you to create simple, effective workflows to monitor bugs, set priorities, and trigger alerts.

The app allows you to track bugs based on severity, status, and user, with bug reports available to help you analyze issues. You can apply business rules to automatically trigger actions for bug events, choosing which events send email notifications to their assignees, reporters and other users.

Zoho BugTracker allows you to create custom views, organize and manage files, and integrate with repositories such as GitHub and Bitbucket.

What do you get for free?

The free plan for Zoho BugTracker allows you one project and 10MB of storage. It includes issue tracking, bug importing, and user management features, but you'll need to start paying to unlock more features.

What other pricing plans are available?

There are three paid plans available for Zoho BugTracker. 'Express' costs $25 per month for up-to 20 projects and 10GB storage. You also get custom views, notifications, and the ability to add bugs through email - none of which are available in the free plan.

Step up to the $50 per month 'Premium' plan and you can manage up-to 50 projects wth 100GB of storage space. Extra features included in this package that aren't in Express include GitHub integration, timesheet approval, and a web to bug form feature.

Finally, there's the 'Enterprise' package which is priced at $80 per month for unlimited projects, 100GB of storage, and things like custom fields, custom email templates, and service level agreements.

What are users saying?

"This add in has assisted us greatly with the communication between our support staff and our development staff," says one GetApp reviewer. "The built-in features, like bug severity, reproducibility, etc are all items we were missing prior to finding this solution".

Average GetApp user rating: 4.67/5 (based on three reviews)

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About the author

James Thornton

Content Manager