Managing Projects using Github vs Zenhub

Project management tools gets a little religous. I know some people who seem to think a team is not using agile with Jira. We at PretaGov tend to be a little more pragmatic. When it last came to upgrading our project management capabilities we knew the following

• We are a consultancy that has support contracts and we prioritise fast turn around on issues so means we do end up multitasking. We needed a system that let us prioritise within clients and major projects for those clients, but also across many clients at once
• We contribute to open source a lot, and many times fix bugs in the open source software we use. We needed something let us mix in the open source issues with our private issues
• We were usng github and so do virtually open source projects.

Thats why, many years ago we picked Zenhub. It seemed to give us a way to all of the above and have Epics, estimates and other nice things you might get out of something like Jira or Gitlab... without the complexity.

Zenhub, for those that haven't come across it, is a tool that works on top of github issues. You can create a workspace, which is kanban board that includes all the issues from many repositiories, including open source projects which you don't "own".

Fast forward to the present and we are ditching Zenhub.

• Its choice to include all issues in a board was painful. We had to invent ways to hide the issues that weren't relevent.
• It didn't work well without installing the chrome plugin which you had to explain to everyone.
• the extra overhead of it syncing between github data and zenhub data just made it slow. it never felt fast.
• It's an extra cost
• Admitatly our fault but we represented each client as a different board/workspace. That made it hard to prioritise between projects support and clients. We tried to use the heirachicaly nature of it's epics support help but it didn't work.