Haven't used it in ages, but back in the day I liked Mantis very much: https://www.mantisbt.org/

Have you looked into GitLab or GitHub for their issue tracking? I don't know what source control you use, but even if you don't, you can make a repo just as a issue tracker.

Have you tried clickup ?
It feels really nice to use, and not overwhelmed with useless features.
https://clickup.com/

I recently have used Trello but it is quite limiting,  Some other ones are Unfuddle & Asana that are better for bug tracking.

https://unfuddle.com - more developer centric

https://asana.com - it is a task manager but more powerful than Trello in experience

I always liked Trac, and it being open source rather flexible. I think you can enable/disable most features. Development has slowed down a lot over the years, but it isn't dead. I don't know that anyone hosts it, but I found it easy to install. Caveat: Haven't used it myself for quite some years.

https://trac.edgewall.org

There are some open source alternatives that you can check
- https://www.tuleap.org/
- https://www.mantisbt.org/

Phabricator is pretty cool. Much more than just a bug tracker of course, but worth checking out even if you don't need most of its features.

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

Unfuddle always seems to do the job.

No matter if you use Git or not, you should have a look at Gitlab <https://about.gitlab.com/>; and Gitea <https://gitea.io/en-us/>;. Gitlab has a lot of features, including an "issue board" <https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/>; that you may like cause it looks like Trello. Gitea is much simpler but also includes an issue tracker.

Both can be self hosted, and Gitlab also has a hosted plan.

If you use Git, both have nice features such as automatically mark an issue as fixed when a Git commit includes a message such as "Fix #21".

Hope this helps!

Have you tried Airtable (airtable.com)? It's not a dedicated bug database, but a really amazing tool that lets you make very user friendly databases that work exactly how you want them to. There's an example of a bug tracker built with it here that you can use: https://airtable.com/templates/product-design-and-ux/expOzMycWirMsUOTL/bug-and-issue-tracker

Another vote for Mantis from me. I've used it on several games projects to collect reports from players, it's easy enough for non-programmers to use, and to keep them abreast of the status of their report. Whether you manually take the bugs from there and put them into Trello once they are confirmed by your internal test team or find other ways to manage them is up to you, but I find it useful to separate between well-written tasks in the task management system and bug reports of arbitrary quality.

sorry to double post, but Jira cloud apparently is not so expensive:
Number of Users Price Per Month
Up to 10 users
(users 1-10) $10 Flat
For more than 10 users
(11-100 users) $5.00/User

https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/jira-core

@peter It was written in Python and ran on the old Google App Engine. It's not worth my time to update it. I have more important things to do.

Hi Ron, I thought I'd add a few more opinions to the pile; I also have a lot of beef with project management and bug tracking apps and I've found so far from what I used, Github is the most decent option for trackign bugs with managed hosting.

> I don't use Github or Gitlab, so I'd have to create dummy accounts just to use the tracker.  It's worth looking into, I'll do that.

Having a private Github repo costs a small monthly fee; it may be worth looking at Gitlab since it can offer free private repos.

> We also looked at Bugzilla, but it suffers from just being a big complicated mess (sorry if I've offended anyone).

No one was/got/will ever be offended.

Try youtrack, amongst all bugtracking software it sucks less in my experience.

Probably the simplest solution would be to use Gitlab: it's polished, easy to understand and you get things like a kanban board, labels, multiple users and private projects for free. (If you were using it for the code you could also get free compute hours for the CI you mentioned recently.) There are some extra features that come with a paid subscription, like milestones.

Github's issue system is about as good as Gitlab's IMO, but you have to pay for private projects. Bitbucket's system is free when sharing with a limited number of users, but now lags quite far behind Gitlab/Github, I would say.

Trac is very nice and simple for personal projects, but no kanban board and the initial setup can be a slight pain (IIRC you must create the database & users, and set up the Apache-style admin yourself). It does support milestones, custom reports (different ways to view and filter issues; it also comes with several useful default reports), though, and is open source & based on Django: so *in theory* could be extended with relative ease.

Atlassian's JIRA is pretty good (I've used it when working with a large company), but I get the impression you have to pay for a lot of the really useful stuff. The UI is also quite complex, presumably because they want to support an extensive (paid) plugin system.

@Ron if you get a moment please let us know which one you ended up choosing and what your experience of it is! 😀

+1 for HackNPlan, if you liked Trello and wanted bugstuff.  It's the sort of thing with a lot of stuff, but they try to give you the option to enable/disable the bits you want.

You can give a try on issue track of https://www.openproject.org.

It is redmine with a modern user interface.

I've always liked https://www.redmine.org/. It's clean and easy to use. Just setting up a rails environment to host it is sometimes a little hassle but I think it's worth it. It can also work with multiple source repositories

https://www.flyspray.org/
I'm late to the party but I'd recommend checking out Flyspray. Free and easy to host. It cuts out all the other business crud you tend to see in other bug tracking solutions. It's also not too hard to extend (provided you're comfortable with PHP).