Competition is good for the customer. If it’s good for the customer, then we should welcome it and participate. When the pressure is on, competition has a knack for bringing out the best in us.  

That said, we have a very specific way of competing at Atono:

1. Tell no lies. We don’t make up information or speculate about our competitors. Every competitor has a unique perspective and customers choose based on what suits them best. We can and should feel confident competing on the fit of our product to the customer’s needs, rather than undermining the competition with misinformation.

2. Acknowledge the contribution. It’s easy to criticize a bespoke implementation of JIRA from 2010 still running in a data center somewhere. But that doesn’t diminish the groundbreaking impact of Jira and Atlassian over the years. We believe our product meets the needs of the customer today, but we also acknowledge that we are standing on the shoulders of giants - so we speak mindfully and respectfully. 

3. Align solutions to needs. It's not “our way or the highway”, but more importantly, figuring out what is best suited for the customer. We compete on the merit and fit of our product, service, and approach with what the customer actually cares about.

4. Give sound advice. It is totally fine to recommend another solution if that is the right call. For example, a prospect wants to use Atono for Development, Marketing, and Accounting project management. Atono is focused on Software Development so, perhaps Monday.com or Asana is a better fit if they require one solution for three departments with less specialization - we should advise to the best of our knowledge.

Let's put what I said above into practice. If I was talking to a customer and they asked my opinion on Atono alternatives, here's what I would say.

Linear

The UI is quick and the search is helpful, Linear is clearly focused on software development - an excellent implementation of shortcuts. Linear’s approach is prescriptive, they encourage you to adopt their specific development practice. For example, in the Linear Method, it says, "User stories have become a cargo cult ritual that feels good but wastes a lot of resources and time." We believe it’s how you develop and use stories that make them useful or not useful.

Jira

Jira is mostly limited by past successes. While the customer base is an impressive 66,000, we understand that nearly 60,000 are on-premises installations, limiting Jira’s ability to innovate. Hackernews, Reddit, and other user forums are full of broken dreams and frustrations with Jira’s inability to innovate or improve application speed, search, or story organization. 

ClickUp

ClickUp is a quickly growing company attempting to meet every project management use case on one system. This is a complex undertaking. Specifically for software development, our experience is that ClickUp provides a crowded UI with limited workspace. We found several of the features to be incomplete, have minor defects, or inconsistent navigation. For our team, using ClickUp was a frustrating daily experience.

Shortcut

Out of the tools mentioned, Shortcut is probably the plainest alternative. It does what it says - align product development work with company objectives - but is missing UX polish and pizazz. The focus on OKRs is an interesting direction to choose over incorporating other software development priorities.

The bottom line is the competition is not our enemy. We acknowledge they exist, we are transparent about strengths and weaknesses, and at the end of the day, they are proof that there is a market for us to serve and eventually become the most widely used application for software development.