Answer really depends on the size & culture of the organization.
Clubhouse.io, Asana & PivotalTracker are nice, but a little opinionated (can be a good or bad thing depending on who you are :) ).
I think where Jira really rubs people the wrong way is it's speed, particularly after someone customized it with a byzantine workflow or with dozens of views/reports and no primary source of truth for the team to use. Imagine a PM looking at one report and the dev's thinking another is "the one." A fresh Jira (Cloud verion on corp-name.atlassian.net) with out of the box Kanban board should work for most.
There are some industry vertical plays out there that focus on Agency or Freelancing work.
That’s exactly the problem with Jira (and honestly Bugzilla in the same way a decade ago), it tries to please everyone and thus succeeds with no one. Trying to do everything typically ends up in bloat/complication/slowness, which seems to happen disproportionately for bug tracking and cms systems.
Clubhouse.io, Asana & PivotalTracker are nice, but a little opinionated (can be a good or bad thing depending on who you are :) ).
I think where Jira really rubs people the wrong way is it's speed, particularly after someone customized it with a byzantine workflow or with dozens of views/reports and no primary source of truth for the team to use. Imagine a PM looking at one report and the dev's thinking another is "the one." A fresh Jira (Cloud verion on corp-name.atlassian.net) with out of the box Kanban board should work for most.
There are some industry vertical plays out there that focus on Agency or Freelancing work.