Mingle Project Management

Mingle Project Management

April 17, 2008 in News, Process, ruby

In my quest for the perfect project management tool, I tested out Mingle (if you want to see all those features, just browse their site).

It’s a really flexible tool and with the new version it’s really getting close to what we’d need. They got some fresh ideas, a flexible tool and lots of eye-candy. It was even easy to set up. I’d try it for real, if it weren’t for those few big gripes…

  • All the eye-candy is really hard on the browser. On Safari it seemed quite snappy, but Firexfox paused regularly… and that is on a recent Core2Duo machine.
  • It still seems to need work. I can reproduce an error just by creating a project from a default template and trying to add a new card.
  • The system requirements are ridiculous. The kindly ask you to have a 2Ghz server with 2GB ram. Dedicated to running a single web app. There are 3D shooters that get away with less.
  • Take a look at the pricing: Sure, you get the first 5 licenses for free and they give it away for free for open source projects.

    But beyond that, it’s about $1000 bucks per user. So a small shop with 20 users would have to shell out $15,000 for licenses. Or rent the thing for over $4000 per year.

    For a comparison, Atlassian Jira starts from $1,200 for a server license. Even Joel Spolsky’s (equally hype-driven) FogBugz only sets you off $199 per user… I’m not even going to talk about free tools here.

To sum it up: It seems to be a really good software and I’m sure they’ll iron out the technical problems.

But marketing-wise it seems to be aimed exclusively at venture-capital driven companies, who can’t otherwise figure out how to to burn their cash. At least I imagine that these are the people who can’t wait buy a new server and hand out huge amounts of cash for a tool that’s still suffering from teething problems.

Because, hey, it looks cool. And it’s WRITTEN IN RAILS (oooooooooh-yeah!) and it’s AGILE (oooooh-hooooo) and it has ThoughtWorks written on the outside, so all the cool kids must have it.

Too bad.

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3 Comments › Leave yours

  1. Michael #

    Good post. I feel something similar about Mingle. It do has some very nice features and flexibility inside, but price is very high….

  2. Lee #

    I installed it, then installed a kanban project template from
    http://community.thoughtworks.com/posts/be30af02aa
    then found that the template had unexpectedly installed 40 users so that my license is now disabled.

    My guess is that they do not want people to use it, just look at it and say ‘ooh.’

  3. Lee #

    Update: by manually editing the activated flag in the user table, normality can be restored.

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