PivotalTracker End of Life – Switch to BARD Tracker

We at teamaton and discoverize have used PivotalTracker from 2012 to 2024 – so for almost the whole time since the founding of our company. Since last year it is clear that PivotalTracker will reach its end-of-live in 2025: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/blog/2024-09-18-end-of-life

Already in 2025 we are using ClickUp as our planning tool. There were a few reasons for the change:

• using the same tool as the other people in our company (not just developers) – therefore more transparency and collaboration
• more flexibility with different lists and views (focus on current sprint, having milestones in the same tool)
• subtasks can have same properties as main tasks (description, attachments, …)
• better text formatting

We still used PivotalTracker in 2024 to search for older user stories with valuable content (for instance bugfixes when encountering the same bug again). Therefore we now needed a replacement where we can still search our vast vault of old USs/Bugs wisdom, even though these searches are getting less frequent.

I first thought about implementing this kind of search myself (importing the Pivotal exports into a new database). This seemed funky (we do funky days once a month), but would have also taken quite some time, and would have had a few drawbacks:

• crude display of user stories without attachments
• no editing or deleting of user stories

I thought about importing our Pivotal data to one of the big tools (ClickUp, JIRA, TargetProcess, Basecamp) but that also disadvantages:

• difficult import of Pivotal data (possibly without attachments)
• too much work to set up (more whistles and bells)
• not a good search function of the data
• pricy

Then I came across a few PivotalTracker replacement tools in the making. A good list of alternatives has been compiled here: https://bye-tracker.net/. Advantages of these tools:

• same look and feel like PivotalTracker
• simple setup and usability
• some even as self-hosting option (see cm42-central)

I checked out all the tools in the list. Most are still in development, some in beta. They are trying to attract customers which are switching from Pivotal. Most are still lacking features, for instance attachments.

Finally I decided on BARD Tracker – id has everything we need:

The import from PivotalTracker is seamless (via API token): with attachments, comments, formatting, tasks, milestones, …

The pricing right now is fair, even free for solo accounts (similar to Pivotal):

The look and feel is very similar to PivotalTracker:

All in all it took a while to sift through the alternatives, but in the end I have a good feeling with choosing BARD, even if it is for now only for searching through old user stories.