Sleepless nights and endless debugging sessions. If you’re a software developer, this experience is all too familiar — so familiar it gives you the creeps.
But bug tracking tools can help you organize your tasks and stay on top of the everyday chaos of coding assignments. Also known as an issue-tracking system, these tools enable developers to track, report, and resolve bugs more efficiently.
Here are some of the things bug tracking tools can do for your team:
- Report and prioritize bugs
- Assign tasks, enhancement requests, and support tickets
- Visualize progress and workflows with graphs
- Track code changes and errors
- Collaborate easily with your team
Using bug tracking tools can help save time, money, and energy — making debugging a much less daunting task. And your team will be able to deliver better quality in a fraction of the time.
Because finding the right tool can be overwhelming (especially on top of all the coding and debugging assignments on your plate), we've done the research for you.
Here's a carefully curated list of the best bug-tracking tools today. Learn more about their features, integrations, pricing, and what users love about them.
Choosing the Right Bug Tracking Tool
When it comes to bug squashing, having the right tool can make all the difference. But with so many bug tracking options available today, how do you choose the perfect one for you and your team?
Here are some things to consider:
Size of the Team
Do you have a small team and thus only need basic features? Or do you work with multiple parties and will need more advanced collaboration tools?
Project Complexity
Are you working on a small project that requires lightweight bug-tracking features? Or is the website project complex, requiring project management features and customization options?
Budget
There are free and paid options, and bug trackers vary in features and functionalities. Weigh the features vs. cost to gauge the value for money — and whether having a larger investment right now will benefit your team in the long haul.
Specific Features Required
What do you need from a bug tracking tool? Do you need client feedback software? Is it issue tracking, customizable workflows, robust integration, feedback, bug reporting, and analytics? List your non-negotiables and prioritize them based on your team's needs.
Integration Capabilities
Choose a bug tracking tool that seamlessly integrates with your current tech stack — project management tools, development environment, version control system, and communication channels.
Best Bug Tracking Tools in 2023
BugHerd
Reviews: 4.8/5.0 (G2)
BugHerd is a must-have for bug tracking that helps you, your team, and your clients find bugs and provide feedback during website design, development, testing, and ongoing post-launch.
To track bugs using BugHerd, simply click on the area of the screen you wish to report on. Feedback and comments are pinned to the exact elements on the web page, which everyone in the web development team sees — on-page and in real-time.
It integrates with popular tech tools like Asana, Slack, Trello, Jira, Github, WordPress, and more. It's designed to fit right into your existing tech stack, making website project management a breeze.
BugHerd is used by marketing agencies, web development, and in-house teams, particularly project managers, designers, developers, and clients.
Many of BugHerd's users, particularly web developers, report saving 3-4 hours of work each day. The tool makes finding, writing, and managing bugs during Quality Assurance (QA) and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) much easier because of the contextual feedback and intuitive features.
Pricing starts at $39 USD per month, but you can try BugHerd free for 14 days to see if it fits your agency's web design workflow correctly.
Rapidr
Reviews: 4.5/5.0 (G2)
Rapidr allows users to capture, record, manage, and resolve bugs in an agile development cycle and one centralized place.
This bug tracking tool is straightforward to set up. Its simple and user-friendly interface — almost minimalist to a fault — makes it accessible even for non-technical team members. This makes it perfect for getting user comments, and helping teams align their product roadmap with user feedback.
However, some current customers report that it's relatively expensive for a non-multi-tenant product.
Some of its features include the following:
- Organized Bug Reports: The tool can seamlessly integrate with your app so your team can quickly log bugs, assign severity levels, and add descriptions and screenshots.
- Voting to Prioritize Issues: Rapidr uses votes and comments to prioritize bugs, so you can ensure your team is tackling the most critical bugs first.
- Instant Notifications When Bug Status Changes: Rapidr keeps your team in the loop and sends everyone a notification whenever a bug status changes. It also resolves user-reported bugs promptly.
Rapidr is suitable for teams of various sizes and industries that prioritize simplicity and ease of use in their bug tracking processes. One of its primary use cases is getting customer feedback, so this tool suits product development teams.
While it integrates with popular tools such as Slack, Zapier, and Jira, it does not have as many integrations as other tools. Its website shows, however, that upcoming integrations are coming soon with Hubspot, Zendesk, Salesforce, Github, and more.
Pricing starts at $49 per month, which includes five team members and basic integrations.
Monday.com
Reviews: 4.7/5.0 (G2)
Monday.com is most famous for its project management tool. But it's also a bug tracker.
Because of its visual interface, monday dev is easy-to-use and fully customizable — practically anyone can log bugs, assign priorities, and track the progress of issues resolution.
Some of its key features include the following:
- Custom Filters and Tags: Take control of your bug tracking with our easy-to-use filters and tags. Prioritize your bugs and visualize their status — whether open, being worked on, or already completed. You can also track how long it takes to fix each bug.
- Collaboration: Connect with your team on a centralized board, so you're sure to have everyone on the same page. Streamline issues resolution by uploading and sharing videos and screenshots. Stay updated when you receive a notification whenever a bug is assigned to you or if its status changes.
- Track progress visually with view options: Discover patterns and recurring issues, and determine average bug resolution time through detailed bug reports.
This tool has robust integration with other tools, most of which are popular project management, development, and communication software, including Hubspot and Slack.
Monday.com's bug tracking software suits teams and organizations of various sizes looking for a visual and collaborative solution to bug crashing and reporting — many users, including developers and designers, like its intuitive and user-friendly interface.
However, the tool falls short in terms of flexibility. Some progress bars could've been more specific on sub-tasks' progress instead of 0-100. If external integration fails, the only option is to contact Support, which could take a few hours.
Others find this product expensive if compared with other counterparts such as Zoho.
Basic dev starts at $9 per seat per month, billed annually.
Bugzilla
Reviews: 3.9/5.0 (G2)
Bugzilla is a web-based "defect tracking system" that empowers your dev team to stay on top of bugs. It's an excellent tool for product and software development teams who need to track and manage bugs, issues, enhancements, and change requests.
It has basic defect-tracking capabilities in integrated source code management platforms like GitHub. But Bugzilla offers more, like workflow management, bug visibility control, security, and custom fields.
Bugzilla is free (it's still in active development), so you can say goodbye to ridiculous licensing fees. And because it's web-based, it requires installation into your server, albeit in a simple and uncomplicated process.
However, while this tool is great for tracking bugs, it needs the project management features of its counterparts. It's not good when it comes to tracking tasks. Some also find the interface very clunky and not very intuitive. It can be slow and difficult to manage, especially if your organization has a massive backlog of bugs and enhancements.
Redmine
Reviews: 4.0/5.0 (G2)
Redmine is an open-source project management software released under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). It's built with Ruby on Rails and both cross-platform and cross-database. This makes it compatible with various systems.
You can build project management software tailored to your team's requirements with Redmine. For instance, its fields and UI are fully editable and customizable according to your team's needs and interests. You can extend Redmine's functionalities by writing your integrations into the plugin system.
Despite Redmine's flexibility and customization, its out-of-the-box user interface may seem too plain and bland. There's also a learning curve to configuring the software, and you'll need a high level of dev knowledge to use it to your liking.
Redmine is also primarily a project management software with a bug tracking feature that allows you to log and describe issues in detail.
Asana
Reviews: 4.3/5.0 (G2)
Like Redmine and monday, Asana is most famous for being a project management software. Did you know that you can also use it for bug tracking?
It's not a bug tracking software per se. But you can use Asana for bug crushing with its bug tracking template and customize it according to your team's needs and workflow. You can also import any existing spreadsheet where your bug tracking and monitoring lives. Just use its CSV importer.
Asana is free for individuals or smaller teams just starting with web projects, complete with the basic workflows. But for more features and integrations, paid plans start at $10.99 per user per month if billed annually.
Mantis BT
Reviews: 4.0/5.0 (G2)
MantisBT is an open-source issue tracker that offers both a simple interface and powerful functionalities (it's released under the terms of the GNU General Public License or GPL).
It's so simple it doesn't require much to get started — no installation is required as it's web-based. MantisBT is built on PHP and supports various Windows, macOS, or Linux servers. It's also compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE 10+.
Developers like that they can modify the software according to their needs. It helps them with bug tracking and bug resolution. It also serves as a project management tool, allowing teams to track project milestones, goals, deadlines, and resources.
That said, MantisBT does not have workflow management or test cases management. It also has limited support for reports, making other tools better in project management and reporting.
And because it's based on PHP, it can sometimes be slow and challenging to set up email notifications for some server environments.
Jira
Reviews: 4.3/5.0 (G2)
Dev teams use Jira for building apps and software products. It's excellent for agile planning, tracking progress, capturing and prioritizing bugs, linking issues to related code, assigning work, and monitoring team activity. This app can be used on the web or on the go, thanks to the new mobile interface.
Many developers like to use Jira mainly because of its clean and intuitive interface. The boards and workflows make it easy to see a range of tasks, milestones, requirements, blockers, and team progress. This way, Jira allows teams to work in an organized and highly collaborative manner.
One of Jira's strongest advantages is its robust integrations. Because Atlassian creates Jira, it's easy to integrate it with other tools and third-party apps like GitHub and Jenkins. However, the number of integrations could also slow down the software.
Jira is one of the top project management tools developers use because of its powerful features and sleek interface.
Pricing plans start at $20/ month for 10 users.
Trello
Reviews: 4.4/5.0 (G2)
Trello is one of the tools on this list that is more famous for project management than bug tracking.
Because Trello is such an easy (and visual) Kanban board that lets you drag and drop cards, bug tracking becomes so simple and quick. No need for installation or set-up, you can dive straight into bug reporting and tracking with this Trello template.
Set labels according to severity (critical to trivial). Use "Marker" to attach screenshots. Delegate a bug by assigning a person, and get notifications when a bug's status changes.
Zoho Bug Tracker
Review: 4.4/5.0 (G2)
As the name suggests, this tool is Zoho's defect-tracking tool. It's customizable as it lets users create custom fields and workflows — even the ability to personalize the interface to suit your team's systems and processes.
Zoho Bug Tracker offers robust reporting that shows a tally of reported, resolved, not progressing bugs, etc. Your team can also stay on top of bug updates, thanks to email notifications that inform you when bugs are created and commenting features that allow you to leave bug descriptions and attachments.
The downside of Zoho Bug Tracker? It doesn't offer unlimited storage for bug reporting, and it has limited integrations outside the Zoho ecosystem.
It has a free plan, but paid ones start at $3 per user monthly.
GitHub
Review: 4.7/5.0 (G2)
Who doesn't know GitHub? It's one of the most popular tools in the software development community — known for its open-source tool used by thousands of developers for project management and collaboration.
GitHub Issues is a bug tracking tool that breaks down issues into tasks, making tracking and resolving them easy. It allows users to track relationships, customize fields, and automate bug resolution with code.
While it's known for widespread use among developers, there's a learning curve involved in using GitHub.
Benefits of Using Bug Tracking Tools
Bug track tools go beyond solving web development issues; it benefits your team's productivity and collaboration in the following ways:
Saving Time and Centralized System
Bug tracking tools provide a central hub that multiple team members can access, thus streamlining issues resolution and reporting while minimizing the time spent on manual tracking and communication.
Increasing Accountability
With bug tracking tools, you can assign tasks and responsibilities to a team member. Having clear and defined task ownership prevents issues from slipping through the cracks.
Enhancing Collaboration
A centralized hub also facilitates effective collaboration and clear communication among the team, providing a common platform for discussions, feedback, and file attachments.
Easier Bug Tracking and Prioritization
Bug tracking tools carry features that allow for easy tracking of bugs — including the severity, priority, and resolution of issues. This avoids duplication of efforts because teams focus on the most critical and high-priority matters.
Enhancing Product Quality
Systematic identification and resolution of issues can only improve the quality of web development work. The result? A more stable and reliable website because bugs are thoroughly documented, analyzed, and fixed.
The Future of Bug Tracking Tools
Bug tracking tools have come a long way from the heydays of spreadsheets and emails. Bug trackers are now used beyond issue resolution and project management; they also make web development easier with automation (thanks to AI) and real-time collaboration.
Trends around bug tracking tools revolve around machine learning and the use of AI. Vast amounts of data are getting streamlined, leading to patterns that automate bug detection and triaging.
With AI, tools can automatically categorize and prioritize bugs and suggest potential solutions. And thanks to machine learning, bug trackers leverage historical bug data to detect patterns and predict issues before they even happen. The tools can then assign new bugs' severity, complexity, and potential impact.
Examples of bug trackers that currently leverage AI and machine learning include Bugasura and aqua cloud.
Bug tracking tools will only keep getting into predictive analytics and automation. Soon, expect smarter issue resolution and faster bug detection times.
We will likely see an increase in seamless collaboration and better integration with dev workflows (such as with popular version control systems and continuous integration/continuous deployment or CI/CD pipelines).
What's Next: Go For Some Free Trials
There are so many bug trackers in the market today. Remember that the finest tool doesn't always have fancy features.
The ONE for you will fit into your workflow like a glove. It's the tool that will make your dev team's life easier — one that can help them say goodbye to all-nighters and endless debugging sessions!
Of course, you don't know what you don't know. So have a go at some of these tools and take advantage of their free trials to see firsthand which perfectly matches your team.
Speaking of free trials, we've got one for 14 days!
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