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FogBugz vs GitHub
March 09, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
3★
FogBugz is the world's easiest bug tracking system, built for teams who are serious about shipping great software. FogBugz incorporates the lessons Joel Spolsky and the team at Fog Creek have learned over a decade of learning how to write software better.
19★
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over seven million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs and much more…
See also:
Top 10 Issue-tracking systems
Top 10 Issue-tracking systems
FogBugz and GitHub, at first glance, seem like two sides of the same cosmic coin, floating through the vast and bewildering universe of software development. Both claim to help teams stay organized, squash bugs and deliver projects on time—though anyone who has ever written software knows that “on time” is a concept only slightly more reliable than a Vogon’s sense of poetry. They integrate with other tools, let people collaborate and generally try to prevent total chaos, with varying degrees of success. If software development were a spaceship, these tools would be the auto-navigation system—constantly being overridden by a panicked crew pressing random buttons.
FogBugz, a product of the early 2000s (a time when people still believed software could be finished), was built with an almost touching optimism that projects could be predicted using Evidence-Based Scheduling. It’s the kind of feature that sounds so reasonable that you almost forget that time, in the world of development, is a wobbly, nonlinear mess. The software also comes with a built-in wiki, because every project needs a sacred tome of half-written documentation and a bug tracker that promises to keep problems under control—assuming developers remember to update it, which they won’t.
GitHub, on the other hand, was born in 2008, the rebellious younger sibling who decided that version control should be social, cool and full of little green contribution squares that guilt-trip developers into working on weekends. It took the arcane magic of Git and made it accessible enough that even humans (as opposed to bearded UNIX wizards) could use it. Unlike FogBugz, which tries to make sense of what developers say they’re doing, GitHub tracks what they actually commit—leading to the inevitable discovery that the most active developers are, in fact, nocturnal creatures who push code at 3 AM. Then Microsoft bought it and the universe wobbled slightly, but mostly, everyone just kept merging pull requests as if nothing had changed.
See also: Top 10 Issue Trackers
FogBugz, a product of the early 2000s (a time when people still believed software could be finished), was built with an almost touching optimism that projects could be predicted using Evidence-Based Scheduling. It’s the kind of feature that sounds so reasonable that you almost forget that time, in the world of development, is a wobbly, nonlinear mess. The software also comes with a built-in wiki, because every project needs a sacred tome of half-written documentation and a bug tracker that promises to keep problems under control—assuming developers remember to update it, which they won’t.
GitHub, on the other hand, was born in 2008, the rebellious younger sibling who decided that version control should be social, cool and full of little green contribution squares that guilt-trip developers into working on weekends. It took the arcane magic of Git and made it accessible enough that even humans (as opposed to bearded UNIX wizards) could use it. Unlike FogBugz, which tries to make sense of what developers say they’re doing, GitHub tracks what they actually commit—leading to the inevitable discovery that the most active developers are, in fact, nocturnal creatures who push code at 3 AM. Then Microsoft bought it and the universe wobbled slightly, but mostly, everyone just kept merging pull requests as if nothing had changed.
See also: Top 10 Issue Trackers
