#1 alternative to BugHerd

The context

Jonas is the co-founder of Bombayworks, a digital agency with over 70 employees and offices in four cities worldwide - Mumbai, Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm. They became a Marker.io customer in 2015.

The challenge

Jonas is obsessed with his team’s success and spends a fair amount of time looking around for new tools to improve his team collaboration.

However, new clients and new team members got added all the time, and they worked in several different tools. It became a hassle for Jonas, who is responsible for employee and client onboarding, to create new users, new projects and new clients in all tools

“Information was all over the place! Tasks, issues, projects and users were all living in different tools, creating a ton of overhead and confusion for everybody”

For example, designers and developers had to:

• look for new issues only in Bugherd
• would see contradicting tasks in Trello
• get urgent emails from a client

And they wouldn’t know what was more important.

After a developer missed an important client email, Jonas said enough!

He knew that they needed a single source of truth where they could manage all projects, users, time logs, and issues in one single place. They settled on Trello.

“Trello is now our source of truth.
I tell the team that if a task doesn’t exist in Trello, there is no need to do it! If you want to get something done, you must create a card in Trello.”

Switching from BugHerd

Before centralizing everything around Trello, Bugherd was the tool Bombayworks' team used to report and track issues.

It was the first visual bug tracking tool they had adopted and it was a breakthrough for them. They were finally able to stop reporting bugs through forms!

However, working with Bugherd and Trello in parallel turned out to be a real challenge.

“We tried to work with Bugherd and Trello together but it was terrible. For example, when we closed a card in Trello, a duplicate issue remained open in Bugherd and vice versa. I wasn't happy with that.”

How does Bombayworks use Marker.io?

The team’s favorite thing about Marker.io is how deeply it integrates with Trello.

Here is how people use Marker.io:

🕵️ Testers: Once developers are done with a website, they hand the project over to the QA team who use Marker.io to report the first batch of visual bugs and issues.

👨‍💼Project managers: After the QA team has gone through the testing phase, PMs use Marker.io to request changes that they know are important for the success of the client.

👩‍🎨Designers: Then the design team jumps in to give their visual feedback before showing it to clients. They go over the website or webapp with trained eyes and make sure all modules, forms and visual effects behave like they want.

🤓Developers: Developers then open Trello to see all new feedback. They especially love that all incoming Trello cards come with a clear screenshot, the source URL and metadata about the browser, operating system and screen specifications.

👩 Clients: Clients then do a lot round of feedback on the live website and use the Marker.io widget to send final requests. 

Conclusion

When Bombayworks initially signed up for Marker.io, they were looking for an alternative to Bugherd that worked well with Trello. But as they started using Marker.io, it became clear that it was much more than an issue reporting tool.

Today, Marker.io is their default tool to report issues, but also to create user manuals, onboarding guides or simply to explain something to colleagues and clients.