Over the last few weeks, there were more than a dozen opensource and commercial software that we tried out. Some of these were specialized bug trackers, while others were general office apps that included an issue tracker as part of its features. It It did take a while for us to find the right solution, and unfortunately (and surprisingly), there were a lot of frog kissing. The common themes that ran across our complaints were apps that focused on developers as core users (most of the people for the app will be small business owners and entrepreneurs, who may or may not be tech-savvy), rough user interface that showed too much of its root in software development, and bloated feature list that degraded usability while adding little to the major tasks at hand.

We didn’t lose faith however, and the winner eventually did come across our path: Lighthouse. The subscription-based service scored highly on most of our wishlist: just the right amount of features, user-centric architecture, and polished interface. Perhaps not too surprisingly, we soon found out that it had pedigree to spare. It was developed by Active Reload, the folks behind Beast, Warehouse, and Mephisto. Here are some of the highlights:

The project overview screen is a clean dashboard that puts the right emphasis on the tasks that most of the users (including us and our clients) will perform.

Each client (or us) can add tags to each ticket to quickly retrieve the the right set of tickets. For larger projects it’s not unusual to reach a couple of hundred tickets in the course of development - this would come in very very handy.

The main ticket window is setup logically, and each screen is consistent without sacrificing usability.

We’re implementing Lighthouse for all of our new projects. If you’d like to give it a whirl, try their free version (one project) to get started.