Bugzilla or Mantis?

Question

As the title says, I'm starting one project right now, and trying to layout the infrastructure for the project (SVN, Email, Bug tracking, Online Forums, etc...)

So, Bugzilla or Mantis?

Solution 1

I think you'll find that your team will like either Trac or Redmine more than Bugzilla or Mantis. Both integrate nicely with Subversion. Both include wiki, forums, project management features...

Quick overview:

Trac: Very widely used and loved, written in python, huge community, lots of "plugins". A common complaint is that it doesn't support multiple projects out-of-the-box, but you can add a plugin to help with that.

Redmine: Written in RubyOnRails. Like Trac, but more complete out of the box. The authors of Redmine are trying to create a better Trac than Trac.

If you are interested in what others searching for bug trackers have written, comparing trackers to each other, I've put some links together here:
http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/2007/10/Links-to-other-comparisons-of-issue-trackers.aspx

If you on Windows, which I'm guessing you aren't, then also consider BugTracker.NET, an easy-to-use, very configurable bug tracking system in .NET/MS SQL Server. (Disclaimer: I'm the author).

Solution 2

I've used Bugzilla and Mantis, but I prefer Mantis' simplicity. It's not as feature rich as Bugzilla but, I remember fighting with Bugzilla a lot more. Mantis is the kind of thing you can setup once then leave.

Solution 3

Mantis definitely wins on usability grounds over Bugzilla.

In particular, it is just a lot faster to log bugs on Mantis. Time to log bugs is a blocker for some people - I've heard it used as an excuse for not logging them, fixing them and pretending there was never a bug to fix (symptomatic of deeper team problems).

It wasn't until a client (currently using Basecamp, bleah!) canned the idea of Mantis because it wasn't pretty enough that I realised some people (as noted above) think it is ugly.

Compared to Bugzilla or another system we tried implementing, some weird European thing, Mantis is gorgeous.

I know Mantis scales well - a friend used it for the production of the movie Happy Feet. He customised it by adding one extra field to provide another level of categorisation.

Solution 4

Bugzilla is bigger, a larger community, more features, more power ... for that reason I've always prefered mantis ;) Mantis is as ugly as sin but for most projects it gives you what you need in a simple and intuative way.

If you have a large team, a big QA department and all the rest bugzillia may be a better fit. Small team that just needs to get stuff done - then mantis is probably better in my opinion.

The biggest feature missing from mantis (they may have added it since, this was a few years ago) is the reports feature so you can track progress with nice line and pie charts. However, I just wrote a simple PHP script to pull out the data and manually created them in Excel each week (only took 5 minutes or so). Not great but functionally sufficient for what we needed at the time.

However there online demos of both so I suggest you try them out and pick what suits you the best.

Solution 5

Mantis is great and very easy to setup

I have been using it for about 3 years

It has the following problems.

There is a 2 Meg limit on the file size that you can store in issue. This becomes a problem when you want to include screen shots of the problem.

If two people update the issue at the same time - Someone will lose data

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