Why are you launching Halyard?

Our team has been building software in a remote and asynchronous method for over 25 years, and we really enjoyed being able to use Pivotal Tracker for our project tracking for the last 16 years. We found it instrumentally effective in bolstering the asynchronous ability of our remote team, and we ended up building almost all of our processes around PT.

We also built a few tools around it. One of those is Daycast, a day-planning time-logger that bravely assumes you can trust your employees, and has an emphasis on team visibility rather than micromanaging. We also built some PT add-on tools to fill in some gaps and assist in cross-project searching and cross-project epics and tags. 

Last year when we were searching for our replacement (prompted by the announcement of Pivotal Tracker’s EOL), there weren’t any launched project management options that met our requirements, so we endeavored to build our own. Since we already had developed so much software adjacent to PT, developing our own was the least risky option for us. By the time you are reading this, you will undoubtedly have more options to pick from and we are confident you will find something that meets most of your needs. We’re sad to say goodbye to Pivotal Tracker, but we’re also excited because Halyard is going to provide the same functionality for our team that PT did, and it’ll actually be a bit of an upgrade.

How is Halyard different from other project manager tools?

Project management tools often seem to ignore the “tools should assist you in productivity and also stay out of your way” principle more than any other. Halyard is what we call a project tracking tool and our goal is for any employee or project manager to be able to quickly pull up the app and know exactly what they need to do next. Halyard also utilizes points and historical work accomplished to track release dates and provide completion estimates. We have purposefully not built separate PM views, manager views, and dev views as we believe in open communication and visibility team-wide. We see extensive options, views, and settings and customizable workflows as concerns, not features. We built Halyard to offer as lightweight of a solution as possible that every employee and role can benefit from.

How is Halyard different from Pivotal Tracker?

If you appreciated Pivotal Tracker you’ll certainly like Halyard. If you appreciated Pivotal Tracker but felt it was a bit limited when your team or company grew slightly, you’ll probably love Halyard. We had around thirty PT users, many PT projects, and a lot of team members that worked on multiple projects at the same time. As we grew, the lack of multi-project searching became an annoyance to almost everyone, and we eventually wrote some PT add-on interfaces to help us out. 

In Halyard we are, of course, natively implementing those multi-project add-ons. If you generally worked solely on one or two projects in PT, you probably won’t benefit too much from these, but they also shouldn’t get in your way. And there’s plenty of things that everyone can benefit from. (A few of us potentially get way too excited whenever we drag an image or other attachment into the description itself rather than having to attach it to a comment instead.)

Will this product be ready for me by Pivotal Tracker’s retirement on April 30th?

Sadly no. While we are internally utilizing Halyard, it is currently in a closed beta state. While it would certainly have been convenient from a marketing point of view to release before PT’s end of life and get a short-term influx, we are building Halyard for the long term. We continue its development at a sustainable rate and are not attempting a full public launch prior to April 30th. Please contact us though if you want to get an invite, we’re happy to introduce Halyard at its beta stage to teams who are interested. 

Can I/we move existing projects from PivotalTracker?

We do have an importation solution that imports all projects, stories, comments, attachments, and reactions from PT into Halyard. If preservation of PT data is important to you please contact us and you may be able to participate in our beta program.

Additionally, our importer also will set up mapping, so if you have a saved link with no context like https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/2462/stories/180382 you will be able to replace the PivotalTracker part of the link with Halyard and access the imported story at https://www.Halyard.io/n/projects/2462/stories/180382

Will our data be secure and where are Halyard’s data centers located?

All Halyard data will remain in the continental US AWS West and East regions. Halyard (and Daycast) are products of Open Door Teams, which is a US-Based company with a team that has been creating secure web apps for over 25 years. We adhere to industry-leading compliance standards and conduct regular security audits to identify and mitigate potential threats. Our dedicated cybersecurity team proactively defends against cyber risks, ensuring your data remains protected at all times. All Halyard data is encrypted at-rest and in-transit.

What pricing options will there be and will you have a free tier?

Pricing is not finalized yet but we are planning on a per-user-per-month pricing model. Estimated pricing is around $12/user/month before quantity discounts and first-year discounts. 

How do I know Halyard will be around for the long term and not shut down?

Having personally felt the pain of Pivotal Tracker’s end of life, we are dedicated to ensuring that our users will never be forced through a similar endeavor. 

We are building Halyard with a data exportation “takeout” option and are making the source code available to all via a noncommercial license and to customers by a license which prevents reselling. We are still working out which license will best enable self-hosting should our company get hit by the proverbial bus, but https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ seemed like an option for the public aspect. If you have any questions or suggestions on the license front please contact us. 

Can I get in contact with someone?

Yes, we would love to hear from you! To send us a message, please fill out our contact form and we’ll be in touch.