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10 Best Bug Tracking Tools List Of 2023

The Best Issue and Bug Tracking Tools List

Here’s a list of the top bug tracking tools included in this review, followed by a summary chart and a detailed description of each tool below.

  1. monday.com

    Best bug tracking tool for customization

  2. Wrike

    Best bug tracking tool for team collaboration

  3. Height

    Use task forms to collect bugs and create tasks for your team

  4. Backlog

    Best bug tracking tool for software development teams

  5. DebugMe

    Best bug tracking tool for small and mid-size teams

  6. Marker.io

    Best website bug tracking tool for easy in-browser markups

  7. MantisHub

    Best bug tracking tool for integrations

  8. Rollbar

    Best bug tracking tool for agile workflows

  9. Zoho BugTracker

    Best bug tracking tool for reporting features

  10. DoneDone

    Best for collaborative bug tracking

Below you’ll find an overview of each of the 10 best bug tracking tools, with screenshots, feature overviews, and pricing.

Why do you need a bug tracking tool? Because there’s no such thing as software without bugs.

Unfortunately, these bugs can damage your reputation, cause a loss of revenue, and result in hours of time spent digging through logs in order to find and categorize the defect—which is why every dev team can benefit from bug tracking tools.

By identifying bugs early on in the development process (and if possible, before the end user encounters them!), our teams stand a better chance of being able to make simple fixes with relatively low impact on project timelines and budgets. Likewise, providing an easy way for end users to report bugs to our dev teams helps us modify and enhance our product over time.

Bugs are a necessary evil, but they don’t have to be a pain to deal with. There are dozens of bug tracking tools that help streamline and organize the defect management process. In this review, I’ll explain what features to look for in these tools and the things to consider when trying to choose the right one. I also provide a detailed description of the best bug tracking software I’ve come across, with information on pricing, trials, integrations, pros, cons, and more.

Bug Tracking Tools Selection Criteria

I looked for defect trackers that met all or most of these key criteria:

  1. User Interface: Put simply, bug tracking software should look and feel great to use. The last thing you want is your bug tracking tool to look, well, buggy!
  2. Usability: The tool should make it easy to log a bug, ping associated team members, pull reports, store information, and perform follow-ups, among other common features.
  3. Integrations: integrates with common project management tools, directly exports data into and generates notifications within those tools in order to help you manage your bug tracking from a single place.
  4. Value for Price: A good bug-tracking tool should have transparent, flexible pricing. Your price per user can vary greatly between less than $1.00 per user per month to $15.00 per user per month. As a ballpark figure, an average bug tracking tool price per user is around $3.00-$5.00 per user per month.

Bug Tracking Key Features

Some of the top software issue tracking tools on the market also supply functionality like prioritization logic (helps automatically determine which bugs to fix, in what order, and how long it’ll take). In addition to being a simple bug capturing tools, some also supply performance measures designed to give insight to management for maintaining schedules and coordinating work across teams. However, in this review, I focus on reviewing tools based on the core bug-tracking tool criteria listed above.

  • On-site feedback: enables clients or team members to annotate, highlight, pin, or otherwise leave feedback to identify and describe a bug directly on the site. This is useful because it provides context that makes it easy to understand the issue they’re referring to.
  • Reporting: at the very least, provides a task list or overview with a record of issues and all of their associated statuses, labels, assignees, etc.
  • Issue status: provides the ability to set and change an issue’s status. Some of the better tools also have some level of automation—when an issue’s status changes, it sends automatic alerts to certain users or it automatically updates the issue in the task board.
  • Notifications: offers either in-app notifications (basic) or notifications within third party apps (even better) when a bug is reported, assigned, resolved, commented on, etc. The better tools allow you to customize your notifications and/or receive tailored notifications according to your user role (admin, developer, client, etc.)
bug tracking tools logos list

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The Best Bug Tracking Tools

Here are a few of the best bug tracker tools available. Read on to discover what they offer, how they differ from the others, and use cases they’re best suited for.

1

monday.com

Best bug tracking tool for customization

monday.com is a great for managing scrum and agile teams, and although it’s suited to a wide range of business environments, it’s often used in software development. The platform includes a bug tracking template, and they’ve made a video showing how their own teams set up the platform to track bugs.

Additionally, the platform has robust time tracking capabilities and customizable notifications and automations. This helps you focus on what’s important and track bugs and bottlenecks easily. You can create, visualize and share your roadmap to keep everyone in sync. Backlogs, dependencies, and sprint planning are available as well in a very intuitive interface.

You can create forms in the platform or integrate to other tools. Moreover, thanks to shareable boards, you can share your project with partners for feedback. With completely customizable labels in the status column (with color coding), and the multiple views, monday.com helps teams see the real status of their projects and tasks.

While monday.com doesn’t offer many features specific to bug tracking (other tools offer features like webpage markup and a more robust set of issue management features) it does let you get an overview of work in progress, capacity, and effort.

monday.com’s integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform and many more, accessible via Zapier.

monday.com costs from $6/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 6745

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats)

2

Wrike

Best bug tracking tool for team collaboration

Wrike is an award-winning, easy-to-use project management software with bug tracking tools trusted by 20,000+ organizations worldwide. It's suitable for teams with anywhere from five to an unlimited number of team members. The tool is highly configurable, and users can customize workflows, dashboards, reports, request forms, and more.

Wrike’s simple interface enables users to switch between Kanban boards, one-click Gantt charts, and traditional workload views, allowing them to choose how they’d like to track bugs. Wrike also features issue management, comprehensive reporting features, schedules, shared workflows, file sharing, and real-time collaboration.

Wrike has an easy-to-use, intuitive interface and navigation with distinct spaces, folders, and tasks. Users can toggle quickly between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and the notification stream.

Wrike also offers a variety of specific solutions depending on the type of team or organization — including marketing teams and professional service teams. Users can also try a variety of templates for common processes such as bug tracking.

Wrike offers 400+ pre-built native integrations, including integrations with the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with IT tools such as Jira and GitHub.

Pricing starts at $9.80 per user per month. There are four different price points, including a free version and plans which offer the ability to invite free external collaborators to a paid account.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 2544

Freemium version available

From $9.80/user/month

3

Height

Use task forms to collect bugs and create tasks for your team

Height is the all-in-one project management tool that your Engineering and Support teams can use to track bugs together. To make it even easier, Height has task forms that can help collect bug information structured the way your team prefers and automatically tracks it as a task.

Once a bug is in your task list, real-time chat within each task allows your team to effortlessly communicate, sharing status updates and asking clarifying questions to help debug. With real-time chat per task, all conversation about your work happens and stays in context, is searchable, and only notifies the people for whom the info is relevant.

Height’s robust offering also includes a command menu where you can customize keyboard shortcuts for almost anything you can think of, macOS and Windows apps, and SOC 2 Type II compliance for data protection.

Integrations include Notion, Slack, Discord, GitHub, GitLab, Sentry, Zendesk, Figma, Slab, Fivetran, and many more through Zapier.

Height's pricing starts at $6.99/user/month and comes with a free 30-day trial. One last thing, guest accounts are free in all paid plans.

30-day free trial

From $8.50/user/month

4

Backlog

Best bug tracking tool for software development teams

Backlog is one of the more feature-rich tools on this list, as it’s a full-scale online project management software for developers rather than a strict bug tracking tool. Along with a suite of task management features, the platform provides a consistent way for teams to report bugs and manage code repositories. You can customize issue templates to fit your bug-reporting workflow and use subtasks to easily organize, track, and retrieve the entire history of an issue.

A main benefit of Backlog is its intuitive interface that’s easy for anyone to learn, as it isn’t solely designed for development teams. You can view each project as a Kanban board and set up custom statuses to manage the stages of bug tracking. Since you can prioritize cards with a simple drag-and-drop function, it’s convenient to create an issue right on the board and add it into the workflow where needed. Switch to the Gantt chart view, and you can see project timelines and team workloads at a glance.

Much more than a bug-capturing tool, Backlog enables pull requests, merge requests, and branches, and you have the option to use Git or SVN workflows. Overall, the platform provides well-rounded features for code review and collaboration, such as inline commenting, and the Wiki tool makes it easy to document bug-reporting procedures to keep everyone informed of changes.

Backlog also comes with a few useful pre-built integrations like Typetalk, Cacoo, Redmine, Jira Importer, iCal, email, and Google Sheets. For additional integrations, you can build your own through the API. And they have an app for both Android and iOS, so your clients and teams can access the tool from mobile devices.

Backlog costs $35/month for up to 30 users, which breaks down to less than $2 per user. They also offer a free version for up to 10 users and one project.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5 162

30-day free trial

From $30/month

5

DebugMe

Best bug tracking tool for small and mid-size teams

DebugMe is a visual feedback and bug tracking tool with some really useful project management features built in. It’s a simple, easy-to-learn solution with minimal features, making it a good fit for small and mid-sized teams (their enterprise plan caps out at 60 users).

The main upside of this tool is that it’s straightforward to use and not overloaded with modules and features. On the other hand, it doesn’t offer anything in the way of reporting tools—for capturing and resolving bugs, it’s great, but it doesn’t do much else (which may be exactly what you need). The pricing reflects this, and it’s one of the more affordable bug tracking tools out there at $8/month for 10 users.

DebugMe provides teams and clients with the ability to leave on-site feedback in the form of highlights, pins, blackouts, and drawings. The screen capture tool automatically records important information about the OS, resolution, browser version, plugins, etc. You can communicate through comments, change the status of a bug, get notifications based on your role, and manage tasks on the app’s Kanban board.

DebugMe comes with native integrations with Trello, Redmine, Jira, Gmail, Pivotal Tracker, Teamwork, Visual Studio Online, Outlook, and Yahoo, and you can sync with other tools through Zapier.

DebugMe costs from $8/month for 10 users, and they also offer a free plan for 2 users.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5 2

30 days free trial

From $8/month for up to 10 users

6

Marker.io

Best website bug tracking tool for easy in-browser markups

Marker.io is an issue management tool for individuals, teams, and enterprises. It allows you to collect visual feedback from clients and team members and report it directly into your existing project management tools through pre-built integrations with Trello, Asana, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Slack.

The main distinction of this tool is that, instead of aiming to provide you with project and task management features that you may or may not use, Marker.io is designed to work seamlessly within the task and project management system you’ve already got in place.

Market.io is quick to implement as a web-based tool with a browser extension that allows you to capture issues and ideas from any webpage. When you take screenshots, it automatically saves information like browser version, OS, and screen size. Users can explain their feedback with tags, descriptions, and annotations.

Marker.io also provides bug report templates to quicken the bug reporting process. Marker.io is currently working with: Jira, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Teamwork, Notion, Wrike, Monday.com, GitLab, Linear, Bitbucket, and Shortcut.

Marker.io costs from $39/month for 5 users with unlimited projects and guests. They have a 15-day free trial available.

15 Days Free Trial

$39.00 USD per month

7

MantisHub

Best bug tracking tool for integrations

Founded by a MantisBT project lead, (MantisBT is a free, open source bug tracker has been around since 2000), MantisHub is a SaaS bug tracking tool that offers a powerful suite of issue management, customer support, project management, release management, and reporting features.

For the price, MantisHub provides a larger-than-average array of features—personalized dashboards, access controls for administrators, team members, and clients, customizable issue fields, notifications, comments, a built-in customer support platform, project timelines with a live activity stream, time-tracking, and plenty of graphical reporting tools.

MantisHub also touts a long list of plug-ins, along with built-in integrations with Clockify and Toggl to import MantisHub issue data directly into those time-tracking apps. MantisHub also integrates with other tools like Slack, JetBrains, and Eclipse IDEs (and your dev team can use the MantisHub API with C# and PHP client SDKs in order to integrate with the tools you’re using).

Mantis costs from $4.95/month for 5 users and 1 project.

Free Trial

$22.95 USD per month

8

Rollbar

Best bug tracking tool for agile workflows

Unlike most other tools on this list, Rollbar is designed to help you debug your software in production—it’s not a client feedback tool, but rather an error monitoring tool for agile deployment and continuous delivery. As such, it provides features for development teams to to get real-time visibility into errors, trace their root cause, and manage issues through to resolution.

Rollbar offers some best-in-class issue tracking features, including a real-time error feed, instant notifications that can be sent through your existing project tools, and impact analysis tools. It automatically gathers data about an error (HTTP request parameter, browser, OS, language, etc). Another useful function this tool performs: Rollbar uses a proprietary technology to automatically group similar errors together, reducing noise for your dev team as they sift through errors.

Rollbar offers a large number of native integrations: Asana, Bitbucket, Campfire, Heroku, GitLab, Help Scout, Datadog, Engine Yard, Flowdock, GitHub, HipChat, Clubhouse, OpsGenie, Pagerduty, Pivotal Tracker, Slack, Split, Sprintly, Trello, VictorOps, Webhooks, Codeship, Buddy, Bash, Octopus, Powershell, Jira, Jenkins, Ansible, Capistrano, Fabric, MSBuild, and Google Cloud.

Rollbar costs from $41/month. They also offer a free version for side projects and hobbies.

Free Version

$21.00 USD per month

9

Zoho BugTracker

Best bug tracking tool for reporting features

Zoho advertises their bug tracker as “simple, fast and scalable”, and they deliver on this promise. Their tool enables you to record bugs and tracks them based on severity, due date, and custom-set statuses and fields.

Zoho Bug Tracker supplies an interface that you can personalize with their configuration tools, alongside a range of useful features for time management and project management (not just bug tracking). The reporting features let you see logged and resolved bugs in addition to team progress and milestones. The timesheet feature allows your team to log their hours. Notifications and newsfeeds keep the team up to date, and you can also automate your SLAs—set rules to trigger updates in other apps when changes are made within Zoho, or trigger an automated email to a client.

Overall, Zoho has better reporting, notifications, and integrations that many other bug tracking tools, so it’s a good choice for teams who need to distribute and access data about their bugs at various points in their workflow. However, it lacks the visual appeal of tools like BugHerd which allows clients and teams to leave feedback directly on web pages and images.

Zoho Bug Tracker comes with pre-built integrations with a large assortment of 3rd party tools: Crashlytics, Zapier, Dropbox, Box, GitHub, Bitbucket, Jira, OneDrive, Google Drive. It also sync with Zoho apps like Desk, Analytics, People, Books, Invoice, Docs, Forums, and Chat.

Zoho Bug Tracker costs from about $3/user/month billed annually. Also has a freemium plan for upto 3 users for 2 projects

Free Plan

$4 per month

10

DoneDone

Best for collaborative bug tracking

DoneDone is a collaborative bug tracker that gives your dev team a simple way to track bugs and fix them efficiently. DoneDone users access a sleek dashboard that displays all tasks and issues. These can be categorized by priority, due date, status, task name, assignee, and more.

DoneDone users can create unlimited bug tracking tasks manually in a few simple steps, or tasks can be automatically created by end-users via DoneDone’s “Mailboxes” feature. Mailboxes can be configured to accept inbound bug notices sent by end-users via embedded web forms or directly from emails sent to an email address of your choice. You can easily set up multiple Mailboxes to track bug notifications from multiple sources.

Most dev teams have repeatable processes to resolve issues. DoneDone allows users to create Custom Workflows and Statuses to save you time and energy while categorizing and assigning recurring issue types.

DoneDone has a mobile app and pre-built integrations with other applications such as Slack and Glip. The app has just about everything most teams need for an effective bug tracking system, yet DoneDone is still known for its simplicity. It’s robust enough to handle most bug tracking demands and simple enough that it can be used by non-technical employees for tracking other tasks.

DoneDone starts at $5/user/month. They offer a 20% discount for annual plans.

30-day free trial

From $5/user/month, 20% discount on annual plans

Need expert help selecting the right Bug Tracking Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company, and you can access exclusive software discounts!

The Best Bug Tracking Tools Summary

The chart below provides a basic summary of the top bug tracking software included in this review. Get a snapshot of each tool’s pricing, trials, and overall quality score. Then, read detailed reviews below.

Tool Free Option Price
1
monday.com

Best bug tracking tool for customization

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats) Visit Website
2
Wrike

Best bug tracking tool for team collaboration

Freemium version available

From $9.80/user/month Visit Website
3
Height

Use task forms to collect bugs and create tasks for your team

30-day free trial

From $8.50/user/month Visit Website
4
Backlog

Best bug tracking tool for software development teams

30-day free trial

From $30/month Visit Website
5
DebugMe

Best bug tracking tool for small and mid-size teams

30 days free trial

From $8/month for up to 10 users Visit Website
6
Marker.io

Best website bug tracking tool for easy in-browser markups

15 Days Free Trial

$39.00 USD per month Visit Website
7
MantisHub

Best bug tracking tool for integrations

Free Trial

$22.95 USD per month Visit Website
8
Rollbar

Best bug tracking tool for agile workflows

Free Version

$21.00 USD per month Visit Website
9
Zoho BugTracker

Best bug tracking tool for reporting features

Free Plan

$4 per month Visit Website
10
DoneDone

Best for collaborative bug tracking

30-day free trial

From $5/user/month, 20% discount on annual plans Visit Website

Other Feedback Tools to Incorporate User Feedback

If you’re not content just to get feedback from your project and client team, you can think about asking users and site visitors too. Here are a few tools to help capture bugs and feedback:

  1. Usersnap: Best for tracking user feedback
  2. Userback: Best for providing feedback in videos and screen recording
  3. Usabilla: Best for bug tracking in UX testing

What Are Bug Tracking Tools?

Compared to a lot of other development tools, bug tracking tools are pretty straightforward: they help developers identify and fix bugs.

What Counts As A Software Bug?

Very quickly, I want to go over the definition of a bug. This is because bugs go by a few different names—what one team calls a bug, other teams might call an issue, error, defect, ticket, fault, problem, or incident. To pick a bug-tracking tool that fits your use case, you first need to have a clear idea of what exactly you consider to be a bug. Having a clear idea will help you choose a tool that does what you want it to do.

Bug vs. Issue

In general, people make a distinction between the concept of a bug and an issue (or use your own terms—maybe you use “defect” and “issue”, etc). Find a simple explanation below:

A bug is generally considered to be a defect (a flaw, mistake, error) in the codebase. As such, the solution involves steps like isolating and reproducing the bug and changing the codebase. To fix a bug, developers need information pertaining to its environment, operating system, browser version, etc (here’s a more in-depth definition of software bug).

An issue is generally considered to span a much broader range of potential shortcomings in a project or product—it’s not necessarily related to a problem with your code. Depending on your organization, an issue could be a customer complaint ticket generated through a report from the end user, an entry on the “requested features” list, a problem someone’s identified with your hardware configuration, or a concern from the design team regarding the user interface.

Bug-Tracking Tools Vs. Issue-Tracking Tools

In some cases, it’s fine to use “bug tracking tools” and “issue tracking tools” interchangeably, but in some cases, it makes sense to distinguish between them. This is because, for some organizations, issue management really does operate on an entirely different lifecycle from bug tracking. Issue management might be completely focused on the cycle of solving end-user complaints, requests, and questions—it may involve fixing a software defect, but it doesn’t always have to, and its main tasks might fall under the responsibility of a department that’s not your dev team.

What’s The Takeaway?

Simply keep in mind that when you’re looking at bug/issue tracking tools, you might simply want a tool to report and fix bugs (a defect tracker)—or you might want something that falls under the bigger umbrella of issue tracking. Broader issue management tools will generally offer more reporting and management features, along with a greater variety of user roles to capture input from and enable collaboration between customer service, project management, IT, design, etc, comprising an entire issue management system.

What Do Bug Tracking Tools Do? (And How Can They Help You?)

Whether you call them defect tracking tools or bug reporting tools, these tools are designed to bring bugs to your attention in a systematic way, providing as much environment data about bug as possible so it’s easier to isolate, backtrace, categorize, prioritize, and fix. Most defect trackers also provide features to help your teams unify and streamline the communication/collaboration that’s part of the bug fixing process.

In many cases, bug capturing tools are designed to serve a narrower purpose (record and track bugs), and they integrate with task management systems that allow you to perform the surrounding planning and management tasks. Other tools offer a more complete suite of software project management features. I’ve included both types of bug software in this review.

Here are the benefits of bug tracking tools:

  • Supply a common, simple interface for sharing files and communication about bugs
  • Provide notifications and records to help your team pace, track, and estimate bug-related work
  • Provide a searchable database of bugs your dev team can reference in the future
  • Automate manual tasks associated with capturing bugs and updating issues

And finally, because bugs are an inevitable part of the software development process, bug tracking tools aren’t a nice-to-have—they serve a critical function in that process.

Benefits of bug tracking tools

How To Pick The Best Bug Tracking Tool For Your Team?

First and foremost, the great thing about choosing a bug tracking tool is that almost all of them are low-risk—they’re simple tools that are easy to access and get the feel for in free trials. Overall, they’re a low-risk, lightweight investment that doesn’t impact much of your existing infrastructure.

Even so, you can save yourself the hassle of going through a string of different bug tracking tools by asking yourself these important qualifying questions for choosing the right one:

What Do You Need It For?

Bug tracking tools are designed for a few different use case scenarios. Find the right fit here:

  • If you need to find errors and bugs throughout your development cycle, look to developer-focused tools like Rollbar.
  • If you need a tool for clients to give your teams feedback. Bugherd, DebugMe, Marker, and Bugyard are great visual tools that are easy for clients to learn and use.
  • If you’re looking for something that helps you manage user feedback and provide customer support on top of simple issue tracking, look at tools like MantisHub or DoneDone.

What’s Your Team Size?

Before you fall in love with a tool, check into how many users it supports. While some tools can support an enterprise level team, a lot of bug trackers are really designed for small or mid-sized teams and they have a limit on the maximum number of users. Tools like Backlog, Zoho Bug Tracker, and DoneDone are great for large, distributed teams. Tools like DebugMe and Bugyard are designed for small and mid-sized teams.

How Many Projects Do You Need To Test?

A lot of bug-tracking tools price their plans according to active projects along with users, so you should consider how many projects you’ll need to test. Tools that offer unlimited projects like Bugherd, Backlog, Zoho Bug Tracker, DoneDone, Bugyard, and Marker.io are good for teams with lots of projects.

How Would It Fit Into Your Workflow And Current Toolset?

Most bug tracking tools aren’t designed as stand-alone tools. In fact, several tools on this list, like DebugMe, Bugyard, and Marker.io offer minimal features beyond simple bug capture and tracking, so it’s a good idea to check out the project management tools they integrate with (Trello, Slack, and Jira are common ones) and see if those are a fit for your workflow. If you’re not already using those additional project tools, how would adopting it affect your workflow, budget, etc?

On the other hand, a few tools do provide additional functionality for tracking and analyzing your projects, tasks, and time. These include Backlog, DoneDone, Rollbar, and MantisHub —good options if you’re not heavily invested in other projects, tasks, and time management tools.

What Do You Think?

Do you have experience with any of these bug tracking tools? What main features do you think they should include? Share your insight with our community below.

By Ben Aston

I’m Ben Aston, a digital project manager and founder of thedpm.com. I've been in the industry for more than 15 years working in the UK at London’s top digital agencies including Dare, Wunderman, Lowe and DDB. I’ve delivered everything from film to CMS', games to advertising and eCRM to eCommerce sites. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of great clients; automotive brands including Land Rover, Volkswagen and Honda; Utility brands including BT, British Gas and Exxon, FMCG brands such as Unilever, and consumer electronics brands including Sony.

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