You signed up for Jira because everyone uses it.
Then you spent 3 hours watching tutorials. Created a board. Set up workflows. Configured permissions. And your client still can't figure out how to report a bug.
Here's the thing: Jira is built for 500-person engineering teams at enterprise companies. You're a 3-person agency. You don't need sprint planning and burndown charts. You just need clients to report bugs and you to fix them.
What small teams actually need:
Simple bug submission that clients can use without training. Clear status tracking so everyone knows what's being worked on. Video support because a 30-second Loom shows the issue better than 10 paragraphs. Client portals where clients see only their issues. And affordable pricing—flat rate, not per-seat math that punishes you for having clients.
Let's look at what actually works for teams like yours.
Linear is beautiful and fast. If your whole team is technical, you'll love it. The problem? It's $8 per user per month. Add 5 clients and suddenly you're paying $480/year just for them to report bugs. Plus, clients still find it confusing. Linear is perfect for internal dev teams, terrible for client-facing bug tracking.
Trello is the opposite problem. It's simple enough that clients understand it, but it's too simple for real bug tracking. There's no built-in way to handle video bug reports. Clients can accidentally move cards around and mess up your carefully organized board. And you end up with screenshots scattered across different cards instead of a proper system. Great for personal projects, not for professional client work.
ClickUp tries to be everything. Project management, docs, time tracking, goal setting, and yes, bug tracking. The feature list looks impressive until you realize you're spending more time configuring ClickUp than actually fixing bugs. Your clients open it, see 47 different buttons and options, and text you instead. If you genuinely need all those features, go for it. But if you just want to track bugs? It's massive overkill.
Asana is solid for general project management. Marketing teams love it. But it's not purpose-built for bug tracking, which means you're forcing a square peg into a round hole. You'll spend time creating custom fields, templates, and workflows to make it work like a bug tracker. It works, but it's not designed for this.
Lantern is what we built after getting frustrated with all of these. It's specifically for agencies and freelancers who need clients to report bugs easily. Clients paste a Loom video link, add a description, and you're done. No training needed. No complex workflows. Flat pricing at $15.50/month regardless of how many clients you have. The downside? It's new, so it doesn't have integrations with every tool under the sun yet.
Here's the math nobody talks about:
Setting up Jira takes about 3 hours if you watch the tutorials and configure it properly. Then you spend roughly 30 minutes per week tweaking workflows, managing permissions, and explaining to clients how to use it. That's 26 hours per year.
Linear takes about 1 hour to set up and maybe 15 minutes per week maintaining. Call it 14 hours per year.
Lantern takes 5 minutes to set up and then you're done. Zero ongoing maintenance.
That's 25+ hours you could spend actually fixing bugs instead of maintaining your bug tracker.
The real question isn't "which tool has the most features?" It's "which tool gets out of your way so you can do your job?"
If you're a small agency or freelancer who needs clients to report bugs easily, you don't need Jira's complexity or Linear's per-seat pricing. You need something purpose-built for how you actually work.
See if simple bug tracking works better than Jira for your team. No credit card required.