Clubhouse is scaling up its software to compete with Atlassian’s Jira

Clubhouse
co-founders CEO Kurt Schrader and chief design officer Andrew
Childs
Clubhouse

• Clubhouse, which was founded in 2014 and
  creates project management platforms for software
  teams, is announcing an enterprise edition.
• 
  Clubhouse originally only targeted small teams,
  but with the enterprise edition, it can support larger teams as
  well.
  
• 
  Clubhouse’s sees its biggest competitor as
  Atlassian’s Jira, which is widely used by large software
  development teams, and the company hopes that the users will
  turn to Clubhouse as another option.
  

When co-founder and CEO Kurt
Schrader founded Clubhouse, he felt that developers needed a
better tool to organize their work. Now, his startup is scaling
to work with enterprise companies in an effort to better compete
with the likes of

Atlassian’s
Jira

.

“One of our biggest challenges is
we’re kind of a David going against a Goliath,” Schrader told
Business Insider.

Clubhouse launched its standard
project management software in 2016, partly as a response

Jira

, Atlassian’s flagship software development
project management platform. It started out targeting small
teams, and on Tuesday, Clubhouse announced it would scale up to
larger organizations with Clubhouse Enterprise Edition.

The four-year-old Clubhouse,
which has

$16 million in
funding

, is currently
used by more than 1,000 organizations, including Elastic,
FullStory, Glossier, HireVue, and LaunchDarkly.

“Even as we build and add more
features, we still keep simplicity front and center to ensure the
tool is intuitive,” Mitch Wainer, CMO of Clubhouse, told Business
Insider. “What’s unique about Clubhouse, and why I joined, is I
felt the pain of using complex tools like Jira.”

Before

its recent
overhaul

, Jira had a
reputation for being clunky and having an outdated interface. And
with other project management platforms, users typically have to
use multiple tools or project views, making the process more
complicated. On the other hand, Clubhouse has always focused on
simplicity, Wainer says.

“Teams were unable to use Jira
effectively,” Wainer said. “What happened is there was a
fragmented world of collaboration.”

Atlassian

has since responded to user concerns
and

completely redesigned

the platform to fit with the
needs of today’s agile teams.

“It’s definitely interesting that
they recognized the flaws with what they built,” Schrader
said.

But what makes Clubhouse
different, Schrader says, is that the platform works especially
well for small teams and can scale up as companies grow. Before,
Clubhouse was only targeted at small teams, but once those teams
grew bigger, they usually turned to Jira. Schrader hopes that the
new enterprise edition will change this course.

“I think for us, it’s figuring
out how to change the conversation,” Schrader said. “When a lot
of organizations grow, they say we should use Jira now because
it’s our only option. We’re changing that conversation.”