This is the least surprising thing I’ve read all day.

Same experience with JIRA. I read all these negative comments here and elsewhere about how slow and clunky JIRA was, and I couldn't relate at all.

Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA Cloud and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense.

We've since moved to JIRA Cloud ourselves, and I understand now.

We moved and none of the new places had any viable computer room, so literally had to put the rack in a closet And well, that ain't cutting it for physical access control these days. Thankfully we have very simple flows without any BS, so not too many 1-5 second clicks to get things done.

But Jira is not cloud-only?

https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center

Notion, take notes

That being said, we don't recommend the air-gapped version for personal use. Instead, you can use our open-source Community Edition here: https://github.com/makeplane/plane — you can self-host it and disable telemetry entirely.

In fact, self-hosting might even do you wrong when things go bad, because AWS is probably better managed and more secure. And they have all their certs, which is legally important.

In my experience that's probably a good thing. I've moved from a company using Phabricator to one using Jira. Phabricator had exactly everything we needed and was very nicely designed and worked really nicely.

Jira has everything you need plus loads of other stuff that project managers feel like they need to add. Oh and they'll never clear anything up or fix any config bugs because they don't actually have to ever use the "report bug" form so who cares if there are 100 fields and half of the mandatory ones are hidden in "More fields"? 5 different states for "TODO"? Eh who cares. 3 different ways to say which team a bug is in? Better fill them all in for every bug.

It's better to be missing features than to have features that project managers can configure.

Today, it may include closed private networks with no internet access, still isolated, but with internal connectivity for practical reasons (like backups, logging, or internal auth).

Not hard in principle, just a lot of invisible cleanup to make it truly self-contained. Learned a ton doing it.

Historically, we did not have wifi and other radio based new fangled data communications. Data connectivity required wires, physical connections. If there was a gap between the two devices that had no wire, just air, that was air gapped. No comms could happen between the two. It is physically isolated. it used to be called "physically isolated" when we used it in the 80's (?). Some say, we stole it from plumbers but that is hogwash (pun intended, you know the backflow prevention thing). I vaguely recall start seeing it late 1990's to 2K in the public?

Mission Impossible 1996 the computer in the room where tom cruise is lowered into the room. That was an example of 90's air-gapped system.

The name stuck because it sounds cool. In my opinion, there is no such thing as true "air-gapped network" any more. There are too many ways to snoop on systems that are isolated, without "physical" and radio connections in the traditional sense (e.g., listen to the "electricity", sounds, power fluctuation, ground vibration, squirrel squeeks).

There are no communication cables between the host system and the wider world.

Know who else uses punctuation? People who write. In fact, that's where the AI got the idea.

We built the air-gapped edition of Plane exactly for this.

A week into installation, your cube mate will be complaining that the arrow keys do not work as used to and cannot use alt-tab on the fields, or the color orange and green make their eye hurt. So a ticket is opened, a software update is made, and then the patch is generated. That is 12 month on a good day because all the back track, re-validation, scope creep, auditing, re-validation, third party review, committee blessings, and good idea fairies.

Then you have to get the patch into the environment. Now you need a blood oath from the entire chain of command up to Katie A. where she swears she is going to beat you if you whine about the color scheme again. ;) Three years past, and the changes are implemented. It does not matter because your monitor which had to be TAA compliant and could not be brought in without you soldering everything together is now running off of a hercules video card, yes that green only hercules card. You see only shades of green in the app...

And honestly it does beat a lot of bloated tools out there. But when you need permissioning, history, workflows, audit logs—and your infra lives in a bunker—we try to be the next best thing.

Air-gapped, fast, and without the Jira bloat.

.so is widely used by software companies as a domain availability solution - think Notion. For regulated environments, the domain doesn’t matter, the architecture does.

With air-gapped deployments, Plane doesn’t rely on any external DNS or domains — .so or otherwise. No license pings, no telemetry, no outbound calls. Everything runs in complete isolation, and customers have full control over the environment.

Also worth noting: Plane’s open-source core (AGPLv3) allows for full transparency and auditability. So any notion of a backdoor is counter to how we operate — and how our users deploy us.

This includes Projects + Wiki. More here: https://docs.plane.so/core-concepts/pages/wiki

Here's a blog on how you can switch between products within Plane, https://plane.so/blog/introducing-apprail-plane-new-navigati...