GitHub is now popular enough for other companies to start building services around it. One of the latest projects that aims to make working with GitHub faster and easier is ZenHub. With ZenHub, teams get a project management service that is deeply integrated with GitHub and provides them with Trello-like drag-and-drop task boards, easy uploads for any type of file (GitHub’s interface only allows image file uploads by default) and +1 buttons for providing quick feedback about commits, pull requests, suggestions and comments.
ZenHub was developed by the team at Axiom Zen, a tech incubator and startup foundry with offices in Vancouver and San Francisco. It’s only available as a Chrome extension right now, but the team promises to also launch a Firefox plug-in in the near future. The service is available for free for individual developers, nonprofits and open-source projects. Teams that use it for commercial projects will have to pay.
The focus is mostly on developers, but the easy-to-use interface also allows business users to manage their workflows in GitHub, which could eliminate a company’s need for any other third-party management tool.
While the service is officially launching today, the team already signed up more than 300 companies during the beta phase. Some of the more prominent users include teams at NBC News, Microsoft, Xamarin and real-estate startup Retsly, which was recently acquired by Zillow. “Zenhub has really helped our team optimize our agile workflow within GitHub without adding the excessive process and overhead that often comes with hosted project management tools,” said Kyle Campbell, the co-founder of Retsly in a canned testimonial today.
Other tools like the open source project Waffle.io (and even Microsoft, which now supports Git through its Visual Studio tools) also offer a similar set of tools for developers on GitHub. Unlike ZenHub, though, they tend to focus more squarely on developers while ZenHub seems to have a grander ambition around project management in general.