Jira Reviews

Pros

I love Jira because of the Atlassian ecosystem. Our Product Management team lives out of Jira for our day-to-day task management, and we work in a 2-week Scrum style. We use Confluence for our documentation and product requirement documents, then Jira Product Discovery for road mapping, prioritization and idea tracking. All products in the Atlassian ecosystem work seamlessly together.

Jira gets a lot of hate for being complicated and hard to implement, but like many things, its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. I love Jira because its flexibility means it's a tool that our whole company uses, from Development to Customer Support to Product Management. This makes it easy to collaborate with other teams, without having to jump between and learn other platforms. Having a couple of people in the company who know Jira inside out mitigates any implementation challenges some may complain about.

Cons

I despise that Jira third-party tools/addons are billed by the number of active Jira users you have. This means that if you want to use an addon for a small team of 5 users, but you have 100 Jira users, you have to pay for 100 licenses. This billing model makes no sense and means it is financially not feasible to use most addons, which our teams could greatly benefit from using

Pros

I love how customizable and configurable Jira is for my company and our teams. All teams have different needs, whether it's kanban or scrum and Jira can handle any need we have. It keeps us organized and ensures we capture all requirements and all bugs so we don't miss anything. The reporting and queries are fantastic and so are the dashboard capabilities.

Cons

The queries are great, but I would like better reporting - we had to add Jira apps to our instance in order to get good reports. I do think Jira is pricey as well.

Alternatives Considered

Azure DevOps Services

Reasons for Choosing Jira

TFS was clunky and outdated - it didn't fill our needs and we were not interested in upgrading.

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira is easier to use and we liked the UI better.

Pros

I like how Jira is so simple to use. For normal users, the most important functionality is to manage their tasks/tickets and Jira does this seamlessly. Other functionalities like integration with confluence, text formatting options and real-time notifications set it apart from other products.

Cons

The responsiveness of the UI is slow and needs to be improved upon.

Pros

Jira helps all teams in the company to align for the size of company we are. The business team can see what happens in tech/product and the tech/product can see what’s going on in the business team. Visibility is key to provide feedback on both ends.

Cons

It has to be set up by an admin, it’s less flexible for the team to take ownership over.

Alternatives Considered

Miro, monday.com, Asana and Notion

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Kanban was more suitable in Jira and the product/tech team wanted visibility.

Switched From

Miro

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Price and a product already used by another team.

Pros

We can easily create tasks and stories to manage the project and plan the sprints.
Once sprint is done, we can generate the reports to see the burndown charts.
We can check the sprint capacity dynamically by assigning the sprint to our tasks or stories.
Can generate different types of dashboards for issues or tasks by using JQL quires.

Cons

Need to learn JQL to create advanced filters or dashboards.
Sometimes adding a new column to a filter little tricky.
Exporting the data to excel is also sometimes not easy.

Pros

Functionality, the service works smoothly without any major bugs or issues, and you can always find help in their documentation or in any online community.

Cons

The additional features like the Gantt Chart or other products are not always easy to use. Sometimes you are required to add apps from the store and pay for features that in my opinion should be supported for free. Configuration can be difficult for someone who doesn't have experience with Jira.

Pros

Really powerful tool for organizing work for the whole company. Lots of customizations, really nice UI/UX, easy to use, plenty of integrations. Relly helpful documentation and community.
Fulfills the job for 100% in case you know how to set it up.

Cons

Requires a conscious setup, which is not easy for beginners. Might be overkill for small companies, who need a simple Kanban board for small projects.

Pros

jira has the capacity to process several files and is aimed at large teams but also it handles all bugs which makes its use easy and quick

Cons

since I have been using the Jira software I have never personally had any problems either with the user interface or at the technical level

Alternatives Considered

WordPress and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

I chose Jira software over the others for the simple reason that Jira is a simple and easy to use tool.

Pros

It is quite easy to setup a project in JIRA and customize to our needs.

Cons

Some add-ins needs to be purchased at additional cost.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Customer Service Management

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Price of ServiceNow was too high when compared with JIRA

Pros

Ability to track tickets via Jira as well as via email
Accountability and transparency to see where a ticket is and who is dealing with it

Cons

I think it can be overwhelming sometimes for a basic user

Pros

a complete and very user-friendly workflow management tool that allows you to optimize work times with a perfect management of all tasks, collaborators, project delivery times and more generally "who does what" on each single activity. Thanks to the easy connection with Trello it is possible to have a complete and easily accessible platform also from mobile for the management of team work. once discovered you will not be able to do without it because it has a free version available complete with all the features you need to manage even complex projects.

Cons

I have been using this software for several years and I have never encountered a problem either at a technical level or at the interface with the different businesses that I have managed. Implementations are always welcome so I look forward to testing some new features that they will release in the future for now everything works great.

Alternatives Considered

FullStory and Trello

Reasons for Switching to Jira

It is a complete and easy to use tool in a team, especially with creatives and developers. Sometimes I integrate it with the use of other software that may already be used in agencies or private individuals.

Pros

Seems like a very good software, is very powerful and is reasonably easy to use.

Cons

We found it through our Trello account, after Atlassian took over Trello. We were using another service desk software but noticed that Jira Service Desk could offer all the features we needed, and all for free! Or so we thought! The plan we chose is for small teams (which we are) and is advertised (still to this date) as "Always free for 3 agents". "Free" is further highlighted at the top of the Plans & Pricing page and a large "$0" is displayed. Well, it took some time to get it set up and to import our tickets (this is not easy and we needed support which was quite difficult to get). Once we got set up, it took some time to learn about it (no phone support on free plan!) and we devoted many hours to this. And all was well for about 2-3 months......then we receive an email to say that payment is due! And that our account would be cancelled if we don't pay! What? We contacted Jira, only to be told that we are on a temporary free plan, like a free trial, and that payment is due after 3 months I believe it was. We explained about the "free" plan that we signed up to but the Jira support member just reiterated her point and was quote blunt and unhelpful. We went back to check out the "Plans and Pricing" table on the Atlassian website, thinking we obviously missed the small print. But we didn't!!! They were still brazenly advertising "$0" and "Always free for 3 agents" and there is no mention of a free trial , anywhere on this page at all!!

Alternatives Considered

Zoho Desk

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Price

Switched From

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Price and the solid experience we had with Trello (although of course Trello was another company for most of this time and had only recently been acquired by Atlassian.

Pros

Jira is a very good platform for organizing your team and projects using Agile/Scrum or Agile/Kanban. Whichever option you will choose you are covered! With its extensible platform through plugins you will never get tired of Jira. The installation is pretty much straightforward and with latest versions you can also make it HA, for instance on AWS, quite easily.

Cons

Although the product is very mature, feels also like a big giant monolith although its plugin architecture. Also, plugins are too much expensive for just simple features. There should be much control from the Atlassian Marketplace, which should follow more an App Store logic like Apple's or Google's one.

Alternatives Considered

Pivotal Tracker and Trello

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira is way more famous and most of the Agile coaches working in the field, are already aware on how to use and customize it, based to their needs.

Pros

Jira is very great for project and task management. It provides lot of flexibility around custom fields and reports. The easy to use reporting functionalities allow to have one simple view across multiple projects and initiatives

Cons

While the interface is simple to use.. it feels very simple. Our users are not very adaptive to Jira as it doesn't have jazzy UX. It's not clean and modern looking like other alternatives out there.

Alternatives Considered

Basecamp and monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Jira

MS project was very heavy to use. Did not provide easy interface for running a whole portfolio. The gantt chart was good but wasn't user friendly to print out or manage and make decisions based on it for the whole portfolio. The cost of MS Project for all users was also very expensive.

Switched From

Microsoft Project

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira provided better reporting and performance. It was also a bit cheaper. Plus, Jira being Atlassian product, it fit well into our ecosystem.

Pros

The ability to manage tickets day to day was a must. Some of these were coming from external parties and others internally. We ended up using it across the company in many departments so the ability to have multiple projects was a must.

Cons

Cloud version support for plugins and customisation is limited to only the basics. Its not possible with dive in to it inner workings and develop your own without tapping the APIs externally.

Alternatives Considered

Freshdesk

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Excel was not great once a small business started to grow fast.

Switched From

Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Ease of use and it fit our model and gave use the options we needed to cut down on the time its was taking to track and monitor work flow.

Pros

Jira has a weekly release schedule which means the product is always being improved or changed. This is usually a good thing, although I will admit that sometimes it isn't. Jira is also incredibly functional for a broad range of use cases, from managing a simple to-do list, team task tracking, process automation, to software development. They do a good job of making it user friendly and easy to onboard, especially since they started making drastic UI improvements a little over a year ago.

Cons

A consequence of being capable of so much is that it can be hard to configure initially. More specifically, which features you need and which can be disabled. There are a lot of great features but some just complicate the workflow, and it usually takes time to figure this out.

Alternatives Considered

Teamwork.com, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Basecamp, Wrike and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira was either more user-friendly or offered a solution that was geared more towards software development than the other applications. I also like the direct integration with Confluence, even though Confluence itself can be annoying at times.

Pros

This software is very easy to manage day to day work,progress,assignments and forcast for different phases of projects..It turned out to be very effective tool in order to achieve efficient and cost efffective operational model in enterprise organizations

Cons

This software should have most reporting widgets and open integration ports so that various data connectors can be integrated for limitless reporting

Alternatives Considered

Power BI Connector for Jira

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Jira is more user friendly

Switched From

Confluence

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira is easy to handle and support from maintenance perspective

Pros

I adore the format, checking history. Being able to channel the assignments. And we are ready to see each comment's points of interest just like the correct date. Moreover it is truly simple drag a report Being able to open the task in a modern tab is additionally so precious. Attaching cards to each other moreover makes things simpler.

Cons

Some of the time due to the stack of errands we are taking care of it may allow us difficult time stacking a entirety page. When you attempt to look something within the look bar, it may evacuate some of the letters you're writing down may cause typo otherwise you have to be compose down the precise thing to find the right issue.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

Jira Software meets the high-end needs of software teams with the power and flexibility an agile team needs to deliver value to customers faster.

Pros

Easy to create Agile dashboards to track bugs in different development life cycle. We can also extract informations regarding the user specific tickets created and worked for any period of time. Also we can attache documents to gives an entire idea about the the bugs and time tracker in comment section provides how much time it takes to fix the bugs. In the software industry JIRA is one of the widely used Bug tracking platform. The idea of classification of tickets like EPIC,Task are very useful to identify the work load needed for that ticket.

Cons

Need exact date and time of the ticket creation and comments when the ticket gets older, right now it describes like the ticket is "created more two weeks ago". JIRA also needs to integration with CICD tools for more information regarding the bug tracking and fixing. JIRA should provide a dashboard for each user how much time he worked on a ticket to track the overall work time and also it will be very easy for the Administrator also.

Alternatives Considered

Redmine

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Redmine lack Agile development life cycle features like an effective dashborad , exact classification of tasks and the work time logging.

Switched From

Redmine

Reasons for Switching to Jira

JIRA provided more features for the Agile development Lifecycle that suited our work environments and continues to give more features everyday.

Pros

I have used Jira at a number of SaaS companies over the past 6 years and have found it to be easy to use for the most part. It is highly customizable and easy to implement; we migrated our current process from Pivotal Tracker to Jira with relative ease. In comparison to other similar products I have used in the past, it exceeds the competition in flexibility, integration opportunities, ease of use and implementation, as well as configurability.

Cons

I find myself running into minor bug-type issues somewhat regularly; like being unable to imbed an image in an item description at creation and only being able to do so in the edit view. Also have experienced issues with multiple users editing the same item and saving over one another's changes. Only issues have been minor that we've learned to work around.

Alternatives Considered

Redmine and Pivotal Tracker

Switched From

Redmine and Pivotal Tracker

Pros

Jira is clean and it is simple yet powerful. You can use it for your basic ticket workflows from the get go and expand as you grow or the tasks you wisch to cover branch out. It is easy to customize the ticket views to contain the information you want to use and avoid cluttering. The Workflow editor is one of the most powerful I came across in all my professional career. It might not seem so much of an importance but believe me, when your business grows unexpected necessities will arise and you will suddenly be required to track tasks you never though about. Jira will have you covered and allow you to add different task types which traverse task-type specific phases and have corresponding stati. Also you have all the world of notification and responsibility tracking ping-pong covered as you go. Two further things are woth mentioning: First the Atlassian World (the Wiki Confluence and build system Bamboo and many other products) integrate flawlessly and it actually really makes using them fun. Jira is one of the tools, that make you smile when you are required to use it no matter the task to track, its jus smooth, convenient and above and beyond provides a rich ecosystem for free and commercial plugins even for rather exotic use cases.
Also, the license Model behind it scales fantastically. When we introduced it we were a small company with 8 people (we are now going strong towards the 200) and it was critical to keep cost for our tools reasonable. Jira got us covered.

Cons

When we scaled, the License was not as flexible in higher user tiers as it was in the lower ones. Also once upon a time an update went wrong and we had to invest a bucketload of time and brain power to get everything back up to speed. We did run jira on premise and hat some custom plugins so there might be some of the tripwires: In case you use plugins they must be available in the version you wish to upgrade to and this might require some research prior to updates. Also, you can make a science out of the workflow and notification configuration. In case it is not documented well when you do it it might get you into trouble.

Pros

JIRA offers true Agile support for managing technical projects. Initially developed by developers for developers, JIRA is a powerful tool that captures more than just the project management aspect of any development project.

JIRA offers a complete suite of issue tracking throughout the development life cycle. Starting with the backlog and planning, JIRA lets you layout your entire project across as many iterations (Sprints) as necessary. It provides ease of tracking the project progress and offers a host of tools for collaboration such as commenting threads. Projects and their projects can also be tracked across releases, with its release management capabilities, and provide comprehensive reports on performance and progress.

JIRA is extremely flexible and offers pre-set templates across all functionalities, and allows you to modify them as neededto fit your team and organization's needs. Unlike some products with rigidity built into them, JIRA allows you to define how your team works.

JIRA has a vast number of integrations and add-ons to further enhance its capabilities.

Cons

JIRA is very powerful and very detailed. So much so, that some users often find it quite cumbersome if their development environments are not complex. Essentially, JIRA fits beautifully in any environment, but is extremely robust for enterprise environments, making it perceptively complex in small simple projects.

Pros

I have been working in information technology field for more than twelve years. For a long period, I was a big fan of Bugzilla. However in my previous company, when we have migrated to Atlassian Jira, it was a very difference experience.

When the entire organization moved more in to agile, the product also changed priorities around understanding customers' problems. The migration was tough as we were not in a position to ignore the requirements from our users. The import functionality helped us a lot and thanks to our engineering team to put huge effort in doing research on Jira.

I love the way information is organized across, projects, boards with decent agile reporting capabilities.

Being in product management, I have enjoyed the flow of user stories, backlog review, estimation, roadmap and Atlassian Jira's functionality to customize workflow.

The transparency which Jira brings to the product management team is a big plus. What we are working on, what is going to come next and when, what is in the pipeline are a big relief to any customer facing product development organization.

Another beauty is the categorization of user stories and epics, which helps the product owners to start filtration of issues at the entry level itself.

The knowledge handover from product team to other teams collaborating for product success ( Eg:- CS, Marketing) became seamless with Jira.

The dashboards are great for monitoring purpose.

Finding Jira, an effective and comprehensive solution to ensure that every action in a user story is accounted and traceable across the product life cycle without loosing the goal of delivering iterative and incremental value to customers, as fast as possible.

Cons

I like learning new things. Jira require good learning and is not a very light tool. The user interface act a bit confusing sometime. Setup, project/workflow creation, user management etc. are tough tasks and require brains from Dev ops with good knowledge of agile practices.

Pros

Using Jira, the team can plan and track their work, Jira is a powerful platform for managing tasks of different numbers and types for any type of product or project, as it offers the possibilities of collaboration as well as documentation of all databases and key documents related to all activities. The number of tickets that can be dealt with And because of the ability to integrate and customize it, which is very useful for organizing the affairs of tasks and team members, we can consider it a practical agile methodology that ensures the teamwork excels and achieves its goals. I love Jira's ability to filter missions, which increases our ability to see details of all missions, check the start and end dates as well as team member comments and attachments they've made. All this is done easily without much effort searching. I appreciate the reports that we get and the ease of customizing them to suit our needs, as they include the information that we want to display, especially related to a summary of the workflow during a certain period of time. I love the fact that Jira is easy to customize and integrates with many of the apps we use.

Cons

It's not a bad thing for people who are looking for the right way to manage products and projects, even though Jira looks complicated and members need to put in some time and effort to learn how to use it well. This topic might not be right for everyone, which could hurt the quality of both the inputs and the results.

Pros

I work for a large clothing retailer that often runs promotional coupons and sends out emails to customers. JIRA houses all of the collaboration for our company in creating and testing these promos and emails. What I like is that everyone, from the communications team to the Quality Assurance Team to the IT troubleshooting team can be in one place to resolve issues quickly.

I love that there is the ability to tag other users and quickly get attention to issues that need a fast turnaround (emails and promos are often made within 48 hours from creation to launch). I also really like attaching 'sub-tasks' to a main project; This keeps organization a priority without having to search for every related task associated with a project. Related to this is the ability to attach documents right to any project/task for easy download.

You can save searches and filters to your home page. For example, I have a filter for viewing only email projects, and another for promotional information. Once you get results, you can sort by title, date updated and a few other categories.

Cons

At first glance, the layout is a bit overwhelming. You have a giant list of projects, and the search doesn't always bring up what you are looking for. It takes a bit of time to learn how to navigate. I would probably like to see 'tags,' or additional ways to categorize a project so that you can search for it through a few more parameters. For my needs, this isn't too important because of the short lifespan of emails and promos. But I could see other applications needing something like that.