Jira Reviews

Pros

It has plenty of features out of the box. It has multiple layers (Teams, Projects) that can support the organization of the whole company, establishing enough separation, but at the same time, the right integrations between the different teams within the company. Can be easily integrated with the whole Atlassian universe (Bitbucket, Confluence), and I truly recommend doing so as you will have every single possible place to put any part of your project (code, backlog, sprints, documentation). It gives you all the needed tools to handle any Scrum or Canvas team, although you will take more advantage of using Scrum I must say. It can be easily integrated via code, and make very creative automated build ticket systems.

Cons

It's pricy and having a lot of free options out there that can handle multiple people, it's hard to say that is the right tool for small indie teams. It is indeed the right one for companies, but for low-budget teams.. it's probably safer to go with free options that don't limit the members' amount.

Pros

I love how it allows me to easily assign tasks to team members, track progress, and see everything in one place. It also integrates well with other tools which makes it even more convenient. Overall, Jira is a game-changer.

Cons

The only downside I've found is that it can be a bit overwhelming when you first start using it. There are a lot of options and features, and it can take some time to figure out how to use everything. But once you get the hang of it, it's not a big deal.

Pros

If you are willing to do the work, the advanced search is useful and the user experience isn't bad except that to eliminate done tickets you have to deselect all then re-select every option except those of a done type.

Cons

Advanced search is the only useful way to reliably get information out, making getting even the smallest view of your data onerous. The core advantage of the tool - it's lack of structure - make it difficult to complete even the simplest of tasks without a ridiculous amount of effort. It's biggest failing is that everything is too flat by default. For example, I am working on a project now and the team has made duplicate tickets because the original tickets are too hard to find and are just dumped on the screen... we have sometimes used epics/stories/sub-tasks with sprints but these are truly inadequate... in today's time why should someone have to spend 20-30 hours a week grooming the backlog and writing searches when if the tool was any good it should (!!) be able generate these views automatically. We are now investigating other solutions like Wrike (absolutely no affiliation, not even sure we will switch to it) and in 10 minutes of testing we were getting views that we have been struggling to get out of JIRA for over a year. Also, you can't do something obvious like make a reminder in the future for a ticket, so you either get flooded with reminders for just about everything or you have to go outside the product to remind you to do something in JIRA. Seriously!?!

Pros

One of the greatest advantages of using JIRA comes with the prioritization of activities since it allows us to remove subjectivity when executing tasks that are really more important. With JIRA we will achieve that critical tasks are carried out in the shortest possible time and the evidence of the execution is recorded, on the other hand, the platform is fully configurable for any type of project or organization, which avoids the need for custom development or integrations made for a specific need.

Cons

When interacting with JIRA in a corporate environment, it's easy to configure and customize user views, roles, and permissions, and it's very easy to get familiar with the user interface and menus, making task management intuitive. On the other hand, collaboration functions to communicate with the team, as well as the notifications, keep employees and senior management informed, regardless of the type of organization, we can use it to track projects.

Pros

Jira is an amazing project management tool that is easy to use and has many features that make it customizable to fit the needs of any project. It has great features like the ability to create and track tasks, assign tasks to team members, and create custom reports to track progress.

Cons

Jira can be difficult to set up and configure, and the user interface can be a bit cluttered at times. Additionally, the pricing structure is quite complex and can be confusing for smaller teams.

Pros

On Jira is very easy to track an issue's progress, very easy to comment, and ask the assignee about the status of the task. I love using the board which helps the team to focus on a set of tasks for a given amount of time.

Cons

Jira keeps on updating the UI, the new UI which they have released for the company-managed projects looks different as compared to the team-managed UI, and Task release fields() also create confusion.

Pros

We've recently enabled the Advanced Roadmap function which has been crucial in getting visibility on a huge project that spans all teams in the business.

Cons

The UI can be a little clunky in trying to find where things need to be edited, with many screens similar but slightly different which can be frustrating to navigate when administering the system

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Jira

It is more development centric, and market leading. We invest in tools that are the best for what they are needed for, rather than one size fits all.

Pros

It's a very flexible and powerful tool ideal for managing any project, from small to large-scale enterprise projects. We loved that we could easily link it to our Github and Slack channels to automate many things while providing us with a clean interface to track our project timeline.

Cons

Although Jira is very powerful, there's a bit of a learning curve for new users. However, once they get past the initial learning curve, It becomes easy to utilize Jira's extremely powerful and useful features.

Pros

Jira's interface is intuitive and easy-to-use, making it the perfect tool for project management. It has powerful features such as issue tracking, project planning, and workflow customization that allow teams to collaborate and get projects done fast.

Cons

Jira can be expensive for some teams, especially those with multiple users. Additionally, the learning curve to use the software can be steep and some customization features require advanced technical knowledge.

Pros

Jira is very easy to use and very simple UI where any user can work swiftly. Jira has helped us a lot as a ticket tracking system as well as Managing our Sprints in the Project Road maps. You can integrate various apps very easily.

Cons

Some of the features like planning vs Actual working charts should be there for the older sprints where we can measure the story points of a particular user.

Alternatives Considered

Trello

Pros

Coming on board with Delta I hadn't user the JIRA platform outside of submitting tickets in my past. There was a shell created by our IT team and it was a great start but with the help of an intern he and I were able to completely change and enhance the user experience on both sides for those who enter tickets and those who work or engage with tickets.

The system seems a little overwhelming at first because it offers so many variations however once you really consider what you want to do and who you want to achieve it really straightforward.
You're able to change and modify just about every aspect of the interface so that its complete company-specific or even department-specific is you choose. You can make it look like its an extension of your companies actual website.
You can access and run reports for so many different KPI's or metrics to see preformance or SLA's and they are all realtime.

Cons

Like I stated it was a bet overwhelming bacause there are so many options and changes that can be made using JIRA however there are tons of resources as well.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Jira

We chose JIRA because it appeared to be the best application for what we needed. It was also expandable and we could scale it as needed in the future. We also like that it was completly customizable.

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 very flexible and can be used for different use cases, eg: project management, issue tracker, road maps etc.
It is quite easy to configure compared to other generic project management tools.

Cons

The transition from old user interface to new one, it is very confusing, the UI is not consistent when we visit URLs from email notifications.
Compared to other generic tools, Jira is quite easy but still it is not easy to setup, it takes quite a few days to configure the system as per needs. It would be great if there were boilerplate templates.

Alternatives Considered

YouTrack

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Pivotal tracker is very specific for project management, we needed a customisable product which we can use with our existing workflows.

Switched From

Pivotal Tracker

Reasons for Switching to Jira

JIRA was easy to configure and had all the plugins we needed, it was just plug and play.

Pros

Jira is a nice and powerful tool to track our projects. This includes all Epics, Stories, Tasks, Sub-tasks and bugs. It allows for many options as well, including labels, easy prioritization (drag and drop). Recently they have added features to help track milestones, so you don't need MS project anymore. There are a lot of different reports (good for clients) and numerous integrations available.

Cons

After you get to so many users, the costs increase quite a bit. Confluence and some add-ons are also additional costs. We have also found the odd bug. For example, the wrong ticket is updated, or in the backlog view the mouse curser can no longer select rows (fixed by a refresh). Classic Projects vs. New Project is also a bit confusing. It's hard to get new features for some of our old projects, unless we recreate the Project from the start.

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Microsoft Project, Basecamp, Wrike and Asana

Reasons for Switching to Jira

We chose Jira as our team has experience using it already.

Pros

We used several bug tracking tools in the past but Jira is by far the best one. What I like most:
- user friendly interface, provides a nice user experience
- Agile SCRUM/Kanban support out of the box
- extremely configurable on almost everything
- extendable through custom scripting, either built-in or via addons
- very collaborative
- there are thousands of addons in the marketplace; you can even write your own

Cons

Being so flexible to be configured, the learning curve for admins is a little steep.
The price is based on the number of users and if you experience wide user adoption in a big company, you end up in paying more for upgrading to the next tier, than if you would pay for that tier first time.

Pros

Jira is excellent at keeping track of our issues and linking between them on a kanban board. It was our introduction to a Kanban system of tickets. There are also many features we see ourselves using that we are on the verge of delving into, allowing us to focus on the tickets now but expand in the near future.

I like that tickets are easily linked to each other. Our previous system made it difficult to know which tickets were related, while Jira has several options for relating tickets (related to, duplicates, blocked / blocks/ etc)

Cons

I think the price can get high depending on how big your team is. We were just over the free limit which becomes a large cost, especially once you include subscriptions to confluence etc.

I think the load times and UI can get buggy at times, there are multiple times a day I have to click through menus several times for it to register. This is by far the most frustrating thing, especially when you have many tickets on a page.

One issue we had was that our current ticket system allows us to CC users onto tickets so they (+ anyone else we add) can get an update. This was not possible through regular Jira, however something similar could be done with effort on the Jira Service Management side.

Pros

I've been using Atlassian products, JIRA in particular, for over 12 years. It's come a long ways in this span in terms of advanced functionality and additional configurable content, and it's consistently proven itself as a market leader in project and task management services. JIRA reporting, dashboard, task tracking, and project development activities are comprehensively impressively designed, easy to use, and highly collaborative for internal teams.

Cons

The success an end user will yield from the software is highly dependent on it being configured in a manner that aligns with the business needs of the customer organization. For example, I've experienced instances where there are growing pains in how internal teams learn to standardize the way they tag tickets for project and task tracking and then use these identifiers to develop reports, create dashboards, and track schedules. If not setup properly by System Administrators then the ROI will be delayed, making it essential for teams to be properly educated and trained on the system. JIRA provides a wealth of content for training & education but worth noting the difficulty an organization can face if not approached strategically and with strong design plans during the discovery phase of implementation.

Pros

1. It is very flexible and fitted really well with agile development work. whether you are using kanban or standard sprint planning work flow, it supports all of those.
2. It is extremely useful to do project planning and creating stories, they will be saved in backlogs and you can access them with weight, estimate and priority.
3. It is quick to create a bug ticket to track bugs.
4. It is very easy to plan for a new sprint, by adding task, stories from the backlogs, it helps with the total points you want to target for a particular sprint, it automatically sum up the story points and make sure you don't over plan.
5. great report tool to help you analyse the project completion and nice burn down chart as well. To help the team retrospectively go back and review.

Cons

1. It is a big over complex by providing such flexible functionalities. But it is worth the time and learning curve.
2. As a developer, I don't have to pay the bill. But it is not very cheap if you have a large development team, the bills add up quickly.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

Reasons for Choosing Jira

it is a online saas. It has more functionalities and very flexible. It is suited for many different development processes. It speeds up project planning, sprint planning. bug tracking, deployment process, and so many more.

Reasons for Switching to Jira

very simple task track tool, it probably helps a small agency project that would be completed in a couple months time. With large and complex projects, or bigger development teams, JIRA is the best option out there on the market right now.

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 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

Flexibility in workflows and tracking separate projects and sub-projects in the same system.

Ease of creating multiple tickets as well as placing them into different projects without having to be in the projects portal.

Creating reports to review metrics is relatively easy, it was useful in an integrated project to review estimated times reported in previous sprints to project development times for other projects.

The flexibility of how tickets look and editable fields as well as workflows to tailor to the team and/or project being worked on.

Cons

The bad part of Jira's flexibility is that settings are all over the place and you typically need to refer to Jira's knowledge base on how to configure custom settings whether it is for fields inside of tickets, workflow settings and automations, and many other settings.

The standard Jira end user interface is not exactly user friendly and some things may not make sense depending on the team using it such as a ticket being in a closed state however the resolution state has separate "states" such as do, don't do which is more used by software development teams.

Jira typically requires a lot of customization when setting up new projects either for project managers, agile software development teams, or integrated project teams. As an administrator this can be difficult to convey to my end users who want to track their projects in Jira. This is where you need to have great communication with your end users to be able to setup and tailor the Jira project to their needs and improve the overall Jira experience.

Pros

This tool works on a hosted model and can be accessed from anywhere in the world by using internet connection. The web version and even the mobile version (which i guess has been recently launched) is good and can be accessed through click of a button while it is assigned to you. It is has various options like assigning to different users, obtaining their comments, attaching supporting documents, printing the ticket, reports and dashboards which can be customised by the users, option to download, link the ticket with other tickets, etc., The tool has the option to create various workflows as per the requirements of the users. It has the option to alert the users with email alerts and also reminder mails. There is option to close the ticket, clone the ticket, revoke the ticket. The users can customize the reports and dashboards as per their requirement and download the ticket in various formats from the JIRA tool.

Cons

The reports and dashboards does not provide for reports in a graphical way. The tickets can not be simultaneously assigned two or more users. The tickets can only be closed by the creator which is a set back if the creator does not close the ticket once its gets over. The note which is created allows only text inputs. It does not allow for creation of table or column. Turn around time for closure (at each specific user level) of the ticket can not be generated from the reports automatically. This is a big drawback. Also, it takes so much time for loading the contents and if the internet is slow then it does not get loaded at all.

Pros

Jira is a great tool. I use it every day as a part of a support project. I use it to keep track of my tickets like incidents, alerts, and service requests. The tool is super easy to use and one can learn it easily. The ticket management is absolutely great. Jira allows the user to create various filters and dashboards to keep a track of his/her various tickets, tasks, and requests. Multiple dashboards can be created as per project needs and can be shared easily with the team members to improve collaboration and communication within the team. Jira allows has tools to create data analytics which can help the user understand the day-to-day work in depth easily. One does not have to manually work on the data, and can simply use the analysis tools provided by Jira. Keeping a track of others' tickets is also very simple, and all one needs to do is add oneself as a watcher in whichever he/she wishes to. Another great feature of this software is closing multiple incidents/alerts/tickets in bulk. Having used this functionality on a daily basis, I know how much time and energy is saved which can be better utilized. There is also a mobile application available which can be used when a laptop/desktop is not available to the user.

Cons

The only drawback I have experienced while using Jira is that it does not provide an option to have sound notifications. For example, while working with tickets, Jira does not notify the user of a new ticket with a sound. So when away from the device, the user might miss out on an important ticket unless it has collaborated with another tool like pagerduty.

Even the mobile application does not have the option to enable sound notifications, and each time the user needs to open the application to see if any new tickets have been added to the queue.

Pros

It comes with a ton of functionality by default. It contains several levels (Teams, Projects) that may support the structure of the entire business, creating just the correct amount of separation while also allowing for the proper linkages between the various teams inside the business. May be easily integrated with the entire Atlassian ecosystem (Bitbucket, Confluence), and I highly encourage doing so because you'll have a ton of places to store any piece of your project (code, backlog, sprints, documentation). It provides you with all the tools you need to manage any Scrum or Canvas team, albeit I must stress that you will benefit more from adopting Scrum. It makes for incredibly inventive automatic build ticket systems and is simple to incorporate via code.

Cons

It's expensive and difficult to say whether it's the best tool for tiny independent teams when there are many free choices available that can manage numerous users. That is in fact the best option for businesses, but for low-budget teams, it's definitely safer to use a free alternative with no membership cap.

Alternatives Considered

monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Jira

I adore how straightforward the program is.

Pros

Jira is the most powerful and popular project management tool available. The best thing about Jira is its high customization capability and simplicity out of the box.We are using Jira for more than 7 years, In any organization, I worked with, I have seen Jira.Most useful features for us in Jira - 1. Customization is very powerful in Jira. For almost every specific need as per the particular project, we were able to customize Jira.2. Powerful reports and dashboards - Easy visualized graphs and charts help us to recognize the current status and health of our progress. It is very easy to track time, individual user performance, blockers, and progress of the sprint.3. Extensive - It is very extensive, even for the rarest need there is already a plugin available we can use out of the box.4. Collaboration and communication- It is the best thing in Jira, no more dependency on Emails, and no more wasting time on checking and finding scattered information in the mail. Jira provides transparency in communication, all communication is in one place. Even having the related important documents, versioning of documents is available.5. Integration- its integration is beyond any other available tool. We are using Confluence to manage all the related documents in one place, and versioning is very easy, We are also using git bitbucket, TeamCity CI-CD integration in our project which made our life super easy.6. Agile tools- Out of the box we can jump-start with premade templates of

Cons

The only con I see in Jira is that it went a little complex to configure as an administrator. But it is obvious due to its large extensive and customizable capability. It happens only for the initial time but that issue can be copped as it has a very vast help community and forums.