Jira Reviews & Ratings

About Jira

Jira is a project management software for agile teams that helps them to build software by staying aligned. It offers a centralized platform that empowers teams to plan, track, release, report, and automate their projects.

Jira comes with both readymade templates and customization options that allow teams to select their preferred boards, Scrum or Kanban, and optimize according to their team requirements. In addition to this, project management system also helps your developers to stay focused on their coding, and not on taking updates with DevOps.

Let’s review all these features in detail, with Jira’s pros and cons, and understand if Jira is the right project management tool for your organization.

Pros & Cons of Jira

• Scrum and Kanban boards can be used by teams
• Easily tracks multiple projects simultaneously
• Any project's development status is easily visible
• Complete transparency and clarity on task ownership
• Auto text completion that helps in creating tickets quickly

• Non-technical professionals must learn quickly
• Jira migration is manual and complicated
• Report customization can be complicated for nontechnical users
• If you have a large team, it's expensive
• A custom logo or background image might not work

Jira Features & Capabilities

Drag & Drop Automation

The automation capabilities of Jira come with drag and drop feature that enables your teams to easily focus on important things. Users can automate any task by using in-built templates and customizing, if required. These templates are available for Jira + GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab, service management, software teams, Jira + MS Teams/ Slack, etc.

Project Specific Dashboards

Jira allows users to organize projects and even track their progress through specific dashboards. These dashboards also come with multiple built-in widgets, and customization options so that users easily get the best view of their preferred workflow.

Scrum Boards

Scrum boards help teams to break down large and complex projects into smaller manageable tasks. Users can create different boards as per their stages of the workflow and move them across as they reach the completion stage. For instance, users can create boards to track and manage tasks in To Do, in progress, in review, and finally when they are to be marked complete.

In fact, project managers and team leads can also assign tasks to define the accountability of every team member. This provides clarity to everyone about their individual responsibilities while giving them a bird’s eye view of how a task is progressing in each stage. This helps your teams stay focused, ship faster, and work in sprints to ensure deliverables are completed at set intervals.

Kanban Boards

Kanban boards in Jira focus on reducing the project completion time by limiting the tasks that you have in progress. Every step or column in your workflow has a set capacity of tasks that can be added, and users need to make space for new tasks by moving them forward in the workflow.

This further helps in maximizing your team’s efficiency as they can clearly see their backlog and clear it as per the task priority. It gives your team complete transparency on the status of the project. Moreover, greater transparency allows project managers to deliver faster outputs by allowing them to identify workflow blockages using a visual view of a project’s development.

Roadmaps

Roadmaps help achieve better coordination across teams and plan smarter to achieve timely targets. Jira offers two roadmaps, basic and advanced, where the basic roadmaps help managers track their team’s progress, and advanced roadmaps help track the progress of company-wide initiatives across multiple teams. Both the roadmaps help in understanding the bigger picture of a project as well as an individual’s contribution.

In addition to this, roadmaps help you get a clear picture of teams’ dependencies and accountability and identify roadblocks. In fact, using advanced roadmaps, managers and stakeholders can calculate each team’s capacity and set goals accordingly.

Bug Tracking

Bugs Tracking is a type of template that focuses on reporting, tracking, and prioritizing bugs. Users can track bugs and centralize bug reports in one place. In fact, for more precision and clarity, you can add context to each bug by attaching labels, attachments, custom fields, and other options. Users can also optimize debugging by creating a specific workflow for bug resolution. Further, you can prioritize bug squashing before they cause much trouble by taking required actions on time

Integrations

Jira will easily merge with your current way of working with its more than 3000 integration options. You can integrate all the major apps in the category of admin tools, CRM, design tools, documentation, messaging, security, testing, and many more. You can even search for apps to integrate by applying a filter for cloud fortified apps, free for all teams, partner supported, etc.

Reports & Insights

Jira’s reporting capabilities help users to generate more than 15 instant reports for every stage of their workflow, right from planning to final delivery of the project. These reports include a control chart, sprint report, burndown chart, resolution time report, etc. The same reports can be used to make data driven decisions and track teams’ progress.

Jira Support & Services

Jira extends complete support to its users so that they don’t face any issues during the implementation process or even after that.

Along with providing basic customer support through emails, tickets, FAQs, and community forums, Jira also offers Atlassian Documents which helps users during the administration process. This project management system also provides complete support during the cloud migration journey by helping users with assessment, planning, preparation, testing, migration, and the final launch.

However, one thing that might concern Jira users is the unavailability of Jira’s phone and live chat support. Although, you can fill up an inquiry form for different matters on Jira’s official website and the team will get back to you soon.

Who Uses Jira Project Management Software: Audience & Use Cases?

Along with software development, Jira work management software can also be used across other teams and industries. It can help your finance, HR, IT, legal, operations, marketing, logistics, sales, and more teams to become efficient and simplify workflows.

Let’s further understand what use cases the project management software can help you with:

• Content & Campaign Management
• Issue & Bug Tracking
• Sales Pipeline Management
• Reviewing Performance
• Recruitment & Employee Onboarding
• Policy Management
• Overall Project Management

Jira Plans and Pricing

Jira FREE Plan

Jira project management software offers a free forever plan for 10 users so that users can test the software. It allows users to create unlimited project boards following any agile framework such as kanban or scrum to get better visibility over their work. In addition to this, users can also create backlogs and roadmaps that will help them create a to do list and execute it by making a plan for their team. Moreover, the free plan also comes with 2 GB of storage, community support services, and multiple reports with actionable and real time insights that help managers to analyze their team’s performance.

Jira Paid Plans

Jira offers two paid plans – Standard and Premium that include everything from the free plan with an extension of features. For instance, the paid plans can be used by up to 35000 users where they can assign customized roles and permissions. The Standard plan also comes with 250 GB of storage and the Premium plan with unlimited storage. Even in terms of customer support, the paid plans get premium support along with advanced roadmaps, guaranteed uptime SLA, project archiving, centralized security controls, and more. To try all these features, you can avail yourself of a 7 day free trial and check if Jira fits right in your organization or not.

Jira Hosting Options

Jira comes with two hosting options – cloud and data center:

• Jira Software Cloud: This hosting option is more suitable for small businesses that want an instant start without getting into the challenges of hosting software on data centers.
• Jira Software Data Center: The data center hosting option is a better choice for large enterprises that work on large and complex projects. These data centers can be hosted either on IaaS, Infrastructure as a service like Amazon Web Services and Azure, or on on-premises data servers.

Jira Competitors & Alternatives

Techjockey’s Final Verdict

Jira project management software is one of the best work management tools, especially for developers. It comes with in-built templates as well as customization options that help you to create optimized workflows according to your organizational requirements. If you have very basic project management requirements, you can go ahead with using Jira’s free plan. And with time, when your team expands and workflows get more complex, you can switch to their paid plans.

However, Jira has a steep learning curve which might make it difficult for non-technical people in your team to adapt to the system. So, you need to ensure that everyone is equipped and trained enough to make the best of the project management software.