Jira

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

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Reasons for Switching to Jira

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

Reasons for Choosing Jira

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Jira

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.