All reviews of Jira

Benefits:

Jira is the great tool when comes to administratering the custom workflows. We were able to define and automate most of the workflows tasks thus reducing lots repetitive manual efforts. As an administration, we have so much of knowledge base available from Attlassian. Out of the box, we get generic yet useful workflows and features which can onboard most of the software and agile projects instantly.

Drawbacks:

Able to import and export workflows from one instance to another Jira instance is missing.

In sum:

Great experience working with this tool and transforming the business workflows. Its valuable tool for any organization for managing all the business workflows.

Benefits:

My organisation uses Agile software development to do product development, it would be appropriate for me to say every one of us uses this software right from the developers, to QAs to designers to Product Managers to even the senior management. Everyone has their own work areas inside JIRA. It is difficult to say in few words what JIRA is, it is a complete suite for a software development company and I'd suggest you try out JIRA no matter the size of your team. My main work areas and familiarity are the backlog, story management and issue reporting. JIRA acts as the single source of truth with its easy to use Epic and Story feature which makes the life of a product owner very comfortable. The development teams are then able to do their story estimations and sprint planning all in the same place. I would highly recommend you to try JIRA even if you are a startup or a big software house.

Drawbacks:

JIRA has a learning curve (at least for me, coming from a non-technical or project management background) but with a bit of training (can be done by yourself) it is not that hard to get up and running. Initially, I struggled to find my way around the software and also didn't know how to use some features and tools. But when you get accustomed to the UI, you will realise the power of JIRA.

In sum:

JIRA was a bit tough at first to pick up, but soon you understand how it works and its features, your workflow becomes very smooth. However, I would like if JIRA had fewer technical terminologies or quick help features in case you get lost inside. They gave a tour when they introduced the 'new issue view' and you can still find it useful in the "Actions" tab on the right top of the screen. JIRA is a must if you are in the IT industry.

Benefits:

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.

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

After a number of years working with various tools, Jira is seemingly the best option for managing software development.

Benefits:

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)

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

We moved our IT department to start using Jira for the teams that work in development. We have not yet moved our Helpdesk or "system uptime" teams over since we are still looking at what product works best. So with the smaller team, I believe it has helped in keeping our tickets in order. It is simple to see what is currently being worked on in each project. We do not have the highest plan so we do not have all features, but I think our current feature set is large with room to evolve.

Benefits:

Product roadmap feature, project tracking, team collaboration, gantt chart

Drawbacks:

For product roadmap user can only go back a year. So for a long time product that already has been developed setting up that product is challenging.

In sum:

Jira is one of the best collaboration and product/project management solution out there. As a user of many other competitor products I strongly encourage you to consider Jira if you are in the market for such solution.

Benefits:

The software is made around the idea of AGILE collaboration on projects for the entire team. It brings transparency to the processes and is a great information radiator for the entire team. It facilitates commonly used methodologies such as SCRUM and KANBAN and makes project management significantly easier. It is also very versatile and adaptable to particular needs. Although the standard fields are great, you can also create your own to fine tune your processes. Workflows are also highly customizable, giving the user-base great flexibility on how work is set up. Based on this, teams which work in areas not related to software development can also reap the benefits. I've seen implementations in recruitment, data analysis and more. Another great feature is its integration compatibility with other ecosystems such as Microsoft's which makes it easy to pick up. In terms of services, Atlassian offers multiple ways teams can use Jira: Cloud or Self-managed (Server or Data Center) making it an adaptable offering that can withstand the highest level of corporate security scrutiny. Another great feature is the marketplace which contains a great number of apps that provide added capabilities to the app. Last but not least, Atlassian has developed an entire ecosystem geared towards solving projects (especially software ones)like: Confluence (Info silo), Bitbucket (code management), Service Desk and more.

Drawbacks:

The plethora of fields and customizations available can make a new user feel a bit overwhelmed. In this regard, it takes a bit to get used to it. The interface could use a revamp to make things cleaner, clearer and more crisp for the more casual user at least. (ex: easier to find timekeeping, task transitions, new task coloring schemes and more) The workflow engine can also be upgraded to be more user friendly and provide more administrative options (create, apply, delete, manage versions) The security administration section also needs a revamp in terms of adding or removing users, groups, roles into or from project (ex: if you create a new group, you can't bulk add it to all existing projects without some scripting in the CLI)

In sum:

I started project management with this in my toolkit and it has remained my favorite ever since. I have seen other options such as Kanbo or Monday, I believe Jira and its related ecosystem remains far superior. Its pricing scheme is pretty good as well, you can try it for free, adopt it in small teams almost free (10$/m) and can scale it up transparently. It gets pricier when it comes to enterprise grade, yet that is the norm and i believe it is money well spent.

Benefits:

So far, the gold standard in project and process management, especially in the number of options, features, automations, integrations and workflows that the software is capable of handling. We shifted to this software when the pandemic hit and were forced to stay at home since we needed a more powerful software to handle our workflow. If you have a techy team, nothing else compares.

Drawbacks:

Biggest con really is that it is not the most user friendly software. Unlike Trello or Asana where you can just go fire it up and it's good to go. This one takes a lot of set-up to do and a deep familiarity with how it works under the hood. Given that the software is one of the older ones, you can sort of see it's age in both the older workflows (issues, screens, etc) vs the newer templates. The newer project templates sort of partially solved this problem but if you need to tweak the settings, it still has a steeper learning curve. The con really here is that i tried Jira with my other less techy company (a school) and adoption was really low as users just weren't able to keep up with it.

Benefits:

*Functionality The best feature of Jira is a huge number of integrations, massive amount of possibilities, statistics and tricks that you can you inside the platform. There is an integrated tracking, kanbans, lists, sorting direct contact with chat (stride) and feature to work with git right from every task or issue. * New UI Recently Jira got an update, a new chat (Stride, instead of Hipchat) and a new UI for the tasks. I can see that company goes in the right direction to adopt all of it's powers. *Customization Jira, being confusing at first hides a lot of it's features inside most of which you can change and adjust to your business needs. It is a great solution for a big corporation with dozens of departments, hundreds of employees and thousands of issues and tasks daily. However, in all other cases Jira can be a nightmare at this point.

Drawbacks:

*Slow Out off all CRM platforms and tools to handle tasks and issues Jira is the slowest by far. Is it initial problem or has it appeared after adopting so many technologies under one roof - I can't be sure. But one thing is clear - Jira is awfully slow. *To many features Yes, it is a disadvantage when it comes to Jira. When a new customer comes to Jira I believe, he is most definitely confused. Especially, if he/she tried ANYTHING else before. Of course, I see that company does a lot to make it easier and more comfortable, but as it is now, Jira is a terrible solution for fast adoption, scary for a small or middle sized team and most definitely not a great choice for personal use. Jira is Huge. If you are huge - great features, customizing, different apps and plugins will help you solve a lot with Jira. If you are just starting or don't have that many tasks and issues and people in your company - you should probable check other options.

Benefits:

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

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

I highly recommend Jira for a bug tracking tool and especially for Agile software teams. For us it has really made a difference in terms of: team collaboration, Agile methodology adoption, decreased time to market of new projects/new features and on the overall teams' spirit. We have seen a wide adoption for the other departments as well, non software development.

Benefits:

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.

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

Overall I really loved the platform and the easy of use and they offer a mobile solution which allows you to manange, support and assist using your mobile device which is important which you are on the go and have customers who diesire information or support.

Benefits:

* Allows the issue flow to be perfectly configured to match your software development practices. * Highly customizable process management - define the properties of issues and how they transition between states. * Integration with many other products, like Slack & GitLab

Drawbacks:

* "Next Gen" project type lacks many features of Classic projects. * Classic Project configuration is full of bloated features and complexity * Next Gen projects sometimes have frustrating bugs and limitations that don't get fixed for years. * Issue transition between Next Gen and Classic projects is not smooth (custom properties don't carry over)

In sum:

I'll focus on the experience of moving from JIRA Classic to Next Gen project types. Basically, over 19 years of existence, Atlassian made JIRA so customizable, that it was difficult for new users to get started. You had to spend months learning the platform just to make simple changes to process management. So Atlassian started over with Next Gen projects. Next Gen projects have some cool features like a road map. Even though I'm experienced with Classic, I decided to try Next Gen. 95% of the time, it works fine. However, there are frustrating limitations: * Workflow transitions rules are very limited. Next Gen allows transition to any status. * Custom fields are project-levels, so moving issues between projects is a pain. * You can only do Sprints or Kanban * Epics are just grouping issues. They don't do much else and don't show on the board. * Single board per project

Benefits:

JIRA is one of the best, simple, and user friendly project management tool. We have been working for almost 3 years now and the user experience it offers is applaudable. You can create your agile boards for scrums and can go KANBAN as well. You can create as many different teams and squads. Link your issues to stories and trace it to the feature, Track how much effort is being spent on an item; Track for how long an item has been been sitting idle; Prioritize your issues, backlogs; Create dashboards for ease and convenience; generate reports, traceability matrix, velocity burndown charts; add/remove user access. You can customize it as per requirement and with ease. Recently it has moved to cloud, so down time has been relevantly decreased which is an added bonus. Best part I like about using JIRA is that its very easy to handle, we can do bulk update on items and it takes very less time to understand. This is one of the best tools that is out there and I believe almost every organization is using it.

Drawbacks:

There is nothing much to add in this section. Practically I am all thumbs up for JIRA. I have a suggestion though. JIRA needs to have a Instant Messaging option enabled so that an organizations do not need to look out for a separate tool. I think if Atlassian would be able to achieve it, not only they would be able to enhance their customer base but they would be able bring a lot revenue.

In sum:

We have been using JIRA across the current project and there are at least 10 different teams (Squads) which are working on their projects (Large Project broken into sub projects). From feature describing to user story writing, test cases, defects, reports, matrix, dashboards, time tracking all such activities been handled by JIRA.

Benefits:

Tracking tasks is a time consuming effort, and one that is easy to forget. Luckily, there is Jira. Jira lets you track your tasks and time spent on them without encroaching on your day. It is easy to set up (once you know what you are doing), easy to use, and a delight to look at. It provides the time tracking and issue tracking tools that any serious project requires.

Drawbacks:

It is hard to set up the first time. You need to know which functions you need and which you should remove. But once you set it up and know how it works, it is a treat to work with it.

In sum:

I have used Jira in a few projects and every time it proved to be a reliable and productive solution. Mostly we use Jira to keep track of our developer's time in the Kanban board. It is a great tool that allows the developers to actually show us how hard they work and what tasks they tackled. Jira has increased productivity in all projects I used it in.

Benefits:

The task tracking and overall reporting are pretty solid. If configured properly, you will not miss on any updates and can proactively resolve blockers.

Drawbacks:

The configuration. They are very complicated and you cannot expect a new user to get it right and that's why there are dedicate people who set up this. We did it on our own and it took us a couple of months to get things right.

In sum:

We are overall very satisfied with the product as the user side of the things are very solid. The administration is quite complex and if you are doing it on your own, it will take a long time and a lot of hours reading their forums to get things right.

Benefits:

If you are looking for a management system that is good enough to cover all your needs then Jira and the Atlassian portfolio is exactly what you are looking for. Every aspect of your workflow is infinitely customizable and perfectly integrated with their entire suite of software development tools. Once your setup is complete everything is easy and automatic for your team. The potential for boosted productivity is huge.

Drawbacks:

All the updates can be overwhelming. Great updates can provide users with additional features without affecting present ones but some updates are breaking and requiring you to find the relocated setting in order to configure what you want. That is adding to the already high cost of setting up a new project. If you have someone dedicated to administration then the rest of the team will have a great experience. This is a very powerful tool and that means it will take time to learn and properly manage it.

In sum:

I have some larger projects for which Jira is a perfect fit. Once you are set up everything works smoothly. I would recommend this tool for any long-term product development but only if you are willing to put effort into it. It is not a one-click set-and-forget solution but can work wonders for larger projects in the long run. For an average team, I would consider 2 months the break-even point for time spent and time saved.

Benefits:

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.

Drawbacks:

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.

In sum:

Jira has been easy to learn and quick to expand. We started with a user base of around 10, this quickly became a 1000 in the space of three years. Every department uses Jira Cloud everyday for a whole range of different reasons.

Benefits:

Jira is an incredibly large and flexible tool to the point that you can virtually have any kind of project - software or not - managed inside it. But though it is large, it is also relatively simple to being with and can accommodate simple workflows even for smaller teams, with some neat ready-to-go templates. But its abiity to grow into a platform that can support a large corporation is amazing. Scalability is definitely their main power. Jira also bennefits from a very large marketplace of plugins that can bring more functionality and fit the granular specificities of each company or project. It also has a very cheap pricing for smaller teams.

Drawbacks:

Some basic functionality if just not there, which is rather unbelievable considering the size of this tool. For example easily planning a sprint, doing capacity tracking or even moving or changing issues can be very difficult and you may need to resort to plugins in their marketplace (with their own pricing). Some of the more advanced functionality (like workflows) is a bit complex and confusing and requires quite a bit of studying. Their pricing after the first tier (for startups) is just unbelievably expensive. It's a jump from $10 to $1000 when you add your 11th team member. Because of this we will sadly not keep using the software after that threshold.

In sum:

We've been using using Jira since the begining of the company about 5 years ago and we are happy with it. Their integrations with bitbucket and other atlassian software is also a plus for us. It delivers almost everything a software company needs to develop projects, and you can find almost everything else in their marketplace. However we are likely going to change software soon due to their pricing jump after the "startup" tier.

Benefits:

Jira makes it super easy to manage a team and helps each developer stay on top of their tasks, keep track of everything they are doing, and easily communicate with other team members.

Drawbacks:

Maybe a bit of help with integration would be amazing for anyone that has no idea what they are doing but otherwise it is AMAZING.

In sum:

It's the best software out there to manage a team so overall I am very happy and so are all of my developers.

Benefits:

Jira can be customized to fit almost any workflow imaginable, whether it be a very simple Kanban board or very restricted and complicated workflows with approvals and automations. If you learn it well you can make it work in almost any organization - which is a skill you can use between jobs!

Drawbacks:

Jira isn't very intuitive to use and setup when you first start using it. They are making a conscious effort to simplify it with the new next-gen projects, which does help, but the UI is often slow and requires waiting between screens loading too often, which can be annoying at times.

In sum:

Jira is all about customization and making it work for your own workflow.

Benefits:

Jira is an immensely powerful issue management tool. It's JQL language provides ultimate flexibility to satisfy the needs of all roles on a product/project team. It's easy to use (if agile concepts are familiar to you and semi-intuitive if they're not), easy to deploy (especially if you're using Jira Cloud) and easy to integrate with.

Drawbacks:

The pricing model for add-ons. You could have a 100 users registered to your Jira instance, have an add-on that is used by a small handful of power users, and still be paying a license fee for all 100 users. Very annoying!

In sum:

I have a (probably unhealthy) love for Jira and would need a lot of convincing to switch. It's interface is genuinely enjoyable to use and it aligns perfectly with agile product management methodologies, natively and in conjunction with its plethora of add-ons.

Benefits:

A team needs a ticket/issue tracking system and JIRA Atlassian seems to be used widely in the industry. As a user, it's easy to use for the most part. Besides having the option of hosting the application in-house, it also has the Cloud edition so from the Systems Team perspective, there's no need for servers, backups, security, keeping the service up (with fault tolerance), etc.

Drawbacks:

From the administration aspect of the software, JIRA still has a long way to go: 1) As an administrator, as far as I can see, one can *not* even do such a simple thing as change the Display Name for a user (I suppose it's a "feature" but I can't see why that's a good feature). Instead, an invite is sent out to the user, who can then set the Display Name after signing up. 2) As an administrator, one can login as another user to test permissions. That's normally a nice functionality for administrators. However, for some functionalities, while you are still logged in as another user, you suddenly go back to your normal identity. That's very confusing and thwarts the purpose. One potential good use is being able to login as another user to set/update the Display Name (see #1). 3) Setting permissions is not that easy. I tried to set permissions for an account that's used for scripting (using the REST API) but it seems very difficult (really, it should be easy) to get the permissions done correctly -- sufficient but minimal privileges. 4) The REST API is not great. The online documentation is often outdated and sometimes things don't work (with errors). Even when things run without errors, it might not actually do the thing that it's supposed to do (so you write the code for nothing when you expect it to work).

In sum:

Overall, JIRA does the job for our team and even though I am on the Systems Team, we ourselves are mostly users as well. That keeps the headaches in check (as things could be very frustrating when trying to administer the applications. See above for the reasons).

Benefits:

It is an outstanding platform easy to use, with a great UI design, and wide range of customization and con configuration. It has standard templates to manage projects according to current approach and new trends (Agile/scrum/PMI). It service desk offer everything you may need to control all of the process internal and external. It has a large number of app to aggregate, as well as REST full API, Webhooks, and the likes to extract data or make interfaces with company's systems.

Drawbacks:

About the cloud service, is a litther pricy, and most of the time you need to contract (monthly fee) some apps to do basic things. On the other hand, support service has its opportunities. Response time is quite slow, and in some occasions -simply- not attended.

In sum:

It is great! we use JIRA to manage projects (internal and external), customer services desk process, reporting, measure work efficiency, monitoring and work hour control.

Benefits:

This software is so great, that you really don't need to train people on how to use it. Project managers will be familiar within a day, and users will understand it quickly because Atlassian put a lot of work into an intuitive user interface. This is the best option on the market if you want something that scales across your company without draining your energy. Not only will you run projects through here, but you can also setup all your standard business processes to run through here. Using the marketplace, there are some great extensions for Jira. We built our entire accounting team into Jira, and used it to know we were following through with our key daily, weekly, monthly processes. Using a scheduler plugin, we were able to create tasks, with subtasks, delegate them, follow up with progress, and print a custom summary report at month end outlining completion, completion date, user, and notes.

Drawbacks:

You will likely want confluence or google sheets to keep overall big picture notes.

Benefits:

1. As a member of a Scrum team, I use JIRA by atlassian everyday and it makes it easy to collaborate. 2. JIRA by atlassian makes team collaboration easy especially when we are working on a common project. 3. One more think I like about JIRA is that it makes tracking my team's work flow easy like ABC 4. JIRA by atlassian is affordable compared to competitors in the same industry.

Drawbacks:

The customer support is not very responsive. I wish they would improve their customer support services.

In sum:

My JIRA by atlassian experience has been good. It makes our project management great.

Benefits:

It's arguably the best software I've used for project management in my team, it's quite efficient, has some cool features like linking your tasks to a git branch repository, it's generally a cool software to use in an agile team.

Drawbacks:

It can sometime be complex navigating around and may need some getting used to. Sometimes needs refreshes in order to check for latest changes in a sprint or during a backlog grooming session.

In sum:

It's a great software to use and would recommend it all day every day.

Benefits:

Jira is being adopted by more Development Teams within our organization and now we are able to use the SmartSheet integrator to report project metrics. This tool allows us to sync our task status to one or more sheets to manage separate deliverables as well as projects. It limits the need for Teams to report data in multiple applications.

Drawbacks:

While the integrator is useful, we cannot edit or view the details for workflows created by others. The integrator(s) have not worked well with Confluence, but that may be a training issue. I would also like to use the API if possible.

In sum:

The consistency that Jira lends across teams during adoption is extremely useful. We are able to leverage project details and be flexible on how the project workflows are defined. Again, the ability to use the SmartSheet integrator without making too many changes to our overall process was the biggest sell.

Benefits:

We use Jira to manage our teams' agile sprints. It makes it very easy to track and document stories and tasks that need to be done. Whenever a new task comes in, it is easy to put it in the backlog to make sure we don't forget about it. Then in sprint planning Jira helps us organize and prioritize our outstanding items into our next sprint. As any changes happen (new items, progress through the workflow, etc.) we are alerted and can easily follow the progress. It's easy to see what other people on the team and on other teams are working on.

Drawbacks:

It's still relatively clunky to quickly add a task, either on the website or on the mobile app. It would be nice if most of the common settings could default so 5-6 fields that are almost always the same don't have to be filled out with every new item. Default to the project, current sprint, story or task, assignee, etc.

In sum:

I've been using Jira for around 10 years. It has the most robust Item profile, item searching with saved searches, workflows with form field dialogs, alerts, charts, etc.

Benefits:

Seriously, where do i begin on this one? Project management? Help desk? This system makes it look easy. If they haven't thought of it, dont worry - they have a marketplace with add-ons by independent developers .. you're going to solve your project management / help-desk / ticketing / stuffyouhaventeventhoughtof problems with this one.

Drawbacks:

There are so many features, so much to try out that at first, it can be a bit of an overload. Just stay focused, start simple, and grow into the more advanced features and add-ons.

In sum:

I really think these guys "live and breathe" this stuff. No, I dont work for them and they're not paying me - in fact this review is free, and I'm happy to give it to these folks. Not only is it a great product, if you need their support, you'll quickly see they very much enjoy helping their customers out and they are true believers in this software's abilities - and they are RIGHT.

Benefits:

Jira is a defacto project management tool in most companies, given its agile oriented layouts of Kanban, and recently introduced Gantt and Timeline views. Task assignation, subtasks, stories, time estimation are easy and even new hires can easily onboard and use it effectively. My favorite was its super clean sync with Slack and its fast alert system, so that any assigned tasks, deadlines and updates would never get missed, even with my team working across different time zones.

Drawbacks:

JIRA has numerous free alternatives, and tbh, I find it slightly overpriced in a competitive market. While my company pays for the official tool that we use, I am usually unable to use JIRA for my personal projects since the free tier limits are very small. I really think JIRA should create a personal project plan that would allow access to some of their services for free/much more reduced cost.

In sum:

JIRA is very useful for collaborating on projects across large teams . It is constantly evolving to accommodate new features, works well for various team sizes, ensures minimalism, and makes sure updates are not missed

Benefits:

First of all I want to say Jira is DOMINATING the market. There is little that Jira cannot do which makes it a no brainer of everything most startups and companies will use. I love that Jira for the most part is a one-stop-shop for Engineering teams, IT teams, Knowledgebase, ticketing systems. You don't really see issues with using Jira until you get bigger. The fact that I can link Jira tickets to my Git commits and add confluence documents to my tickets and google drive files ALL IN ONE is ourtagious and its something my company loves inside and out.

Drawbacks:

Just like every software out there you cannot be perfect in all ways. Because Jira is a one-stop-shop the biggest issues we have is customization of Jira. Not because Jira cant be customized, but only because it can be customized so much that we need set Jira admins whos sole job it is to manage Jira for the entire company because of the huge learning curve because it takes so much time how to figure out even the littest changes to make our lives easier. On top of that, a big issues I see if that as you grow in Jira it is a money pit at times to have it scale with the company. At this point, we are so vested in Jira we cannot get off of it. Adding SSO, and Confluence, and CI DI, and all the features that they promote arent dominating their fields, but its like "Well.... We are on Jira and they don't integrate well with other software so if we want the best features I guess we will have to use all their software"

In sum:

Jira cuppled with Agile processes have driven the velocity and overall engineering teams to new heights at the company. I don't see a world where once you are on it you are with it for better or worse.

Benefits:

Ease of use and filters and customizing dashboard based and sharing across team

Drawbacks:

All good, when downloading any incidents it should consider all the attachments and download in the particular incident.

In sum:

I have been using this tool for almost 2 years for tracking, creating Incident and also for change request, It's simple to use and easy to filter our query.

Benefits:

1. Different user roles can be defined to allow for segregation of duties. 2. Epics can be defined to assist with long and intermediate project planning. 3. Duration of sprints can be defined according to project requirements. 4. Statuses for user stories can be used for tracking progress as well as workflow management. 5. Allows for bulk import of epics and user stories which can fast track administrative tasks where this information has been captured elsewhere e.g. CSV format

Drawbacks:

1. Only users from within the organization can be assigned to tasks and user stories. This can cause unnecessary delays where external users need to provide urgent input or contribution. 2. Statuses (user stories) cannot be defined specifically for a board where multiple boards exist within a project. 3. Only two types of users can be assigned to user stories, which are assignees and reporters. JIRA does not allow for multiple users (assignees) to be assigned to one user story.

In sum:

JIRA is a great tool that allows for greater team collaboration within Agile projects. It is easy to use and very intuitive. Sometimes connectivity can be a problem especially with the cloud based versions. JIRA definitely provides more value than shortcomings.

Benefits:

The powerhouse controls that allow you to configure exactly the solution you need. JIRA is unmatched in customization. For controlling workflows, getting status updates and clearly understanding what's on your plate, JIRA is amazing.

Drawbacks:

The use of JIRA without properly configuring it. Without that commitment, JIRA can be offputting and seem like a heavy mess of a system. You need to remove what you don't use, need to set everything up for individuals and you need to educate your team about how they can use the system. It's so open that it can overwhelm people without management.

In sum:

I love JIRA because I am an organizer and I spend the time getting it right. But you need that kind of commitment for the best experience.

Benefits:

First of all, this product offered a free trial to experience the features first-hand without any strings attached. It was great to have the ability to go and play in a sandbox environment and carefully evaluate what it can and cannot do for me and how it can add value to my organization. Set up and gaining access was easy and quick. The different permissioning levels make sense to stay organized and maintain accurate information. Some of the features I liked the most was having a great UI for exploring and learning without much training. I was personally tasked with setting up a couple of projects and the respective boards for my teams and I was able to do that in a pretty self-serve way. The design is minimalistic and doesn't feel overwhelming, it is clean and navigable. Easily creating backlogs, sprints and administering those are also my favorite features because it makes it so easy to implement an Agile project management and software development culture. The categories of initiatives, epics, stories, tasks etc. align very well with the Agile methodologies in following the same hierarchy. I love being able to get a quick summary view of the tasks before diving deep into the details. Assigning owners, labeling, story points to track work effort needed, description fields, attachments, comments and seamless integrations with other products make it all the more user-friendly. Kanban Board views in Active Sprints tabs provides a clearly easy to understand view of progress.

Drawbacks:

Managing boards within each project is the first that comes to mind. Jira does not offer a standard naming convention for the projects and boards and this can cause some major confusion. I have hard coding this manually and training people to do the same to ensure consistency. If you attached Lucidchart diagrams or embed other important document within tasks or epics, they don't update in real-time or even with refresh which is frustrating. This runs the risk of people getting outdated information which can misinform their actions. The search functionality within Jira is also something that I like the least. It does not return optimal results or even close to optimal results. Sometimes it does not search for metadata and you have to remember the actual word you're searching for to track down a task. It returns an overwhelming amount of results and the filtering or sorting options available are confusing and hard to understand. Another limitation is that even though one project can have multiple boards within, it can only have the one same backlog of items which does not make sense to me. There also cannot be multiple sprints running across different boards and all of this makes me wonder what the actual difference between projects and boards are. Jira also lacks some automation in moving tasks to different statuses upon completion. The workflows are suboptimal and don't work as intended most times. The reporting capabilities within Jira are also quite weak in my opinion.

In sum:

My overall experience with Jira has been great so far. There is a lot more to learn and Jira provides that opportunity to create the best experience for me and my colleagues. They do keep introducing new features and facilitate an active community to gather feedback and actually act on it. Jira has definitely added a lot of value in how we do project management and software development at my company. It has his flaws but it still works out to be the best tool for us to accomplish the purpose at hand this far. I'm sure it will only get better from me and we can get the utmost value from Jira in the long run.

Benefits:

I like the most the integrations available (Bitbucket, Slack, etc) and how customizable the software is. You can define which detail to include in any new created task, project, etc.

Drawbacks:

I liked least the format used for uploading files. With this purpose Jira works together with conduent in a "Pages" format but I would prefer a File Management System based on folders.

In sum:

I´m using scrum and interating continously to achieve expected outcomes developing software.

Benefits:

Jira is an essential tool that will greatly improve traceability, task management, and planning for any organization. It is incredibly intuitive when it comes to the reports that may be generated for any user. Giving the business greater control and vision into the finer details of each day (if process is followed by users), a company or organization can drill down into details of what teams and resources are working on. You can step back a level and see overall features and implementations to be delivered by any set of teams/individuals. It truly is a well thought out tool with lots of available customization.

Drawbacks:

One thing I've always disliked about Jira is the lack of UI customization such as applying themes or having certain sections stand out more than others. You will see much of the UI is plain and ambiguious. I am not sure if this is customizable from a different permissioned user however, I have never seen the ability to have a nicer looking interface from my accounts within my organizations. Yes it is much more powerful but lacks creativity in UI design.

In sum:

Since Jira has been introduced, it has allowed the company coming closer together and break down the previous silos that were prevalent for quite some time. This assisted the architects, UI/UX engineers, developers, testers, and all of management/leadership to take a peek at different parts of the entire overall lifecycle of development. Automated scripts took this a step further which allowed reports to be generated and key points to be communicated across. I believe this tool or any other tool will suffice for your Agile needs however Jira is considered one of the more widely used and best tools available.

Benefits:

I love Jira's ease of use. Jira allows our staff and business partners to request from us using Jira Service Desk. Engineers track their effort using Jira Software. We use the default settings for the most part and that works great for us. There is no need to train anyone on how to use it because everything is self-explanatory. That cuts down on confusion and allows us to get/enter accurate information.

Drawbacks:

It is slow. It is very slow at times. Jira's makers - Atlassian - have not paid much attention over the years about its slowness. If you are into full-fledged project management, portfolio planning and more, you will have to buy add-ons to get additional functionality within Jira. Did I say that Jira is slow? While the ease of use saves time in accurately recording information in Jira, all that saved time is wasted away waiting for pages to load.

In sum:

We use Jira for IT help desk support, miscellaneous administrative and clerical support, staying focused on engineering and resource planning. We've gained several benefits. We can transparently tell all the efforts we are working on, which effort is taking more time, what are the blockers, who's putting how much effort into what work and whether there is value in the work we are doing. Jira has allowed us to stay focused and cut down on non-essential or wasteful work while giving the company a clear idea of what we are working on.

Benefits:

It's a very powerful tool. It provides many advanced features to collaborate with people. We can easily tracks things on Jira through our mobile devises and other gadgets. It helps us to plan the projects with tasks and sub-tasks.

Drawbacks:

It is an expensive software compared to other open source software. I have worked with many software Jira is one of the most expensive product that we have used in our projects.

In sum:

Jira is an extremely useful product to work with a very large team and many project at the same time. Jira supports Agile and Kanban both the types of project management strategies.

Benefits:

The ease of use is such a timesaver. Also the many integrations with other attlassian products is great, it really saves a lot of time and it's a great as documentation. Jira is the reference for software development team, and with good reason1

Drawbacks:

It can be costly and there are nasty sides on the licensing. For example, you can't use plugins for a limited number of users, and only pay for that the number of users. Although in some cases I can understand, in some other cases it makes no sense and it's really a barrier. An other nasty side we experienced is the lost of investment when upgrading during a license term. We bought a license for 2 years, without any discount wrt the 1 year license deal. Within the year, we already needed to extend the number of licensed users so we had to upgrade the license. We then had no way to recover a part of the investment of the remaining time of the initial license ... never buy more than 1 year! One last BIG negative is the recent forced move to cloud. We have always ran Jira and Atlassian products on prem. A recent decision by Atlassian is forcing the user away from the current on prem solution. This is simply not what we want or can. I'm sure this will be an issues with several European organizations where the move to cloud wrt GDRP is not that easy or not a company priority.

In sum:

Overall, the product is great to use. If your company invests in it then as a user, you should can count yourself lucky. When you are responsible of running and purchasing the product and are dealing with organizational constraints, Atlassian Jira might not be so user friendly anymore. That's a petty, as it's in contrast with the user friendly image Atlassian Jira has with the many users.

Benefits:

- Very easy Kanban board and ticket tracking - Linking tickets is very intuitive and useful - team collaboration through pointing, filtering - Full of features - Expandable with plugins

Drawbacks:

- wish epic management could be done better. E.g., wish you could have epics of epics - wish it was more intuitive to search past tickets, however reporting is available. - Sometimes performance seems slow - For people who don't need very complex task tracking, JIRA is a bit too bloated with features.

In sum:

For usage in a relatively larger tech environment, JIRA has a been an indispensable part of my workflow. I use it every day to not only track my work but to communicate my progress to others (and vice versa) and to plan and resource our sprints. JIRA supports many features out of the box and offers plugins to expand its features. However, if I were in a smaller tech organization, the huge variety of features and customizability might be a bit overwhelming and I would look for simpler tools to get the job done. In larger engineering/product organizations, it is the de-facto standard for issue management and I highly recommend it.

Benefits:

1. Great User Interface and User Experience. 2. The ability to create custom queues and automatically re-direct issues to these queues saves a lot of time. 3. The inbuilt SLA management and the option of integrating it to third party alert and notification software is impressive. 4. Adding attachment, links and other resources to JIRA ticket is easy and straightforward. 5. It has great audit trail tracking and can act as a source of truth for all parties involved.

Drawbacks:

1. The issue search feature could have been a little more customizable and faster. 2. The options available to format the comments on an issue are limited and not very intuitive.

In sum:

JIRA is a modern take on a ITSM solution. It is feature loaded yet has a very intuitive User Experience. It has good User Interface as well. JIRA acts as the common interface between Developers, IT ops and business teams and helps different parts of the business colloborate better. It acts as the source of truth for all involves parties and does its basic tasks quite well. It adds velocity to the overall process of task management irrespective of the industry it is used in.

Benefits:

The fully integrated task and project management boards with extensive levels of detail to run Kanban maintenance boards, complex sprints and even visualise recruitment pipelines. In collaboration with Confluence and BitBucket, the Atlassian product suite make the management of a growing software team seem easy.

Drawbacks:

JIRA has quite a steep learning curve for less software native users and can appear too complex for the average operational or commercial person. As such, it can be difficult to convince new people to use JIRA without extensive training and hand-holding. This could be improved by guided tours and a simpler interface for "new starts".

In sum:

JIRA has been an excellent tool overall - provides the perfect mix of task, project and issue tracking features that every company needs. I have worked with JIRA in two independent fast-growing companies and both times it has been the main driver of productivity.

Benefits:

Jira has a strong SaaS-based offering that makes the administration and operation of the product simple and easy. The software has multiple options for viewing tasks (from project-task style to Kanban style) which allows different teams to be flexible and use different formats.

Drawbacks:

The difficulty of running the hosted version of the software with custom plugins is almost unacceptable for enterprise-grade software. The concept that enterprise project-management software requires dedicated IT assets to service and maintenance increases the overhead of the software to unacceptable levels. If a deployment requires a host, non-SaaS version of the software with custom plugins, reconsider.

In sum:

Jira is a strong, industry-standard project management and task tracking service that is flexible enough to allow different types of teams (software, legal, IT, etc.) to work on the same platform.

Benefits:

I love the KabBan task view, our company uses this every morning for a company-wide standup meeting. We have set up a customized board with cards that display budget/due date/time spent/etc. and it has been invaluable to us during COVID-19, as we are all working from home and need to stay connected. Jira's time logging via Tempo has some buggy elements, but has been absolutely crucial in maintaining a clear view of task progress and budget maintenance. The time logging tools are incredibly reliable and allow the perfect amount of editing control by both administrators and users.

Drawbacks:

It is a big pain not being able to assign more than one user to an issue at a time, especially when making Jira issues for meetings, as the purpose here is to provide an issue to log time against. It has also been difficult for our company to systematize and homogenize project structure, as there was such a large learning curve to Jira project setup, and we have a large number of open projects. The functionality between projects differs greatly, and I think a large part of this is due to complicated project setup and maintenance. While Jira is very developer-minded, and many of our developers like it, it seems a slightly less appropriate fit for our designers/strategists and project management team. I also lack the ability to export some reports I need, for example a clear Estimates versus Actuals report in CSV form.

In sum:

As a project coordinator, I use Jira daily in a project management aspect, matching our planned work to progress completed by our teams. I maintain an overhead view of in-flight tasks and projects, and compare this data to outside sources we use for resource management, capacity to contract, etc. My most frequently used elements are a custom KanBan board which shows all in-flight, assigned issues for the entire company; as well as Tempo time tracking software and the reports tool.

Benefits:

Workflow customisation is by far the best of any software that i used. Also connecting confluence pages with jira tickets helps a lot for better documentation.

Drawbacks:

Sometimes it is slow or wont load. Also i have a felling that the state of a ticket changes on its own, but not always.

In sum:

Since i started using jira i got 10 times more organised. Communication with coworkers got easier. I managed to create a workflow of my own inside the company workflow using subtasks. So i am very happy with this software.

Benefits:

I think Jira is great that it allows us to build workflows for our support team, as well as for use as a project management system when planning out software development timelines and estimates. This tool has really reshaped the way we look at IT, and provides the metrics and analytic information to back us up.

Drawbacks:

The learning curve is pretty steep with Jira, getting into some of its more advanced functionality like integrating with other software and initially setting things up takes some time. As well, the Confluence pages have great amounts of features, but the formatting is a little awkward on the web interface.

In sum:

Overall this is a great product that I would recommend for small and perhaps larger teams, it has worked well for us to minimize the inbound flow of support requests (or at least provide a single channel) and during the COVID-19 outbreak has helped substantially in keeping track of issues from remote users who can't "tap" you on the shoulder.

Benefits:

Firstly Jira is the most advanced task management software in my opinion. It has tons of valuable features for issue tracking, has interfaces like scrum, kanban and etc. It has simple mode for an starting projects and very advanced for more complex projects. One of the great things it is the editable everything e.x statuses which helps to my my team to do process more likly.

Drawbacks:

Using the Jira API it has little drawbacks for example complex documentation. It does not have major language libraries and sometimes the the API is not stabile.

In sum:

Overall this is the great software for Product-process management and for issue tracking.

Benefits:

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

Drawbacks:

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!!

In sum:

Hugely disappointing attitude. The money they were looking for after 3 months was quite reasonable but the attitude of the customer support agent and the extremly deceitful and dishonest way that they promote this plan was a huge turn-off.

Benefits:

We use JIRA online and it's dead simple to create and manage complex tasks. I love the ability to integrate with great packages like Confluence (which is SOOOO much better than Slack!).

Drawbacks:

Getting new employees up to speed on using the software is more time consuming that it should be. I'd prefer a more intuitive UI.

In sum:

I've used everything from Excel spreadsheets to MS Access to MS Project and I find that JIRA is the best bang for the buck when managing our SDLC.

Benefits:

I like the kanban board, it works very well and looks simple to use (but it's not easy to setup). The task management for business project is very nice and the new feature of being able to look at the overall work like in a spreadsheet, definitely beats Smartsheet for me. I like that you can easily move your work when you're done using the board view, if you like.

Drawbacks:

Scrum/Agile can be difficult to setup because the Kanban board isn't so great when setting it up. I have run into some difficulties with it, their support board was helpful but it did not resolve the issue. Business projects do not have the ability to link to Bitbucket, it would have been nice to include task management with Bitbucket integration, it helps to appropriately follow up on tasks. The board view for tasks and sub-tasks doesn't work for me. I'd like to see that there are major tasks with steps of the child tasks (change the subtask icon too).

In sum:

JIRA has been very beneficial to us across all teams and it's very useful for service and technical management.

Benefits:

Of course there's a little confirmational bias in any review of a product already acquired, but implementing it really was a thoughtful decision. Over the last few years, this product has really matured. When we started with it as an immature FOSS offering, it wasn't really enterprise-class. We were motivated by cost initially, but Atlassian has really grown it. Now with external directory integration, tiered hosting offerings, MSP-level features, and significant customization available, I can't think of another product that beats the value proposition. My most favorite feature? The return on investment. We use this to manage service desk interactions with more than 25 MSP clients, and have never been let down. It costs us less than weekly staff meeting pizza to operate and integration with other Atlassian products is superb.

Drawbacks:

Much of the branding customizations fall flat. Inability to resize or edit logos, the prominently featured plugs for Atlassian throughout the UI, and clunky DNS-tricks requires to redirect customer portal URLs to MSP's domain.

In sum:

We have used this product from the very day we christened our service desk. It has evolved into an enterprise-class, feature-rich ticketing system that we have integrated with several external directories for our customers. So far, we haven't found a requested feature that we couldn't implement easily in Jira and the value proposition is strong. We recently migrated from an on-prem solution to one of their cloud offerings, mostly for ease of customer access, and have been thoroughly pleased.

Benefits:

It is a feature packed program that helps teams collaborate using a ticketing system. Much easier way to work with team members to fix issues, deploy updates and collaborate. Using this system between employees, departments, consultants and others we have been able to streamline collaboration on projects. It also has a lot of integration, including with Slack, to expedite notifications.

Drawbacks:

There is definitely a learning curve with this project and it can be a little hard to get the hang of, but once you do, the UI of the program will make sense.

In sum:

Great way to collaborate with team members and outside vendors on ticketing and projects, with a lot of integration opportunities. Would highly recommend to users not currently using JIRA.