What Is Jira?
Jira is a project management tool that enables project managers to plan, assign, track and review projects in real time. Jira started its shelf life as a bug-tracking tool, so it is still the best project management tool for locating, tracking and recording bugs smoothly.
Jira often gets discredited as being suitable only for developers but in addition to software development, the Jira platform supports projects of these types:
- Service management
- Work management
- Marketing
- HR
- Finance
- Design
- Personal
- Operations
- Legal
- Sales
All projects are not created equal. The needs of a software development project would differ significantly from a human resources (HR) or operations project. To provide the necessary tools and templates for different types of projects for businesses of all sizes, Jira offers these four products:
- Jira Software: For planning, tracking, fixing and shipping world-class software
- Jira Service Management: Helps your customer care desk track and fix customer issues quickly and effectively
- Jira Work Management: Allows you to manage projects for any department within your organization, from marketing and recruitment to legal and operations
- Jira Align: Built for enterprises, it connects all the teams so that they can be on the same page and get real-time visibility into all the projects
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monday.com
Yes
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HubSpot
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Smartsheet
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Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
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ClickUp
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Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
What Sets Jira Apart
Jira was originally designed for software development and bug tracking. It has features that are customized to issue tracking and bug reporting. Hence, Jira is the best choice for software development teams.
Jira software ships with an Agile flavor, which could be an additional advantage even for non-software projects. Agile methodology focuses on identifying and completing the most important tasks first so that the team delivers continuously and does not create a bottleneck. This is an approach that can help any non-IT project, whether it is a go-to-market or sales pipeline or recruitment and onboarding project.
Pros
Jira comes with two visually rich boards for tracking projects—Scrum and Kanban. If you wish to set deadlines and track progress of the project, according to those deadlines, Scrum is ideal for you. However, if you just want a visual way to look at your projects and tasks (issues in Jira), Kanban board is the way to go.
Cons
Jira is supposed to be more intuitive for developers in terms of its approach as well as labels used for tasks, events or custom fields. So non-developers may need to put in some effort initially to get used to the interface and its style of functioning. Also, for such a robust and feature-rich project management tool, it does not have any budgeting and invoicing features.
Jira Core Features
Let’s now dive into the core features offered by the Jira platform.
Issue Management
Anything that you need to track from start to finish is an issue in Jira. Every project is a collection of issues to be tracked. Issues are further broken down into stories and tasks so that large complex projects can be broken down into smaller manageable tasks that can be completed in sprints and delivered continuously.
Agile Development
Jira is built for Agile development. The software ships with Scrum, Kanban and bug-tracking boards so that development teams can choose a project depending on their requirement. Projects other than software development, such as Go To Market, Recruitment, Onboarding, Budgeting, etc., also benefit from these boards.
Jira ships with two boards—Scrum and Kanban—that make managing sprints for fixing issues very intuitive. Issues themselves can be tracked and logged using multiple project views including user stories and story points.
Bug Tracking
Jira was originally developed to track bugs in the software development process. The software comes with a template dedicated to bug tracking, which makes it very simple to track, record and fix them. As all the issues can be viewed in a single board, bug fixing can be prioritized in a single click.
Roadmaps
Roadmaps enable stakeholders to appreciate the big-picture view of any project, taking in the overall progress at a glance. This high-level, visual summary of the project’s goals, timelines and priorities enables managers to prioritize critical tasks and focus on delivering the most valuable work first.
Roadmaps also enable stakeholder alignment around project objectives, promoting transparent communication and accountability. You can even export them to other formats such as PDF or CSV for easy sharing.
Reporting
More than 15 reports can be created at every stage from planning and tracking issues to final delivery. These reports, such as a sprint report, control chart, resolution time report and time tracking report, help project managers gain actionable real-time insights into their team’s progress and re-prioritize accordingly. These data-driven visually rich reports can also be shared with clients to establish transparent communication channels.
Role Assignment Features
Although in the free plan, all users are administrators, for the paid plans, you can assign different roles to the users, such as developer, reporter and viewer. These roles are used to assign global and project-level permissions, customize notifications, establish email notification rules and more.
Software Integrations
Jira integrates with more than 3,000 integrations in over 35 categories ranging from project management and CRM to dependency management, security and workflow. To assist first-time users, Atlassian’s Ecosystem team highlights top apps that can be a great place for you to start exploring.
Jira Pricing and Plans
Jira has a forever free plan for 10 users, which is ideal for single teams with fundamental project management requirements. In Free and Standard plans, you can create single projects with basic roadmaps and dependency management. With Premium and Enterprise plans, you can create multiple projects with advanced roadmaps and dependency management. When the number of seats exceeds 800, opt for the Enterprise plan to unlock advanced features and functionality.
Jira Tiered Plans and Pricing
Free Plan
Jira’s Free plan is a good starting point for small teams of up to 10 members who need a project management tool but wish to avoid incurring any costs on it. All the users in the Free plan are administrators and project permissions, roles, issues and levels of security are not customizable. The plan provides 2GB of file storage for attachments and access to at least one community for support.
Core Jira features such as customizable templates and automated workflows are available on the Free plan.
Standard Plan
Jira’s Standard plan offers more features compared to the Free plan and is perfect for growing teams whose project management and team collaboration requirements are not yet complex.
The Standard plan allows up to 35,000 users to collaborate on a project on Jira software, 10,000 users on Jira work management and 5,000 agents on Jira service management platforms. These users can be managed efficiently with advanced permissions and multiple user roles. The Standard plan also includes audit logs that enable teams to keep track of important changes made to their Jira instance.
Premium Plan
Jira’s Premium plan has advanced features and capabilities, perfect for large and complex organizations with multiple teams, handling large and complex projects. The plan includes global and multi-project capability, advanced route maps, custom fields for capturing additional information, advanced security and compliance features, premium support and more.
Advanced roadmaps allow managers to get high-level views of projects across multiple teams and even company-wide initiatives. The Premium plan includes premium support via access to a dedicated team of technical support engineers who provide 24/7 assistance by phone, email and chat.
Enterprise Plan
Jira’s Enterprise plan is perfect for large enterprises with complex requirements such as multiple teams, multiple locations and multiple projects. It offers unlimited users, unlimited sites, advanced reporting and analytics and dedicated support in addition to all Premium features. Atlassian’s Enterprise Advocates work closely with your team right from implementation and training to ongoing support.
The Enterprise plan includes access to premium add-ons and open beta of Atlassian analytics, Atlassian data lakes and data connectors. The Enterprise users need a single license to log in to all the instances (sites created on Jira cloud).
Jira Setup and Customization
When you sign up for Jira, you are sent a verifying link to your email. On checking that verifying link, you are redirected to a page where you need to create a workspace. Everything that you do in Jira happens in this workspace. All plans except Enterprise allow for just one workspace.
After creating the workspace, Jira tries to collect some basic information about you and your team to set you up properly. These are questions about your team, role, whether you are experienced in Agile development or not, etc. You can of course choose to skip them for now.
You can again integrate popular tools such as Slack, Google Sheets, MS Teams, GitHub, Jenkins, GitLab, etc. Or configure it later.
You can choose to start from a template or a blank project. If you start with a template, it saves time and effort because it comes pre-configured with common workflows, issue types, project settings, custom fields and best practices specific to the type of project chosen. Starting with a blank project can be time-consuming.
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Clover
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Jira Ease of Use
Jira is highly intuitive if you are or have prior experience being a developer. For non-developers, it may take some initial effort, but it is worth it due to its Agile approach to project management. Also, for first-time users, it is advisable to start with templates that come pre-configured with workflows and best practices. Jira has enough templates to get you started with any type of project.
Jira Security
Jira allows you to create and customize user roles and permissions. It allows people from trusted networks only to access your software instance. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest using AES-256. Jira is fully compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), SOC 2 and 3, PCI/DSS, ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27018.
For added security and compliance, you can subscribe to Atlassian Access, which includes single sign-on (SSO), system for cross-domain identity management (SCIM) and Active Directory sync. These services are part of the Enterprise plan.
Jira Customer Service and Support
Jira has a robust and in-depth self-service portal. You can access it from within the tool by clicking on the Quickstart button on the bottom right of your screen. It also has helpful short videos to get you started and answer any other questions you might have.
Each support request is an issue tracked according to its priority level, determined by the inputs you gave while logging the issue. Some of the other fields include customer time zone, affected product, addressed customer comments and BRT escalation.
Jira software provides 24/7 support via email and chat. Our support ticket was resolved in just over an hour. The best part was that its ticket receipt email was full of helpful links to webinars and knowledge center articles.
Customizable Templates
Jira has fully customizable templates for a wide range of projects from recruitment and onboarding to marketing and HR. You can customize the templates even after you have populated them with your own data. These templates come with pre-configured workflows and custom fields that follow the industry best practices for that project, which enables your team to hit the ground running.
Guest/Client Access
Jira user roles and permissions can be tweaked to provide guests or clients limited access to projects or issues. You can allow them global or project-level or issue-level permission, depending on their needs.
Jira Alternatives and How They Compare
Jira vs. Zoho Projects
Both Jira and Zoho Projects enable you to plan projects, track progress and collaborate with teams to get things done. Jira has a clean user interface and powerful analytics and reporting capabilities. Zoho Projects is an excellent option for entry-level teams with limited requirements. The power of Zoho Projects lies in its ability to integrate with 45-plus other Zoho tools such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Forms, Zoho Sprints and more.
Jira vs. monday.com
Both Jira and monday.com are popular project management tools with their own features and capabilities. However, even first-time users find monday.com to be easier to use and more flexible. Jira is designed specifically for software development and hence has features customized for issue tracking and bug reporting.
In Jira, every task that needs to be completed is an issue and every project is a collection of issues. In monday.com, you have pulses that accept all kinds of information and you can use it for an entire project. In monday.com, you can manage deals, contacts and teams besides the projects.
Jira vs. Notion
Both Jira and Notion started as specialized tools; Jira for bug tracking and Notion as a note-taking app. But both have evolved into full-fledged project management tools that can be used by teams handling varied projects. Notion is a fully customizable general-purpose project management tool for a wide variety of projects. Jira, on the other hand, is focused primarily on software projects.
Jira has advanced features and capabilities for handling Agile projects, custom reports and managing dependencies. Notion has powerful capabilities for handling content-focused projects such as wikis, websites and product guides.
Related: Azure DevOps Vs. Jira
Who is Jira Best For?
If you need project management software for your information technology (IT) team, Jira is beyond doubt your best option. However, if you are willing to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the software, Jira is an excellent choice for any team that wants to adopt an Agile approach to completing tasks.
If you have very basic project management requirements and work with a very small team, you can start with its forever-free plan for up to 10 users. As you grow in size and complexity, you can upgrade to paid plans. Even the free plan has many fully customizable templates for project management, marketing and sales and HR issues, which should be sufficient for a small business.
After evaluating Jira and comparing it with other project management tools, Jira didn’t land on our roundup of the best project management software. Still, it is clear that Jira is an excellent choice for small businesses with not-so-complex project management requirements, especially due to its lucrative free forever plan.
Our Experience/Expert Take
While reading the multiple reviews on review sites such as G2 and Capterra, it seemed as though the Jira interface was not very intuitive for nontechnical people. From our own evaluation and testing of the tool, we believe Jira’s Agile approach to issue tracking and management can benefit even non-IT project management.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the main function of Jira?
Jira is used to plan, assign, track and manage software development projects in real time. It empowers Agile teams to ship quickly and more frequently. Jira enables IT teams to track bugs from the identification phase to fix them successfully.
What are the disadvantages of Jira?
The biggest limitation of Jira is that it is not so user-friendly for nontechnical people. Many IT teams would find it intuitive but if you expect nontechnical people to use it too, be prepared for some challenges.
Is Jira still the best?
Jira is one of the most affordable project management tools on the market. It can be used for a range of projects from HR, marketing and operations to sales and workplace management. If you want a tool for managing software projects, it is an excellent choice.
What are the benefits of project management software?
Project management software helps you to plan, organize, budget and track the progress of a company project. It also unites a team around shared goals so all are working toward a successful project completion. In dispersed teams, growing businesses or across multiple departments, this can be difficult to do without software people can join and access from their own devices wherever and whenever they work.
