No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Alfabet IT Planning & Portfolio Management vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alfabet IT Planning & Portf...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (13th)
Jira
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
285
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Application Requirements Management (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

MS
Head of Business Agility and Development at Aqarat Real Estate Development Company
Helps us to implement and understand the status of our projects
The initial setup is straightforward. The solution's deployment takes around two months time. We have to set up the solution. We have to put in the data to ensure that the solution is working. We need to fill out our process, our tools, and our data. Two developers were involved in the deployment process. It is a self-maintained solution that requires updates from time to time. I rate the setup an eight out of ten.
RituRaj - PeerSpot reviewer
SDE 2 at Virtusa
Centralized sprint boards have transformed our planning and now improve cross‑team visibility
While Jira is very powerful, there are definitely areas it could be improved, especially for usability and simplicity. One common challenge is that Jira can feel overwhelming for new users. The number of features, configurations, workflows, and settings is huge. Onboarding non-technical teams or new employees sometimes takes longer than expected. A simple default experience for a beginner would help a lot. Another issue is performance. In large organizations with heavy customizations, large backlogs, or complex dashboards, Jira can occasionally feel slow, especially when loading filters, reports, or larger boards. Pricing can also become expensive as an organization scales and multiple Atlassian products and plugins are added. Some smaller teams sometimes feel the ecosystem becomes costly over time. The mobile experience would be smoother for project managers or leadership users who mainly want quick update approvals or dashboard views on the go. Overall, Jira's biggest strength is flexibility, but that flexibility can also create complexity if not managed carefully. Improving simplicity, performance, and ease of adoption would make the platform even stronger. An additional improvement I would mention for Jira is around balancing flexibility with simplicity. Jira gives organizations a huge amount of customization power, which is great. But over time, many teams end up creating overly complicated processes. After a few years, some Jira environments become difficult to maintain because there are many workflows, custom fields, permissions, and automations layered on top of each other. It would help if Jira would provide a strong built-in recommendation or health check for keeping a project clean or efficient. For example, identifying unused custom fields, suggesting workflow simplicity improvements, flagging redundant automations, or recommending dashboard optimization.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"ERP approach to IT (edit architecture elements as data using forms, easier for many people compared to drawing / modeling) Hundreds of predefined reports (not only for analysis but also for displaying profiles for single elements like an application including dynamically generated diagrams based on edited data) Very sophisticated meta model (dozens of man years of experience condensed in it) Enterprise collaboration features Web client for the enterprise, either on-site installation or running in a private cloud."
"I would recommend trying planningIT"
"My personal experience with the product was good, primarily because of the support team's responsiveness."
"The dashboard is the most valuable feature."
"In my organization, we have so many diverse projects, that the flexibility to integrating JIRA with other tools has been a helpful feature."
"It has the ability to just do everything, and it is a one-stop shop for all of your IT software development needs."
"I like almost everything about Jira."
"The solution provides an integrated platform for customer service and is good at organizing our technical support for clients, and it has been very stable overall with no performance issues."
"Easy to configure, very fast to configure, extremely powerful workflows and schemes, integrates with other Atlassian tools as well as 3rd party tools."
"It is a very convenient tool. We can organize our sprints through scrum or kanban. There are scrum boards, and there are kanban boards. If you prefer scrum, you can use Jira. If you prefer kanban, you can still use Jira. You can create your kanban boards in a similar way as you create your scrum boards. It is very useful. It also seems to be very popular these days."
"The product provides high flexibility to create new workflows quickly."
"The simplicity of Jira is the part that I like the most, as well as the way in which it can be extended."
 

Cons

"The tool is clearly not very intuitive."
"The user-experience, enhanced performance, and in-hand governance can be improved."
"Only few predefined integrations with other tools exist, most integrations are implemented via an integration module based on XML typically needing vendor expertise."
"Jira could provide more insight into sprints such as how did we perform in the last sprint compared to other sprints. It would be helpful to have metrics and a dashboard feature for others to see."
"Previous solutions ... did not work - to put it mildly."
"I would like to see visualization of release planning. I can list the releases and I can give dates to releases, but to show how they are happening on a timeline, I would need to order the Portfolio part. But just for this, it may be too much to use the Portfolio for that."
"Not very intuitive for project admins."
"At first, the documentation is typically light on needed information, is buggy, or is a little old."
"Jira is not a highly customizable platform, all you can do is use various plugins and widget to fulfill your needs and if you need more than that, then you might have to look for other project management tools."
"It should have its own repository for test case creation, so that one does not have to resort to third-party tools and plugins."
"We encountered occasional timeouts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive. There is a yearly licensing cost. There are no additional costs, only the standard license, and the cloud license."
"We make use of the solution free of charge."
"We feel that the product is a good value for the cost."
"I am not sure if the client is using a commercial version. I think it is on a per-user basis, and it is around 15 Canadian dollars for a user, but I'm not sure. It also has a free version."
"JIRA's pricing is very economical. I would say that JIRA is a great deal more economical than Microsoft."
"The price is quite competitive."
"It is an affordable tool."
"It is very cheap if you forego the local instance and stick to the cloud."
"As a company, we get a subsidized price, and it's lower than what's quoted on their website."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Project Portfolio Management solutions are best for your needs.
906,960 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise153
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?
Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
Jira operates on a subscription model, typically priced per user. It is quite affordable, and the setup cost is low. Licensing is simple and easy to get started with.
 

Also Known As

planningIT, alfabet planningIT, Alfabet IT Planning and Portfolio Management
Jira Software
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FUJITSU, Coca Cola, ING, CreditSuisse, CosmosDirekt, GTA, Echo Entertainment Group, Electrolux, Cern
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about monday.com, Planisware, Broadcom and others in Project Portfolio Management. Updated: July 2026.
906,960 professionals have used our research since 2012.