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
283
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Application Requirements Management (2nd), 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 NSIT - 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."
"The dashboard is the most valuable feature."
"I would recommend trying planningIT"
"My personal experience with the product was good, primarily because of the support team's responsiveness."
"I would definitely recommend this product because it's scalable and easy to use."
"The integration of other open source tools with Jira is very useful. It allows us to create documents and transcriptions, making it versatile beyond software development."
"It was easy to use. The consultants that we had on board were familiar with it. So, obviously, having a community that had used it before or was familiar with it was a positive thing."
"The informatics is the most valuable feature. It captures what we need."
"I like that it's integrated with the specs."
"For me, it's more complete and allows for smaller teams than Azure DevOps."
"I found it super useful, as it is customizable for different teams and users."
"Jira is an amazing tool, there is no doubt about it, and we have no thoughts of using any other tool."
 

Cons

"The tool is clearly not very intuitive."
"Only few predefined integrations with other tools exist, most integrations are implemented via an integration module based on XML typically needing vendor expertise."
"The user-experience, enhanced performance, and in-hand governance can be improved."
"I'd like some more features around software testing. I'd like to see some more stuff done around data testing."
"What could be improved is the migration between the testing and production environments. This could be automated somehow as the manual transfer of certain workflows and functionalities is very time consuming right now."
"We would like to see integration between Tempo and Jira."
"Ease of administration and customization. It is really clunky in this area."
"It should have its own repository for test case creation, so that one does not have to resort to third-party tools and plugins."
"JIRA still has their own backtracking tools. It should have a better visibility into HPE UFT. Most people use functional testing tools, like QTP. They need to improve their integration to make it seamless."
"Something I would like to see improved is the traceability feature. When you have a user story, if you can see all the test cases, it would be an improvement if you could see any design documents or any change management."
"One of the issues is tracking the hours that people spend on each task. I know the solution has some built-in features but it doesn't quite meet our needs."
 

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."
"The basic price of Jira is reasonable, but for each plugin, we have to keep paying more. When you add it all up, it can be expensive. The main problem we face is we are forced to purchases plugin licenses for users who are not going to use them. For example, we have Jira licenses for approximately 450 people but if we only want a purchase a plugin for few people it is mandatory to buy the license for the 450 people who have Jira licensees. This is a problem because sometimes we need plugins for the product manager or for people in charge of the report, not everyone. For us, it can be very expensive in the end, they should alter this policy to allow plugins for only a set number of licenses."
"Worth the extra cost."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It's paid yearly."
"There is a monthly license required for this solution and it is expensive."
"The price is quite competitive."
"I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Its price is fine, but we would like it to be less expensive. We are paying on a yearly basis."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Project Portfolio Management solutions are best for your needs.
894,807 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business108
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise152
 

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 itself is fairly priced for the features it provides, but pricing is a bit higher than some alternatives, mostly because many plugins and add-ons are paid and licensed per user. So even if onl...
 

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 Alfabet IT Planning & Portfolio Management vs. Jira and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,807 professionals have used our research since 2012.