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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

"The dashboard is the most valuable feature."
"My personal experience with the product was good, primarily because of the support team's responsiveness."
"I would recommend trying planningIT"
"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 feature that I have found most valuable is that it is a quite powerful user tracking system."
"In general, the GUI is nice."
"It is an open-sourced product that is easy to customize."
"Perfect for keeping track of large amounts of bugs, tasks queries and releases for fixes."
"JIRA stores history of changes, which helps a lot to track who, when, and why the issue was modified​."
"The most valuable features of Jira are the dashboards and user interface. The processes within Jira to monitor, maintain and release are beneficial. It is a continuous development solution."
"It is a good defect tracking tool, it has a lot of capabilities and functionalities, there are a lot of graphs and a lot of tracking, it can be sprint-driven if you want, there is a lot of data that you can pull out for estimations, it has got a lot of out-of-the-box functionalities, and it also works well with all the integrated tools that you buy."
"What I like most about Jira is that it's flexible, as it has the flexibility to be configured for any company."
 

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."
"There's been the odd amount of JIRA downtime (not self hosted) and sometimes tickets that can't be accessed."
"Test case management could be more user-friendly. When we add or update test cases, there should be a better way to organize them within the dashboard."
"The next-generation software projects lack a lot, and I found quite a few bugs."
"Customer service has not been helpful but I have not minded since the wiki documentation and Atlassian Answers forum have been great."
"I do know the initial setup was pretty complicated. The user interface could be better organized and easier. ​"
"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."
"Technical support could be improved. When you submit a ticket, it can take two or three rounds before you get what you're looking for."
"There are so, SO many areas that I couldn’t even begin to count. The most basic of requests have been allowed to languish for years, many over a decade."
 

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 standard package of Jira is for 100 users. They should offer more packages for other increments, such as 500 or 2,000. In my previous company, there was a free package that provided a minimal number of users."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis, and it is based on what you use."
"The license is yearly. It is a large, long-running program."
"The pricing for Jira is reasonable, although I think they can bring it down because the plugins cost extra."
"Compared to the value Jira provides, it’s not that expensive. It has an yearly licensing cost."
"For very small companies, if you have less than 10 individuals, it is $10 a year for each of the products. When we were a part of the enterprise and had more than 10 people using it, or before they came up with this solution for small companies, it was $2,500 a year for the license for Jira and Confluence, and I believe something like $600 a year to perpetuate the license. I can't remember if it was $600 or $2,500 annually. It was for up to 25 people at the time, and this was in the early 2000s and mid 2000s."
"We used to be on a perpetual license provided by our clients."
"The ballpark figure is about $100 a month."
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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
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

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
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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.
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