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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
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.
reviewer2813067 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sde 2 at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees
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

"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."
"My personal experience with the product was good, primarily because of the support team's responsiveness."
"The dashboard is the most valuable feature."
"I would recommend the solution to others."
"In my organization, we have so many diverse projects, that the flexibility to integrating JIRA with other tools has been a helpful feature."
"What I like about this solution is you can create a consolidated customized dashboard out of your files to identify what's been going on and identify who has how much data assigned to them."
"Using Kanban boards has allowed us to become a flow-based organization versus a sprint-based organization."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is a quite powerful user tracking system."
"It has an easy UI that can easily plug-in to every level."
"It helps me to use virtual Scrum boards across four locations, three time zones, and to plan my work."
"The ROI on Atlassian products has been tremendous."
 

Cons

"The user-experience, enhanced performance, and in-hand governance can be improved."
"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."
"In the way it is deployed, I think Jira is too dependent on the third-party applications that are available in its marketplace. If we could get some of the basic functionalities which are offered by these third-party applications, that would be ideal because each time we need a new functionality, we have to purchase a new plugin as an add-on."
"The reporting needs to be better."
"The filtration could be better."
"Jira could be more, for example, like Micro Focus, which is what I mostly work with currently."
"From a very software-centric or a lead developer standpoint, there should be the ability to work at multiple levels. You have epic stories and use cases or epic stories and tasks. It would be nice to be able to have multiple levels of stories and multiple levels of epics work with it. It's lacking a little bit there, and this is the big thing for me because it makes it difficult to do a real sprint when you're limited to one story per epic. It's really hard to isolate tasks at multiple levels to match the type of use cases you normally do. That's the biggest difficulty. Other than that, they've been improving year to year, and every version seems to have a level of improvement."
"There needs to be an easier way to capture a few metrics. I wish there was an easy way for Jira to explain to me what has been added after the sprint has been done. Currently, it is a bit difficult for me to tell. In addition, when rolling over stories from one sprint to another, it is kind of difficult for me to find out how many story points were actually rolled over without going into Jira and doing an analysis. I wish Jira would somehow aggregate that information for me so I can easily report about it."
"Some of the customizations are definitely a little challenging."
"Sometimes, it is slow and hangs. We faced some stability issues where JIRA was down for a day, and we lost some of our comments made in JIRA because of downtime."
 

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."
"There are no additional costs to the standard licensing."
"Almost everybody uses JIRA nowadays because it is the most cost-effective solution."
"The price of Jira could be lower."
"I think the starter pack of three users, up to five users, is free. So you can try it out."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It's paid yearly."
"JIRA's pricing is very economical. I would say that JIRA is a great deal more economical than Microsoft."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"The tool's pricing is expensive. The new pricing is indeed quite expensive compared to what it was a few years ago. Last year, when we intended to renew our subscription, we found the pricing considerably higher."
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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
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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 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.
896,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.