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Atlassian ALM vs Jira vs Microsoft Azure DevOps 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 11.0%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure DevOps is 9.5%, down from 16.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Jira11.0%
Microsoft Azure DevOps9.5%
Atlassian ALM2.4%
Other77.1%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

BRIANJOHNSON2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independant Consultant at B&H Designs Ltd
Long-term testing workflows have improved integration of test planning and defect tracking
The deployment depends on whether you are deploying it on your computer or across the program. Cloud-based system deployment takes some time, as it depends on your rights to your computer. I would rate the deployment as a seven on a scale of one to ten. It took a couple of hours to get it right. The IT department deploys it.
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.
Bharadwaj Deepak Mohapatra - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at ENTERPRISE SYSTEM SOLUTIONS LIMITED
Have built reliable end-to-end pipelines and streamlined cloud provisioning through consistent collaboration practices
I am currently working with open-source tools such as Jenkins for my main CI/CD pipeline, and for enterprise clients, I am using Microsoft Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline. For other clients, I have also implemented CI/CD YAML pipelines through GitLab CI/CD workflow and GitHub Actions. I am creating the end-to-end CI/CD pipeline from development to deployment and monitoring all of this. Azure Boards is easier than Jira for my understanding because there are very easy points to manage the Agile methodology which we work on. Because it is a GUI, sometimes the process may take a few minutes more than the CLI process since the backend is running the exact CLI, but we are commanding through the GUI. There is definitely a time lag, but it is more secure. Microsoft Azure DevOps pipelines work very seamlessly rather than other CI/CD pipelines, as of my understanding. The downside is that the process may take more time when deploying some clusters, Kubernetes, Azure AKS service, or some vast microservice architecture deployments. There may be a little bit of lag I feel, though I cannot tell very strictly that this is a disadvantage, but sometimes it takes a little more time than other cloud infrastructures. All the major things are done by GUI, which is somewhat a little slow. However, if considering automations, process, monitoring, and provisioning, then it is the best cloud service across all the other service providers. Our implementation is a hybrid cloud. Microsoft Azure DevOps is definitely easily scalable. I have worked on many Kubernetes infrastructures and microservice deployments, and I have seen that replication is very good because it is very easy. The replication process is very straightforward. I definitely advocate for using less code because it is very time-consuming. If using GCP or Amazon Web Service, there is more interaction related to work over the CLI process. In terms of Microsoft Azure DevOps, there are many things done by the GUI, which is the best part.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Atlassian ALM suite consists at least of JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket and HipChat - just the tools you need for organizing your teams in a very efficient way."
"In Bitbucket, the reviews are pretty good."
"The interface between the repository and test plan stands out as valuable, and I appreciate building the tests and scenarios in Test Lab and the ability to link defects throughout the system, which Atlassian ALM does better than any other testing products."
"If you can spend the little effort to configure Jira to support your more complex requirements management, then you can concentrate everything in one tool."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite, and we have good integration with work management and software build automation (Bamboo), which is the major strength from this provider."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"Our Premier Support engineer was extremely helpful with deployment."
"The product is quite easy to use and simple to navigate, it's flexible and can provide a lot of different options, such as dashboards that you can create and manage, so you can really tailor-make your own dashboard depending on your needs."
"The adaptability of the Scrum and Kanban boards for other uses, with careful use of the customization features."
"The product provides high flexibility to create new workflows quickly."
"You can see what everyone is doing in your team and you can check and get updates on progress."
"JIRA's technical support is absolutely fantabulous. I had used it in the past when I was working at my previous organization. And when we wanted to link it with a framework, they helped us out with the API we were looking for."
"Jira is easy to use and there are a lot of tools that are integrated with it."
"It has improved my organization because it gives us collaboration."
"Stable and scalable solution for work planning and code collaboration. It's fast, and it offers a good user experience."
"The integration of the whole cycle is the main strength of the tool. If I want to control the cycle with other tools on the market, I would have to use several tools. However, this is not the case with Azure DevOps or TFS."
"Azure DevOps is the main communication tool between the product owners, UX designers, and developers."
"In our organization, Microsoft Azure DevOps helps senior leadership go in and check the project status and how much effort has been put in by the development team."
"We use this solution for continuous integration, strategic analysis, and to create and deploy virtual machines, and soon there will be more than 200 of us using this solution."
"Both UCD and ADO are the best products in the current DevOps space right now."
"We can eliminate some of the middleman processes."
"The initial setup is quick and easy."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."
"Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents."
"Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive."
"All Atlassian products are based on JAVA which makes it a bit difficult to trace problems if you don't have much JAVA skilled staff around."
"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."
"Frankly it's a really daunting exercise - challenging, problematic and very flaky."
"For project management, the scheduling of the project tasks should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid using the Atlassian Portfolio."
"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"The only problem area for me is applying filters, and for new users it is very complicated work."
"As the solution is highly configurable, it has very poor governance."
"I prefer to use Azure DevOps instead of Jira for stability or the frequency of use."
"Jira has recently updated their UI, but more can be done to make it even better."
"The solution can improve by including test management functionality in a native bundle without plugins."
"Because I am a developer, I would like integration with Git Source Code Management so that for tickets, we can reference the code where the change has happened and where the issue is. This feature might be there, and I probably haven't discovered it."
"I sure wish Jira was less expensive. Its price point should be a little lower, and it should be more flexible for users who are just ticket viewers."
"From a very software-centric or a lead developer standpoint, there should be the ability to work at multiple levels."
"Microsoft could improve Visual Studio by making it easier to find the plugins you need to get your job done."
"The solution is generally stable but not entirely issue-free."
"The active directory password system needs some improvement because many times the password for the active directory expires before the set time."
"Reporting could be better. We would like to see how many applications are onboarded in DevOps and in which phase they are."
"I would like to see better integration and collaboration between tools."
"I would give it a higher rating, but there are a couple of things that tick me off."
"Requirements management is an area that can be improved."
"Not all companies use the same methodology which could limit the use of this solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a community edition available, but if the price were lower for the addons then more people would use the full version."
"We are on an annual license to use Jira."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"There is an annual subscription to use Jira."
"The price is quite competitive."
"The price seems reasonable to me. It's very similar to Splunk."
"If you are using just Jira, it is cheap, but if you start to use it and you feel you need some more services or more functions, then you have to buy add-ons, which can make it expensive."
"We currently have ten users, and it is free for ten users."
"For the basic license, it is around five euros per month."
"I don't have a problem with the pricing."
"I don't know the pricing of DevOps. It would be much cheaper than ALM because ALM came out as a software product initially. Now they are moving into a cloud and subscription model. In that case, Microsoft is coming from Azure and the cloud and DevOps and software as a service, so it would be much cheaper, but the catch would be that they are trying to get money on all the sides, like an operating system, Microsoft Office, or Microsoft Azure DevOps."
"It is the least expensive product in this class."
"I don't know what we pay, but I do know what I've seen online. If we switched to JIRA, we will basically have to double our costs because we still have to pay for the DevOps licensing. We're probably spending $100 a month on it. It has only standard licensing fees."
"The solution is expensive."
"There are additional costs for some functionality, such as increased scalability."
"With Azure, you have to pay for every user."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
21%
Educational Organization
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise152
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business43
Midsize Enterprise28
Large Enterprise69
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian ALM?
Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Atlassian ALM?
I am still not satisfied with the requirements area of Atlassian ALM. Atlassian ALM has four parts: test plan, Test L...
What is your primary use case for Atlassian ALM?
I have been using Atlassian ALM for twenty-five years. It used to be called Quality Center, and I first used it in 20...
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 d...
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 a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
In terms of pricing and setup cost, my experience with the pricing and licensing of Jira was generally positive, espe...
Which is better - TFS or Azure DevOps?
TFS and Azure DevOps are different in many ways. TFS was designed for admins, and only offers incremental improvement...
Microsoft Azure DevOps: what is your experience regarding pricing and costs ?
Pricing experience is limited, as I am a user of this product and not involved in the pricing aspects. There has defi...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure DevOps?
No major failures have been observed with Microsoft Azure DevOps, as it is available most of the time. There are occa...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Jira Software
Azure DevOps, VSTS, Visual Studio Team Services, MS Azure DevOps
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, NASA, Cisco, eBay, Redfin, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Gilt, CSIRO, Autodesk, The Daily Telegraph, CODE, Illumnia
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Alaska Airlines, Iberia Airlines, Columbia, Skype
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian, Microsoft, OpenText and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites. Updated: June 2026.
900,228 professionals have used our research since 2012.