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Jira vs Rally Software comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Jira enhances team efficiency and productivity, offering cost-effectiveness and features, outweighing initial costs through significant time and error reduction.
Sentiment score
7.5
Rally Software boosts efficiency by 10%, offers 15X ROI, saves time, and is cost-effective despite some user challenges.
Overall, the ROI mainly came from improved team productivity, better project visibility, reduced coordination efforts, faster issue tracking, and more predictable delivery execution.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
A return on investment has been seen with Jira, as a lot of time has been saved in arranging tasks, converting software features into epics, tasks, and milestones, making it easy to track progress and plan future roadmaps.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
We implement it and track it with the help of the time tracking feature, which makes it quite easy to manage everything in a single platform.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The ROI is visible, as that's why we are investing in these tools and running our projects successfully through them, despite a few challenges such as role-based access being somewhat difficult.
Sr. Information Architect and Principal Consultant UX at Tech Mahindra Limited
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Jira's support receives mixed reviews, with Premier Support praised, but suggestions for improved efficiency and localized service remain.
Sentiment score
6.8
Rally Software's customer service is responsive, with quick, knowledgeable support and proactive communication, generally satisfying users despite occasional delays.
Jira's customer support is one of the best I have ever dealt with because they respond quickly.
CEO at 2Help
They usually reach out within one to two business days and give specific answers.
Senior Technical Support Engineer I at Krisp
Atlassian's biggest strength is its self-service ecosystem: documentation, community discussions, and integrations.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Jira is generally praised for scalability, accommodating growth, but some users face challenges without customization.
Sentiment score
7.2
Rally Software offers strong scalability supporting large enterprises, despite occasional performance issues, effectively handling significant user volumes globally.
In our experience, Jira scales well across team size growth, multiple departments, larger project portfolios, and complex Agile environments.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
As the number of users, projects, and work items grows, Jira can scale effectively.
Integration Supervisor Lead at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jira supports a growing user base, multiple workflows, integrations, and enterprise-level project management needs.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
If you have a huge database, it becomes difficult to process the data.
Sr Technical Architect at HCLSoftware
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Jira is generally stable and reliable, with occasional slowdowns; most users appreciate its consistency and robust functionality.
Sentiment score
7.4
Rally Software is generally stable and reliable, with occasional slowness and downtime, but users appreciate the responsive support.
It handles team collaborations and large workloads consistently very well.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
Downtime is very rare.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
In my experience, Jira is stable, with around 99% uptime.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Jira's usability is hindered by outdated documentation, complex customization, limited search, stability issues, and difficult third-party integration.
Rally Software struggles with navigation, integration, user-friendliness, and requires improvements in reporting, customization, and workflow efficiency.
Focus more on improving API integration and automation tools, not just the design.
CEO at 2Help
One feature that could improve Jira is the integration of AI capabilities, such as organizing Jira tasks autonomously with minimum human intervention and executing aggregations and clustering of these tasks.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
A simpler user experience for new users is necessary.
Product Analyst at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
At the time of my use, there was not an inbuilt capability to migrate applications from other third-party solutions to Rally Software.
Sr Technical Architect at HCLSoftware
One area for improvement might be the rigidity in role and access configurations, which require many process changes to fit the tool.
Sr. Information Architect and Principal Consultant UX at Tech Mahindra Limited
 

Setup Cost

Jira's pricing ranges from affordable to costly, depending on users, plugins, and transitioning to cloud options.
Enterprise users find Rally Software pricing high but valuable for large-scale agile projects, suggesting a more flexible model.
Even if only five people from your team use a financial plugin, you still pay for all 100 seats.
CEO at 2Help
Overall, Jira offers good value for an organization that actively uses its capabilities, but companies should plan carefully for long-term scaling costs, especially in large enterprise environments with many users and plugins.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
The setup cost is expensive.
Sr Technical Architect at HCLSoftware
Rally Software is affordable because our customers also prefer it.
Sr. Information Architect and Principal Consultant UX at Tech Mahindra Limited
 

Valuable Features

Jira's customization, Agile compatibility, and integrations enhance project management with user-friendly interfaces, reporting, and collaboration tools.
Rally Software offers user-friendly Agile project management with real-time dashboards, customizable reporting, and robust integration capabilities.
You can build your own workflows and make it work exactly the way your team needs and integrate it with almost every third-party software.
CEO at 2Help
Agile boards give instant visibility into what is in progress, blocked, or completed. It provides clear status and ownership, which helps the team stay aligned without constant follow-ups.
Product Analyst at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Jira has helped not only our organization but many organizations to be very focused and understand what needs to be done and to prioritize things effectively.
Senior Technical Support Engineer I at Krisp
Rally Software provides real-time dashboards for different kinds of stakeholders and governance, giving clear insights into project progress, team velocity, and potential risks.
Sr. Information Architect and Principal Consultant UX at Tech Mahindra Limited
I can view configuration item details, such as what is being changed, and I can see any change requests attached to items or configuration items being moved to other locations.
Sr Technical Architect at HCLSoftware
 

Categories and Ranking

Jira
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
283
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (2nd), Project Management Software (1st)
Rally Software
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira is 11.2%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rally Software is 5.3%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Jira11.2%
Rally Software5.3%
Other83.5%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Amit Anand - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Technical Architect at HCLSoftware
Drilling into change lifecycles has given me clear end to end traceability for every item
Reporting is my main area of concern. Additionally, the migration activity and portability are important areas for improvement. If I needed to move from Jira to Rally Software, having built-in portability or migration utilities would be beneficial. At the time of my use, there was not an inbuilt capability to migrate applications from other third-party solutions to Rally Software. Currently, I am not using Rally Software.
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894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user355629 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Corporate Systems and Emerging Business at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Nov 19, 2015
JIRA can do incident management, work configuration, and a lot of other different things. But we haven't found anything as compelling as CA Agile.
The tools are not overly complex for Agile. It appears that CA has recognized that. They're not just building the connector for Rally, but they are also allowing other groups to build connectors from JIRA into CA PPM and from other tools to CA PPM. If you are looking at open source products, why…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business108
Midsize Enterprise61
Large Enterprise152
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise113
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Rally Software?
Rally offers many features that help the management of activities, coordination, alignment and reports, which applies agility across the organization. If I were to highlight a particular feature, i...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rally Software?
Rally Software is affordable because our customers also prefer it, and I have never heard concerns about pricing preventing us from using this tool.
What needs improvement with Rally Software?
While I'm not heavily involved in project management tools, I am familiar with these tools. One area for improvement might be the rigidity in role and access configurations, which require many proc...
 

Also Known As

Jira Software
CA Agile Central, Rally Enterprise, CA Agile Training, CA Agile Coaching, CA Agile Academy, CA Agile Management , CA ALM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Physicians Mutual, Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare, Editora Abril, Tata Communications, Level 3 Communications, Seagate, TomTom, Philips, Hiscox, Physicians Mutual, MYOB
Find out what your peers are saying about Jira vs. Rally Software and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.