"Great for tracking my development team's productivity."
"Kanban boards are most valuable"
"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."
"We can create multiple boards for the same product backlogs."
"It's flexible and it can provide a lot of different options, such as dashboards, that you can create and manage."
"It provides very good visibility and traceability. You can clearly see each and every part of a process. It is also user-friendly and robust. It is working well, and there are a lot of add-ons or plug-ins out there that you can use."
"I was able to do real-time reports myself without having to wait for data import."
"I like the test cases in Jira. The orange dash items view was great, and I like the features and layout of the data. It's quite different, and people are now getting their items so quickly."
"It's user friendly. We haven't had any issues so far. It's flexible. If we need something, we can always contact the owner in our headquarters to make a configuration."
"The most valuable feature is integration, particularly if you have a .NET application."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is integration."
"Team Foundation Server (TFS) is easy to use, and we have a complete trail and traceability. We also like the access control part."
"User alerts are very helpful for knowing when work is required."
"For what I need TFS for, I have never run into any limitation."
"The solution is very much stable."
"The most valuable feature from my point of view is project management, which includes user stories as well as task management."
"If Jira would be interested in offering a SharePoint version, it would be beneficial."
"Once a story is closed, all the records, versions, and documentation associated with it are gone. We lose the traceability of what was done."
"The next-generation software projects lack a lot, and I found quite a few bugs. There are some really basic things that you still cannot do. For instance, to put a mandatory due date for a task that you create in one of these projects is still not available. That's a bit of a block because people, especially those who are not technical, are not going to add anything if it's not mandatory. It's going to be difficult to teach them that they should do it anyway."
"Could be more stable with more integrations."
"The features are not intuitive. It would be good if there were templates."
"It should have Behavior Driven Development (BDD). There should be an option to add macros to help with that. A lot of people are using it now, and it would be nice if there was a way in there to be able to generate the BDD of commands whenever you're creating a story."
"Lacks field-level permission in the cloud version."
"Slow when integrating with other components."
"They have room for improvement in merging the source code changes for multiple developers across files. It is very good at highlighting the changes that the source code automatically does not know how to handle, but it's not very good at reporting the ones that it did automatically. There are times when we have source code that gets merged, and we lose the changes that we expected to happen. It can get a little confusing at times. They can just do a little bit better on the merging of changes for multiple developers."
"Currently, we are looking for a solution with which we can incorporate third-party development sites or third-party project teams into the system. Because it is on-premise, it is a bit problematic because we need to have a VPN or something else in the system. A cloud-based solution would be better for us, and that's what we are looking for. Our biggest problem is the external connection, which, of course, is limited by our own IT. It would be good to have some kind of publishing service for this external connection. It might be there, and it might be that our IT is making it impossible for us. Its template editor could be easier to use. Currently, customizing the project templates according to your needs requires some work."
"The dashboard and the customization of dashboards is an area they have to work on."
"The project management side should be addressed and the project and release planning should be somewhat extended."
"The reporting functionality is something that they should work on."
"The execution of test cases could stand improvement."
"There's not automatic access to test case management and execution."
"I'm looking for specific options that aren't currently available, such as active status, new status, or what's currently in progress."
Jira is ranked 1st in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 151 reviews while TFS is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 21 reviews. Jira is rated 8.0, while TFS is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Jira writes "Great for collaboration, very stable, and extracting data is straightforward". On the other hand, the top reviewer of TFS writes "It is helpful for scheduled releases and enforcing rules, but it should be better at merging changes for multiple developers and retaining the historical information". Jira is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Micro Focus ALM Octane, IBM Rational DOORS, Polarion ALM and Rally Software, whereas TFS is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software, Visual Studio Test Professional, Micro Focus ALM Quality Center and Zephyr Enterprise. See our Jira vs. TFS report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors.
We monitor all Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
We use both. It depends on your application and your budget.
For us, the Atlassian suite of tools required to do end-to-end ALM processing is very expensive (currency conversions also does not help). We, therefore, only use JIRA as an incident/support/planning tool.
We are a Microsoft partner and hence the VSTS/TFS tool suite is much more affordable to us. The visibility of this tool from backlog item to code, build test and released into production is amazing, but it lacks some of the basic admin capabilities that are well automated in JIRA e.g. as tasks are moved, the status of parent items/stories/epics are not automatically updated in VSTS. This adds a lot of admin overhead for product owners, scrum masters and team members.
If it weren’t for budget, the Atlassian suite will be my first choice. If you combine, JIRA, Bitbucket, and Bamboo you would get the same visibility.
We also use Confluence extensively as all our documentation are done Wiki style. We found SharePoint just becomes a repository and not a knowledge share platform.
Hope this helps!
Shout if you have questions.
Both products share a decent amount of market share. I prefer the use of TFS when conducting .NET development due to the ease of use with the Microsoft IDE. If this is the primary basis of the development effort - perfect. If on the other hand the development is spread across a variety of languages & technologies, or the development landscape is varied and primarily open, JIRA becomes the platform of choice. TFS seems great in small team settings, while JIRA seems more easily applied to large, distributed development teams.
The best comparison would be Atlassian toolset Vs TFS. What is covered in TFS can be covered with the different Atlassian tool sets. The integration between the different Atlassian tools is quite seamless but you are not bound. Most tool sets provide an integration with Jira. For great automation I appreciate the Jira (Atlassian) ecosystem. There are several plugins that cover most needs. However other issues such as your current needs,skills, budget, company size and tools should be taken into consideration. And the best ROI is to get the free versions and try them out both can do the Job and even Microsoft shops developing with Visual Studio can easily integrate with Atlassian tools.
Jira alone does not provide all the capabilities of an ALM; typically it will integrate with an ALM solution such as Zephyr or Micro Focus ALM in order to provide ALM-type capabilities, such as end-to-end governance and traceability of development/test assets.
Likewise, TFS (Team Foundation Server) also requires another component which is client-based called VSTS/Visual Studio Team Services to provide full ALM capabilities.
Usually, a choice for TFS is made when the development technology stack is based mainly on Microsoft, such as .NET. The Microsoft suite comprising .NET, TFS, and VSTS is an entire ecosystem that serves that technology stack very well. It is a licensed solution.
If the development technology stack is more diverse, e.g., includes Java, Python or other similar technologies, then a solution that includes Jira (which is open source) plus Micro Focus ALM or Zephyr (which are licensed) tends to be more popular. The integration of all the diverse technologies tends to be better with Jira.
Let me know if this helps, or requires more explanation.
Both are good, it depends on your operation and requirements.
1. Are you looking for flexibility interface? If so, JIRA is easier to use than TFS.
2. Are you looking for Reports Analytics? Again, JIRA is better than TFS.
Jira is a "great to integrate" part(!) of an ALM solution. VSTS (cloud) and TFS (on-prem) are much more complete because they already provide version control, work item management, reporting, continuous integration, continuous delivery, wiki, manual and automated test, ...
I would always prefer to use VSTS over TFS over Jira because VSTS does always include the newest features from VSTS/TFS, but both provide a much more complete solution than Jira and I don't want to spend my time to configure integration between different systems.
In the past (when working as a consultant), I migrated a Java-only-team to TFS and the only complaint was that the build system did not provide a way to see the output of maven in real-time ... this has been fixed some years ago.
One important aspect is the know how that is available on the team. If you have great know-how with using Jira and how to integrate it with other ALM parts, it might be a better solution to go that way. If you are new to both, I would recommend TFS/VSTS because you will have a more complete solution with seamless integration of all parts in a shorter time.
For complete ALM, I would consider MicroFocus ALM Octane? I have worked at a shop where I used and was an administrator of JIRA. As Rene stated, it's not an ALM solution. Take a look at this Octane demo - https://www.goconsensus.com/app/view/p/q33mf86w?autoplay=false
Rene's response is correct. Jira is a project management tool. If your goal is just to manage a project Jira might be the best choice for you. If you want an ALM suite and you are a Microsoft shop (even if you are a Java shop) then my recommendation is using TFS.
TFS 2018 is a full ALM suite for managing project, managing code repository, deployment management, etc.) I know before TFS is strictly known for source code repository but over the years they have grown and even know they have a capability to support GIT.