Jira Align alternatives and competitors

Predominantly, we used to have something like Clarity in the past to maintain our project portfolio management, our demand management, and agility management. However, we were not too happy with the analytics and the dashboards in the past with the Clarity product, their PPM product. That is when we migrated to ServiceNow. The main use case predominantly concerns demand management, forecasting, and portfolio management. The whole ITBM right now is also known as Strategic Portfolio Management. It's the whole portfolio across the practice as an entire thing managed through that. It's our whole go-to platform for managing merger planning. It is an enterprise agile planning tool.

The most important feature for us is project portfolio management. That helps us manage and track the entire life cycle of a project or a program at an enterprise scale and across business portfolios. That has been the key differentiator which we use from the product. 

To look at the whole demand management perspective, now we are spread across the globe. We might have different demands coming in from the India region, from UK, APAC, US, et cetera. With this, we can figure out how to manage and forecast the whole business demand. That has been another major use case for us from a demand management perspective. 

The resource manager is useful. If we know the demand, we know the business, how do we tie that up with resource ramp-up, ramp-down? It is not just about a few FTEs. This also includes expanding to an ODC, looking at what we can track, and seeing our resource availability and allocation according to skills, geographies, and levels. The whole resource management has been very helpful in visualizing resources. 

There's lots of innovation within the product itself.

A major improvement we would like to see is definitely around agile management. They have improved over the last many years, in all fairness, yet there are many things they can do from an agile and scrum management perspective. 

What is challenging for us is managing the finance. We still depend upon our classic Oracle NetSuite for many of these financial planning and organizing. While many features exist in ServiceNow, it is not far along with what we have in the Oracle world. Predominantly, we have to manually write the scripts and all the custom rules for much of the whole financial annual planning and monthly planning. 

It's not out-of-the-box. There's a lot of customization, so I'll have to buy an expensive product like ServiceNow and then have a tech deck for it. I'll have to keep a big developer team on staff to build these things out. 

One of the things they should definitely change is the number of out-of-the-box options. The native feature that comes with this financial planning is something that needs to change. For example, if I have to see some of these permutations and combinations, like how I see them on a spreadsheet, I should be able to import them. Everybody doesn't log into the portal. I need to figure out: how can I do it manually, upload it, and then have the XLSM take these macros and run? That is the one automation I would definitely like to see.

The finance teams, they're well-versed in using Excel. I cannot go and insist to them that they should start using my folders. I would love to see some compatibility where we could have something like a spreadsheet in Excel and then put it onto ServiceNow and have it reflected. 

I've been dealing with the solution for about five years now.

The product is stable. Once we have all the initial glitches and migration issues resolved, it's fairly stable. The product challenges we face are not from a whole platform perspective. It's only a customization perspective. Therefore, if I have customized more than a particular set of requirements, it takes a bit of time. If it's out of the box, I don't have to customize anything, and I'm ready to go. However, whilst we're customizing, the platform wouldn't be that stable.

ServiceNow, every six months, launches a new release, a major release. What happens is when the new release comes, for me to upgrade and transition to the new one takes a long time due to my heavy customization. 

From an availability perspective, is stable. However, from a service availability, that upgrade cycle is usually much longer whenever we have to upgrade. 

The scalability is straightforward. You can scale up and down. That should not be a problem.

We do a true-up every month. We know how many licenses we are using. We are in total control of the ramp-up and ramp-down. We are good with that.

We have between 50 to 100 people on the solution. 

I would love it if folks used it daily; however, they login in once a month for the monthly and fortnightly reports. The number of diligent users would be about 20 users. They use it for finance, procurement, and all these things.

We also use Jir, which does an interesting job as well.

The business angle is well defined in ServiceNow products. Azure DevOps or other things are moving from a technical to a semi-technical area, where I cannot bring my business or financial teams to log in and get that focus. The biggest differentiator compared to other options is that it's predominantly from a persona approach. I can actually personify my platform for technical teams, semi-technical teams, and business teams. That has been the biggest value differentiator compared to other tools like Atlassian, maybe Clarity, or even Azure DevOps. 

On the flip side, when I go to my technical teams, they would love to, obviously, log in only to an Azure DevOps or Jira option. 

The initial setup was fairly complex.

We thought we could have everything ready in six to eight weeks' time. However, it literally took us almost six months.

In all fairness, there are some things we also realized afterward. We are premium partners. We realized that, while we say out-of-the-box, it is not actually out-of-the-box. If you are staffing an organization from scratch, it is okay. However, we were already using Clarity and, obviously, spreadsheets. One of the issues which we face was a mindset from people who suddenly had to start using it when they already had methods. 

Discounting that fact itself, many of the customizations and all those modules, configurations, parallel runs, and then going live and cutting over took us more than we thought. 

The configuration of the product takes time. What happens is, while ServiceNow claims everything is out-of-the-box and everything can be easily achieved, many times, for some customizations, we had to raise a ticket with the actual ISVs, or the vendors and then add that. And we have an in-house ServiceNow team. We are not beginners.

We know ServiceNow pretty well. In spite of that, if you have to refer to ServiceNow, it means it's still not that user-friendly compared to others. They're in that space, they're evolving. However, it's more from the configuration perspective where you run into issues. I'd rate the initial setup at a or 2.5 to three out of five. It's not easy. There's a moderate amount of difficulty. 

The ROI is quite high as I can have my team members all on one portal. 

With this product, I have a unified integrated view across geography, across teams, and that helps. That itself allows them to collaborate together. Apart from that, from an ROI perspective, some of our planning and forecasting have been much more streamlined. If you look at ROI from that perspective, it's high.

I'd rate the ROI at a four out of five. It's quite good. 

Since we are a managed service provider, we buy it annually. 

While we might charge back to the business and charge back to our end. We also have some business people, consumers, and customers. For them, we do it monthly. From our direct contracting perspective with ServiceNow, it's an annual fee.

The cost of the solution should not be more than $50,000 annually. 

We use the high-end version; we don't use a standard version. We have many other integration hubs and other things, so it's a bundled product.

From a dollar-to-dollar comparison, they're expensive. They're actually more expensive than, probably, Clarity. They're actually more expensive than whatever you have from a portfolio management option from Atlassian. However, if I look at the whole ROI, it is reasonable. That said, of course, we would love it if the price was reduced.

I'd rate the solution four out of five in terms of value for money.

In ServiceNow, since we are an MSP and a premium partner with ServiceNow, we pretty much cater almost to the entire suite, or at least the entire ITX. That's IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, IT Business Management, and then more or less the governance risk and compliance aspects.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I'm a product owner. So, I'm not really using the product myself on a day-to-day basis, but I've been managing teams and companies using GitLab for four to five years. Besides that, I've been involved in two or three tool selection experiences where GitLab was one of the candidates, and because of that, I pretty thoroughly investigated GitLab.

It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable.

It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful.

In terms of additional features, nothing comes to mind. One of the potential pitfalls is to keep adding new features and functionalities. They can just improve some of the existing features to make it high-end, top-quality. I don't have any substantial experience with agile planning. I don't know the industries GitLab is in, and I don't know why they make decisions like this, but as a customer, I would rather see them invest in improving the basic agile planning functionalities rather than adding, for example, portfolio planning features. That's because if I'm going to do portfolio planning, I probably will also need a lot of business users. I'm not sure if I want them in GitLab, I'd rather have them in Jira collaborating with me on portfolio planning. That's way better fitted for that type of work.

I don't have a strong opinion on that or much experience with that because, in the two companies, we used a self-hosted instance of GitLab where the user base was pretty small with 40 or 50 users. My current client has 300 users, which still is not huge, and we're using a managed hosted server. Its performance is fine. It is not stunning, but fine. I just don't have an insight on how much effort that costs from the hosting party.

It is a scalable product. For my current client, we're looking at doing exactly that. We have been using the basic features, and we're looking into making more use of the security features and static testing unit. We're in the middle of doing that. I wouldn't be doing that if I wasn't convinced about its scalability.

My current experience is with the hosted instance of GitLab. So, there's a company in between.

Before that, I've been having contact with them in the tool selection phase as well as the implementation phase, and I was very happy and impressed with their knowledge and responsiveness. I would be curious to see how it is if you're three years into using the tool and run into an issue. That's because in the phase of being one of the tools you want to consider for CI/CD, obviously, they're very willing and eager to get you on board, and thus are on top of your support request, but if you're a running customer, with three or four years in, I'm curious how their responsiveness and expertise would be. I don't have that experience.

Based on my experience, I would rate them a four out of five. They were very good. If I have a question or we aren't getting support quite quickly enough, I would still feel free to call the account manager I was in contact with back then.

Positive

I haven't done it myself yet, but I have been working with the teams who have, and I would rate it a four out of five in terms of the ease of setup. It's pretty straightforward. That's also one of the strengths of GitLab. For example, for my current client, setting up a default GitLab runner that suits most of the teams was the biggest challenge, which is a compliment to the setup procedure of GitLab because that was easy enough.

It's always difficult to compare prices fairly because features between competitors always differ pretty strongly. 

There are three tiers. The Premium version of GitLab is a no-brainer. If I look at the difference between Free and Premium, I would always go for Premium. For me, that's a no-brainer. In terms of competitiveness, they're doing a great job with Premium. The step between Premium and Ultimate might need a business case in most companies. You get a lot more features, but there is also a pretty steep difference in price.

I'm not sure if they have some kind of discount. I've been negotiating with them on prices before, and I believe they weren't too happy to give discounts, but list prices are $19 per user, per month for Premium and $99 per user, per month for Ultimate. 

So, the difference between Premium and Ultimate is a bit bigger, and in most companies, you need to build some type of business case. If I look at the security testing features that you get, such as compliance and value streaming portfolio mapping, I'm not sure if a lot of companies are directly looking for that in GitLab. I myself would rather, for example, use Jira for that than GitLab, but still, security and compliance for me would be the biggest benefits of going to Ultimate. My current client is in the financial industry, and business cases are built up rather easily. So, in terms of competitiveness of features, they're doing pretty well.

In the last tool selection I was involved in, the main competitors were GitHub and Atlassian. CircleCI was another one, but it wasn't a strong competitor. We were not sure about CircleCI.

The difference between GitLab and GitHub is minimal. They're pretty similar. The difference between GitHub and Atlassian is a bit bigger because Atlassian has several applications. If you were to set up a CI/CD pipeline, you would need Jira, BitBucket, and then bigger pipelines, or Bamboo as a build too. You would also need a couple of tools for user management. You need to set up a tool stack. Atlassian's flexibility is perfect, but if you were to score that on ease of setup, that's probably going to score worse than GitHub. That's a clear difference for me between Atlassian tooling and GitLab.

For me, CircleCI, Jenkins, CloudBees, Concourse, and Travis are doing the same in a way. There's some overlap, but the target audience is completely different. As a big enterprise, you wouldn't be looking at a tool like that very soon. Those are tools that would fit in a pipeline for a smaller company that really values flexibility and a customizable developer experience. In an enterprise environment, you just want one tool that's easy to set up and easy to manage, and GitLab and GitHub are perfect for that.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I am very satisfied with it.

Our client uses Agility in a highly defined way, but it's not flexible. That's what we brought to the table. We handled the transition and mapping to take data from Jira and define a mapping solution in Digital.ai then push that upstream through to Clarity. Then we map the data to terminology because the hierarchies are very different between safe and agile.

They're a siloed organization, but the C-suite executives don't care, and they're not going to change that. They're unwilling to change their software, but they want reports, so they brought us in to reconcile this and push the data that they need to file their financial and forecasting reports. 

Even though if, in the strictest methodology sense, it didn't make that much sense but from reporting it was able to push the data. You wouldn't normally mach, for instance, a feature to an epic. You wouldn't do that because they're not at all the same. Things like that. They took terminology from Jira and they mapped it through to Agility and then took from Agility and mapped it up to Clarity. Actually, that interface was done first, the Agility to Clarity.

Agility is highly flexible. It can do much more than what our client is doing with it. They use it in a defined way. Some at that company have a much broader knowledge of agile and SAFe, but they're given applications and a mandated way to work. We had to work within their parameters and provide an accurate transition so the data would be mapped and pushed through.

In my work as a contractor, it's always frustrating when a client has multiple software applications that don't talk to each other and they all perform the same function. That presents a huge challenge between their IT groups. 

I did not use Agility before this current project, so I've only been using it for five or six months. I don't have a lot of hands-on experience with Agility, but I know Rally and Jira like the back of my hand. In the past, I worked on a project where we used seven versions of Jira, and I had to define a new methodology for the company. 

I've used Jira and Rally in the past, but we're using Digital.ai because it's crucial to our clients. Agility can scale from traditional agile to SAFe. Jira is great, but it's so customizable that you can get into trouble sometimes. At the same time, a lot of companies use Jira. I'm not a flag-waving fan of Jira, but it was the first one in that space, and that's how it got its hold in the market. Today, a lot of other great products have come along. I like Agility's scalability and flexibility. Honestly, I even like Rally better than Jira.

I wasn't involved with the setup. I just deal with the mapping components.

I rate Digital.ai Agility eight out of 10. Before implementing Agility, I would consider your use case and requirements. What were you going to use it for? Is it strictly internal? Are you working with lots of other clients that might default to Jira? 

I recommend defining your use case and deciding if Digital.ai Agility is suitable. I prefer Agility out of the three applications we work with because it has the most flexibility and can work at a higher level. It can also be scaled to profile for either SAFe or standard agile. Having something flexible and scalable gives a company a better opportunity to have a support application that can be used by different business units or technology units within the firm. I recommend doing your homework, looking at requirements, and making decisions. I rank Agility among the top five.

With Leankit, our PMO has a single solution and Program Increment Board to integrate teams and projects and align priorities across the entire program - which consists of 22 Scrum teams. 

It allows us to track our PI goals, sprint goals, dependencies, and impediments across all of the teams creating extreme visibility and predictability for product owners, stakeholders and the teams. With integration into JIRA and the team boards, it allows us to have one single source of truth while not overwhelming the teams with the added responsibility of manually updating their epics, stories, and/or tasks. 

Leankit has made it much easier for us to visualize our progress across our entire portfolio, which consists of 22 Scrum Teams. 

It is now our single source of truth, given the integration with JIRA and near real-time updates. It has made such an impact on the way that our business unit manages programs that we plan to leverage the virtual Kanban boards to enable remote and in-person Big Room Planning sessions. 

It provides visibility and predictability across all of the teams in each PI. It also has been a great roadmapping tool for our product owners.  

The "Blocking" feature has helped our scrum masters track impediments and share them at the program level to stakeholders with accountability and detail so that they understand and the action items which can be noted easily. 

We use it for our Scrum of Scrum Impediment Executive Action Team Meetings daily because it allows us to view all of our impediments in one place and shows us what exactly is being blocked, (i.e. Program Increment Goal, Sprint Goal or an Epic). 

The dependency features are also very valuable as there are many to track in a given Program Increment; that also allows us to review them during our Big Room Planning. 

Our overall impression of Leankit has been very positive, however, our experience with the JIRA integration into our Leankit boards was much harder than we anticipated and that could be improved by simplifying it somehow. They could use some sort of drag and drop approach if possible. 

The requirements to create these integrations are very complex and time-consuming both on our end and the Planview/Tasktop end. Once the integration is set up, the user experience is great, however, the setup itself is difficult. 

I've used the solution for a little over a year.

The solution appears to be handling our setup perfectly. We rarely have issues.

The solution appears to be handling our 22 Scrum Teams, the JIRA integration, and our use across the program. 

So far, we have had a very good experience with customer service and tech support. 

We tried to use JIRA Portfolio, however, it did not meet our needs. Therefore we started looking for alternative solutions. 

The initial setup was fine, however, as I mentioned before, the JIRA integration was a bit complex and time-consuming. 

We implemented through our own EPM Tools Group as well as with a Tasktop representative. 

This has yet to be determined. 

We shared our experience with other PMOs within our company and it led to an Enterprise Agreement. The price was right and the setup was fairly easy. 

We also looked at JIRA Align. 

We're very happy with our decision to use LeanKit for our Portfolio/Program management and we're glad we could spread the word around our company to lead to deeper integration. We look forward to some cool new features.

We primarily use the solution for our internal development and we have some clients that require some consulting around some DevOps functionality.

We use the product for the development process for the repository, for the tracking of the tasks in the boards, and for the pipeline for CINCD.

The test plan is one feature that we are exploring more right now. This is a great feature that we want to deeper into.

We have a solid base. We can do everything with DevOps.

It is possible to add third-party extensions to increase the usability of the product.

The initial setup is very simple. 

We have found the solution to be scalable.

The solution, for the most part, is stable. 

Some things, like project management, tasks, progress, and having work progress views, require us to use some external tools or to create our own internal tools. These are not native to DevOps. It would be ideal if, instead of searching for third-party solutions, they had these feature sets or capabilities included under DevOps. They need to expand the solution's offering.

While I have used the solution for two years, the company has some personnel that have used it for longer. Our development team may have used it for four or five years. 

The product is stable. We had some regional degradations a few months ago, however, it wasn't too much. For the most part, it's reliable and there aren't bugs or glitches. 

The solution is scalable. If we need to expand it we can do so. 

We've never had to contact technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be, as I've never dealt with them directly. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It is not difficult or complex. 

We use the online version. We don't have to deploy the tool. We don't have to put in a lot of effort as we already have the pipelines in the TFS. We just move it to Azure DevOps. 

I'm a solution provider. I sell Azure DevOps and I have a client that was looking to analyze some differences between Jira and Azure DevOps. Therefore, I have evaluated Jira a bit for them.

We are both a reseller and a partner of Microsoft.

We always use the latest version of the solution. 

I would recommend this product to other companies and users. If a company or a team doesn't know how to work with Azure DevOps, the advice I would give is to find someone that knows the tool and do a POC first to make sure you understand everything a bit better before diving right in. 

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.