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Jira pros and cons

Vendor: Atlassian

4.1 out of 5

274 reviews
91% willing to recommend

6,081 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Jira offers flexibility and adaptability, enabling custom workflows to fit team needs. Integration with tools like Confluence and Bitbucket boosts collaboration. Agile features support project management and team collaboration globally. Reporting and dashboards provide insights into projects and performance. Despite versatility through plugins, challenges include performance issues, complex workflow management, high pricing, and limited integration with third-party tools. Hierarchical and release management features face difficulties.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Jira offers comprehensive project management capabilities, enhancing team coordination and tracking of tasks.

Its robust integration potential allows alignment with other tools like Bitbucket and Confluence, streamlining agile workflows.

The customization features in Jira provide flexibility in configuring workflows, fields, and project setups, accommodating unique team needs.

Jira's reporting functionality is valuable for tracking team progress, offering visual insights such as burndown charts for sprint management.

Jira's collaboration capabilities, including comments and notifications, foster improved communication across distributed teams.

CONS

Jira experiences downtime and performance issues, which can affect productivity.

Reporting capabilities are limited and require customization and third-party plugins.

Integration challenges exist with third-party tools, including those for testing and code management.

Complexity in workflows and configurations makes it difficult for non-technical users.

High learning curve and administrative tasks can be cumbersome and time-intensive.

Jira Pros review quotes

RC

Product Manager at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 16, 2021

You no longer need to email people. You can mention them right in Jira and have conversations there.

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reviewer1407036

Senior PM / Scrum Master at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 20, 2021

It was very easy to learn Jira. As a scrum master, I run daily stand-ups, and they are run directly from Jira. The feature that I really love in Jira is called Issue Navigator. It allows me to customize how I want to show the user stories within Jira to my squad.

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GH

Senior Principal Engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Jun 16, 2021

The agile framework works well, and I pretty much live by that. Everything, such as sprint management, is laid out.

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reviewer1690113

Product Engineering & Operations Director at DXC

Oct 9, 2021

In terms of the general way that the tool functions, it seems like it's a pretty good fit-for-purpose for what we're trying to do. We've never thought about replacing it with another technology.

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DM

Consultant at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 2, 2021

It is a good defect tracking tool. It has a lot of capabilities and functionalities. There are a lot of graphs and a lot of tracking. It can be sprint-driven if you want.

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reviewer1443285

Head of Software Solutions at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Nov 2, 2020

It's really smart how they connected third-party vendors into their own marketplace. You can create and add apps. Anybody can do it.

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reviewer1322850

Technical Lead at a mining and metals company with 51-200 employees

Nov 12, 2020

With the help of Jira, tasks are less likely to remain stagnant for a long time. We always see them somewhere on the board.

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MB

Meryeme Bensouda

Global Client Support Operations Manager at kyriba

Jun 24, 2020

This is our way of communicating with different teams. We are a global company. I am based in San Diego, for example. A lot of the BAs are based in Paris. The development team is based in Minsk. We absolutely need to be in constant communication and on the same page.

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Software Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Dec 9, 2021

I was able to do real-time reports myself without having to wait for data import.

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BR

Lead, Tools implementation & Project Management at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 6, 2022

I feel the strongest feature of Jira is its workflow engine. It helps us automate our workflows within our organization. It's the one characteristic of Jira which I think can help any organization, be it in any domain.

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Jira Cons review quotes

RC

Product Manager at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 16, 2021

In Jira, say on the team, no matter the methodology, it doesn't matter what I'm practicing, if I am using the tool for a while and I've compiled some sort of history. If I want to change my workflow, say my team is today using to-do in progress done, and tomorrow, I decide I want to use to-do in review and done, and I apply that new workflow, I have just now effectively lost all of my histories in terms of reporting.

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reviewer1407036

Senior PM / Scrum Master at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 20, 2021

One major issue that I, and even our business stakeholders, have noticed is related to Epic Link. When Epic Link's background color is a dark color, it effectively becomes unreadable. I wish there was a way for us to change the text color of Epic Link in the Issue Navigator view.

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GH

Senior Principal Engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Jun 16, 2021

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.

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Free Report: Jira Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Jira. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1690113

Product Engineering & Operations Director at DXC

Oct 9, 2021

We're doing PI planning, Program Increment planning, and that kind of stuff, and it's not always a good facilitator for that. We tend to pull it out and put it into other tools to manage that, and then we get it back into Jira as that's our system of record for where all the stories are kept. That's probably the biggest headache with it.

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DM

Consultant at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 2, 2021

If they want Jira to be the one-stop shop of the view of all of your deliverables, not just from a defect tracking perspective, but also from a requirement perspective, a code perspective, and a testing perspective, it needs to pull out more data and work better as an integration tool.

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reviewer1443285

Head of Software Solutions at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Nov 2, 2020

Pretty much 70% - 80% of the Next-Gen Projects features are still to be developed.

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reviewer1322850

Technical Lead at a mining and metals company with 51-200 employees

Nov 12, 2020

There needs to be easier integration with third-parties — personally, this is the biggest issue for me.

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MB

Meryeme Bensouda

Global Client Support Operations Manager at kyriba

Jun 24, 2020

Jira has recently updated their UI, but more can be done to make it even better.

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Software Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Dec 9, 2021

There is always a bit of a performance problem. It's a bit slow to load the whole data.

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BR

Lead, Tools implementation & Project Management at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 6, 2022

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.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

Application Requirements Management

Project Management Software

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Jira

OpenText ALM / Quality Center vs Jira

Polarion ALM vs Jira

Rally Software vs Jira

Codebeamer vs Jira

OpenText ALM Octane vs Jira

Jama Connect vs Jira

Jira Align vs Jira

PTC Integrity vs Jira

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) vs Jira

Helix ALM vs Jira

Digital.ai Agility vs Jira

Planview AgilePlace vs Jira

Atlassian ALM vs Jira

See all alternatives

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