it_user149535 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Cost effective application if you are looking to do application development, request fulfillment, incident management...

What is most valuable?

Getting our Service Desk out of a system of stored emails and into a ticket system where we can queue, assign, track, report, and store knowledge has been great for us.

How has it helped my organization?

JIRA was our first experience with ITSM implementation. It allowed us to reduce the amount of tools we were using, standardize our procedures, and measure our work. This allowed us to show the need for additional staff resources, additional training, track our busiest times and prepare for them.

What needs improvement?

Administration: JIRA administration is not as efficient as it should be. JIRA is aware of many relationships but doesn't bother to show them to you on the admin side. Example. JIRA knows what roles I'm using for a project because they are listed in the permission scheme. Rather than just showing me the roles listed in the scheme it will show you every role in the database. This makes the page load slowly and is frustrating to scroll through. There are many other examples of this same function for administrators.

For how long have I used the solution?

31 months
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Jira
March 2024
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No, deploying JIRA in our VM environment was not a problem.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We did have some issues with stability in the beginning. We were pushing the ticket limit is 4.1 and it caused some issues. We later tested the High Availability Clustering and the archival tools for this which were very nice and did work, but were to expensive at the time.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We did have some limitations but that was not an issue after 4.4 when the ticket limit was doubled.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service: Customer service has not been helpful but I have not minded since the wiki documentation and Atlassian Answers forum have been great. The developers I have done beta testing for have also been great. They are good about using your feedback as they design.Technical Support: The wiki and forums are wonderful. I get all my answers from those two sources. Talking to a customer representative has not led to anything useful.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We had a system called EPIC that we had created in house and did not have the functions and capabilities JIRA had. JIRA was also a more cost effective solution.

How was the initial setup?

I did have complexities in the beginning and again as I was scaling but they were not the tool as much as establishing efficient shared processes and procedures.

What about the implementation team?

In-house. Two of use spent time learning the tool and implementing it in our area first and then across the University.

What was our ROI?

In dollars, nothing. We are not charging to use our implementation. In employee resources, project planning, training, staffing, process efficiency, a lot. It would be hard to say the actual cost.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Our original cost was about $2000 for our licenses and hosting costs to get started. We are currently paying about $6000 dollars per year for our current installation.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We tested three or four other options including, BaseCamp, Footprints, Drupal, and a lite version of BMC. We were a small area at the time and JIRA's combination of cost model and function won.

What other advice do I have?

This is a very cost effective application if you are looking to do application development, incident management, request fulfillment, problem management, knowledge management, or project tracking at a low maturity.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Hasan Hüseyin TEZCAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager & Project Technical Leader at C Tech Bilisim Teknolojileri San. ve Tic. A.S.
Real User
Helps to schedule tasks, customize them, and track progress within sprints
Pros and Cons
  • "I have experience with Jira's bulk tracking and issue management. We use it to add new features to our product, fix bugs, and address customer feedback."
  • "Improvements in Jira for the next release could include adding AI tools for dashboarding, making it easier to report insights, and enhancing business intelligence capabilities. It should also improve on-prem support. As far as I know, Jira's on-premise support is being discontinued. From last year onward, they stopped providing on-premise licenses and now only offer cloud support. This shift happened gradually, and I believe they now only offer cloud licenses."

What is our primary use case?

I use Jira to schedule tasks, customize them, and track progress within sprints. We follow a two-week sprint structure and manage all our tasks within Jira accordingly. We use it in the defense industry, and our applications are related to satellite communication. 

What is most valuable?

I have experience with Jira's bulk tracking and issue management. We use it to add new features to our product, fix bugs, and address customer feedback.

The features I find most valuable for work and team productivity are creating subtasks and tracking their completion. Additionally, reporting features such as burnout charts and task reporting are quite valuable for us. 

The tool's integration capabilities with other tools are quite nice. It's an open tool that easily integrates with third-party products like Microsoft Project and GitHub. Integrations work smoothly; we've also integrated it with requirement management tools per our needs.

What needs improvement?

Improvements in Jira for the next release could include adding AI tools for dashboarding, making it easier to report insights, and enhancing business intelligence capabilities. It should also improve on-prem support. 
As far as I know, Jira's on-premise support is being discontinued. From last year onward, they stopped providing on-premise licenses and now only offer cloud support. This shift happened gradually, and I believe they now only offer cloud licenses.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the product for ten years, since 2014. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

My company has 200 users, of which nine to 10 are from my team. 

How are customer service and support?

The documentation and the internet are enough to clear our doubts. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The tool's deployment is easy; I rate it a nine out of ten. It can be completed in two to three days. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The tool's pricing is expensive. The new pricing is indeed quite expensive compared to what it was a few years ago. Last year, when we intended to renew our subscription, we found the pricing considerably higher.

What other advice do I have?

The decision to use Jira on-premise instead of the cloud is primarily driven by security concerns, especially in industries like defense, where sensitive information must be protected.

We want to continue using the tool, but we may have to explore other options due to the lack of on-premise support and Atlassian's emphasis on cloud deployment. If it extends its support for on-premise usage in closed network environments, we would gladly continue using it, considering our current investment and experience with the platform. However, if no such support is provided, we may need to evaluate alternative solutions that can be deployed on-premise.

I recommend using Jira because it's easy to work with and open, allowing for integration and development of additional features if needed. Its ecosystem is vast, with a large community worldwide using Jira, and it offers many add-on products for various needs.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Jira
March 2024
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Manish Bhatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Designer Architect at Tech Mahindra Limited
Real User
Powerful tool for collaborating across large groups of people with a useful search (JQL) feature
Pros and Cons
  • "Jira has been a good l tool for collaborating across large groups of people. The JQL feature is powerful and easy to use."
  • "The Jira dashboards could be more useful. The dashboards have good widgets but the comparison of data over time or extraction of trends from the data is not easy."

What is our primary use case?

Jira is used by my clients across their organizations. They use it for everything related to IT solutions.

How has it helped my organization?

Jira has been a good, powerful tool for collaborating across large groups of people.

What is most valuable?

I use structures as well as the reporting features, personally. The JQL feature is powerful and easy to use. 

What needs improvement?

The Jira dashboards could be more useful. The dashboards have good widgets but the comparison of data over time or extraction of trends from the data is not easy. This is important for us from a governance perspective. Currently, we do this outside of Jira in Excel manually or using other reporting tools. 

Secondly, it would be useful if the graphs in Jira could be more customizable. If you draw a graph on Excel sheet, you are able to do a lot of customizations. Those kinds of customizations are not possible with the current implementation of Jira. 

When you create structures such as hierarchy, including epics and stories, if you change something, the fields are not correlated. This makes the tracking of changes a manual process.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Jira for more than a year, but I'm working on a project which has been using it for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable solution but it can be quite slow. The speed at which Jira operates depends on how it is implemented. 

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Hema Patil - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Affiliate at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
Problem-free with great workflow customization and good reporting
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution is stable and reliable."
  • "I don't know whether there is a Jira problem or a test risk problem, however, sometimes, we face issues on fetching the reports."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution as an ALM, an application lifecycle management tool. 

What is most valuable?

I like the entire workflow customization, which we could set up for our usage.

There are some really great in-built reports.

The solution is stable and reliable.

The scalability is great.

In terms of the initial setup, the solution is easy to implement. 

We've had zero issues with the product. It's been great.

What needs improvement?

Even though I like the reporting part, we have some issues. I don't know whether there is a Jira problem or a test risk problem, however, sometimes, we face issues on fetching the reports. This is when in-between integration comes into the picture. There could be easier integration. It used to be easier in 2016.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using the solution for more than three years now. It's been a while. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The product is reliable in terms of performance. It's stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution can scale well. If a company needs to expand it can do so. It's not a problem.

We have 250 or more users using the solution. We might go up to 300. It's not likely we would pass 400 users. We might increase the usage a little bit.

How are customer service and support?

We've never had issues with Jira and therefore have never reached out to technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used to use TFS.

How was the initial setup?

The product is quite straightforward, especially since it is on the cloud. It makes it very easy to set everything up.

We have three people able to deploy and maintain the solution.

What about the implementation team?

We did not use an integrator or consultant for the deployment of Jira. We handled the process ourselves. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We pay for a yearly license. 

What other advice do I have?

We primarily use the solution ourselves, as customers. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. 

I would recommend the solution to others. It would be ideal if it offered better tool integration, however, other than that, we've never had issues. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Product Owner at Day Insurance
Real User
While scalable, the dashboard is problematic and I feel Azure DevOps to be more user-friendly
Pros and Cons
  • "We have not encountered difficulties with the scalability."
  • "I find the dashboard to be Jira's most problematic feature."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution for software project management and software lifecycles. Jira covers the entire process from requirement analysis to deployment. 

What needs improvement?

I prefer Azure DevOps and Microsoft Ecosystem to Jira. 

I consider Azure DevOps to be more user-friendly and to provide a better user experience. I feel Jira to be a bit difficult to work with. I specifically recall that i encountered difficulties with Jira when I wished to receive or generate a report. Azure DevOps offers a simpler and more user-friendly panel than Jira. Jira's reporting panel is not user-friendly and a bit on the difficult side. Azure DevOps also offers more options for generating queries and reports, especially when it comes to great dashboard visualization capabilities for the monitoring of one's project. This poses a big problem with Jira, as Azure DevOps does a better job of providing this feature. 

I find the dashboard to be Jira's most problematic feature. I do not like it and feel Jira is troublesome when it comes to visualizing the reports. These should be improved. 

Azure DevOps offers more simplified processes, maintenance and development than Jira. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I used Jira for around one year, at which point I left my previous company and made use of it in the new one I joined, where I continued to do so. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I find the solution to be stable, though a bit hard to use. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not encountered difficulties with the scalability. 

How are customer service and support?

We have had no issues with support. As with Azure DevOps, we take advantage of the open community and forums for resolving any issues which may arise. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I prefer Azure DevOps and Microsoft Ecosystem to Jira.

I consider Azure DevOps to be more user friendly and to provide a better user experience. I feel Jira to be a bit difficult to work with. I specifically recall that i encountered difficulties with Jira when I wished to receive or generate a report. Azure DevOps offers a simpler and more user-friendly panel than Jira. Jira's reporting panel is not user-friendly and a bit on the difficult side. It also offers more options for generating queries and reports, especially when it comes to great dashboard visualization capabilities for the monitoring of one's project. This posed a big problem with Jira, as Azure DevOps does a better job of providing this feature.

I find the dashboard to be Jira's most problematic feature. I do not like it and feel Jira is problematic when it comes to visualizing the reports. These should be improved.

Azure DevOps offers a more simplified processes, maintenance and development than Jira.

As with Azure DevOps, we take advantage of the open community and forums for resolving any issues which may arise.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We make use of the solution free of charge. 

What other advice do I have?

My recommendation, for sure, is that a person go with Azure DevOps. 

I rate Jira as a six out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Front End Engineer
Real User
Good interface and overall user experience
Pros and Cons
  • "The JIRA user interface looks great. It's an overall good experience. It's very intuitive in the sense that you understand how it's going to work. It's very self-explanatory, and it's beneficial overall."
  • "So at one point in time, they did a huge UI upgrade. At that time, I felt like they had changed something, so it was hard to figure out. Now that we are habituated, it's not an issue now."

What is our primary use case?

It is helpful for bug tracking in software development. If developers are doing some work and testers notice some defects, they can flag it in JIRA. For example, I track my day-to-day work in JIRA so that others know what I'm working on. They can look at JIRA and don't need to contact me. From JIRA, they can find out that I am working on this project and spent two days on it, etc. It's used for so many things, like task management, bug tracking, and release management. 

JIRA is not for deployment. For deployment, you are going to use some tools like Jenkins. It's meant for all the features that are going into that deployment. 

Different teams within the company use JIRA. For example, everybody in the engineering section uses it, so altogether, that's around 200 people.

How has it helped my organization?

JIRA gives us a lot of visibility. For example, if you're planning to release a given feature, you can track the status of that feature. Is it working correctly, or does it have some bugs? So you have a high level of visibility on the work. 

What is most valuable?

The JIRA user interface looks great. It's an overall good experience. It's very intuitive in the sense that you understand how it's going to work. It's very self-explanatory, and it's beneficial overall. Each release has different steps and phases, and the whole thing can mostly be captured on JIRA. The workflows are really helpful. 

What needs improvement?

So at one point in time, they did a huge UI upgrade. At that time, I felt like they had changed something, so it was hard to figure out. Now that we are habituated, it's not an issue now. We had gotten used to the old interface, so things changed, we felt an initial discomfort. That's the only thing. Otherwise, there is nothing I dislike about JIRA.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used JIRA since the beginning of my career and nothing else.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I haven't had any issues with JIRA's stability so far.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of JIRA has always been good. The response time is always fast. I've never had any issues with scalability. I think no matter how much our usage increases, we'll continue to use JIRA.  But, I think our usage is at an optimal level. 

How was the initial setup?

From our end, setup is basically book-keeping. I can't say much about the overall setup because there is an administrator for JIRA who adds users and sets everything up. I haven't been an administrator. I'm just consuming the JIRA. 

Initially, I think administrators are going to set some things like configuring the workflow should and then how you want to say things. But other than that, if you set it up once, it's going to work. You don't have to do much maintenance.

What other advice do I have?

I rate JIRA nine out of 10. I would recommend it.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Director at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Tailoring of workflows is extremely useful as is the collaborative nature of the solution
Pros and Cons
  • "The customization and tailoring of the workflows have proven to be very useful."
  • "Tracking is important but the built-in features don't meet our needs."

What is our primary use case?

We use Jira to manage all our software development projects and our engineering projects. Our main use of the solution is for the workflows on our different types of projects. It's mainly used by our engineering groups, they have the proper workflows and all of the stats. As a director, I work more at the business level, tracking tasks similar to the new planner that's in Microsoft which some people are switching to. We also use it in the backend of the projects. For project managers and directors, it's more about a to-do list thing that's shared. I'm a company director and we are customers of Jira. 

How has it helped my organization?

The online collaborative nature of the solution has been helpful. Previously, coordination was done in Microsoft Project and Excel spreadsheets. The level of collaboration and the accessibility of the information which Jira offers has greatly improved things and we've also been able to build out and fine tune the workflows and the integration into the different tool sets. We're definitely going to keep using Jira.

What is most valuable?

I think the customization and tailoring of the workflows have proven to be very useful. And then there's the collaboration of the tool itself which has a lot of nice features. 

What needs improvement?

One of the issues is tracking the hours that people spend on each task. I know the solution has some built-in features but it doesn't quite meet our needs. We tried a couple of expansions unsuccessfully. Being able to track the effort on each of the tasks is important for us and we'd also like to be able to compare that with what's been budgeted. It would be useful. We've recently moved to Teams and some of the integration with Teams doesn't seem to work, whether it's not supported or not there, the ability to integrate that would be something we'd like to see. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using this solution for over five years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We're a fairly small organization. We've scaled up to around 500 users and we haven't had any issues with that. It's mainly used by our engineering group, and our active users use it all the time, on a daily basis. We'll increase as we organically grow. 

How was the initial setup?

I can't recall the initial setup but it took us a while to figure out exactly how to use it. We deployed using our own staff. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't know what the licensing costs are but we find them affordable. It's never been a major issue.

What other advice do I have?

This is a powerful tool and allows a lot of collaboration, it's worth spending some time figuring out how your workflows will be, that's where the real value is.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Technical Lead at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Good reporting and visualizations, sprint tracking is helpful, simple and quick to set up
Pros and Cons
  • "The sprint tracking is really helpful and very convenient."
  • "Having more seamless integration with Confluence would really help us track our product management activity and other product details in one place."

What is our primary use case?

We use Jira every day for tasks like tracking product deployments, mapping it to the tools that we use, and sprint tracking. We also used it for audit purposes, where everybody goes back to that for details about each user story.

Each sprint tracking is done in there, as well as the other product-related activities

All aspects of Jira administration help with respect to QA development and deployment.

How has it helped my organization?

This solution allows us to use customized workloads for different projects.

What is most valuable?

The sprint tracking is really helpful and very convenient.

Scrum boards are very easy to follow and we use them every day.

The roadmap, to understand what our team is going, is quite helpful when it comes to understanding things in a visual format. It provides good visuals such as the Burnup Chart.

Requirement traceability is easier to do with this product.

It integrates well with other tools.

What needs improvement?

We have been working on integrating Jira with Confluence for the past months but it is not yet working. Having more seamless integration with Confluence would really help us track our product management activity and other product details in one place.

Integration with BitBucket would allow us to have a better deployment process.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Jira for between four and five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This product is very much stable, and we have every tracking option being used.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It scales well, from what we have seen. We have more than 350 users that are in groups, and perhaps another 150 in addition to that. We are onboarding a lot of teams.

How are customer service and technical support?

When I need support, I contact our in-house technical team. I have not spoken with anybody from outside the organization or anybody from Atlassian.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using the on-premises version until a year or two ago when we migrated to the cloud version.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple and it didn't take much time to complete.

What about the implementation team?

We have an in-house team to deploy and manage our IT solutions. There may have been some outside help initially but everything is now done in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We have an enterprise license that includes cloud service and support.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, this is a very good product and I think that it is the best project management tool. It is used company-wide and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Jira Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Jira Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.