Jira Reviews and Pricing

Senior Executive, IT Developer at a insurance company with 51-200 employees

Sep 4, 2014

Our development team and it's functional staff have gained a better overview of the issues that are being worked on

What is most valuable?

<ul> <li>Ability to search old issues.</li> <li>Ability to create your own tags and fields, ie customization.</li> <li>Easy of use. I have trained several non-it people in its usage and they all say it's really easy software to use.</li> </ul>

How has it helped my organization?

Our development team and it's functional staff have gained a better overview of the issues that are being worked on and what issued are getting delivered in a patch.

What needs improvement?

Perhaps a built in "Jira-Capture"

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it at 3-4 different companies over the last 8 years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Current company, only a small userbase of about 25 users. Previous company perhaps 150-200 users - no issues whatsoever. (We're in Norway, not many people here.)

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

Previous solutions ... did not work - to put it mildly.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward setup.

What about the implementation team?

In House

What was our ROI?

Previous product cost us about 100.000 NOK/yearly (USD 15,000/year). JIRA costs us perhaps around 25.000NOK (USD 3,800) on time setup cost with all the plugins we've purchased.

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

Time spent setting things up. Perhaps one or two hours a week on average for one developer.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No, did not evaluate other options, as JIRA fulfilled our need.

What other advice do I have?

Go for it!

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user149535

IT Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 31, 2014

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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

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 technical 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: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user147549

Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Aug 20, 2014

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My deployment was expensive due to the complexities I implemented. Other deployments have been less expensive.

What is most valuable?

Workflow configuration (escalation, workflow chaining, conditions, validators, post-scripting, etc)

How has it helped my organization?

Enforce role- and group-based permissions re: who can drag tickets, and when, on the agile boards.
Instill true SLA-based reporting and escalation to keep work moving seamlessly through the process flow.

What needs improvement?

Workflow management
User permissions
Native reporting capabilities in workflow
Ticket status, etc

For how long have I used the solution?

6 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

The forums and online documentation have been fine. I haven't needed to escalate beyond that.

Technical Support:

The forums and online documentation have been fine. I haven't needed to escalate beyond that.

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

At my previous company they used Assembla. I switched them to JIRA which is more open in its project sharing as well as far more configurable.

How was the initial setup?

JIRA has been very simple to use, no issues.

What about the implementation team?

I've always done the implementations myself.

What was our ROI?

As an enabler of process and procedures, JIRA's ROI can be measured in that regard. Because we treat it like a tool and not an end unto itself, I've never measured it separately just for JIRA.

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

Including all plugins in my last job, ~$15,000 and $7,000 annually thereafter. That was very plugin-centric, however, due to the complexities and user interface solutions I implemented. Other deployments have been less expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Bugzilla and other bug tracking tools were on the docket. We ultimately chose JIRA because of its UI polish and wide range of configuration options. When JIRA added Greenhopper, now JIRA Agile, that made the choice very simple going forward.

What other advice do I have?

Read the online documentation, know what processes and procedures you wish to implement first, and keep it simple. Workflows can collapse under their own weight if they're overly complex for the sake of complexity, simply because "that's just the way things have always been done". Simplify simply simplify.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user147549Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

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Apr 14, 2015

Very small world :)

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it_user147237

Product Development Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 19, 2014

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I like the agile board functionality, dashboards & JQL. I would like to see JQL extended to return other types of info.

What is most valuable?

Coming from projects that rely on Agile / SCRUM, one of the essential features in JIRA is the support for these methodologies, represented by the Agile Board functionality. This is the place where our team interacts with JIRA as part of the daily routine by updating tasks, estimations and adding relevant comments. This is also where Sprint planning takes place and where support for Sprint retrospective and analysis is offered in the form of reports like the burndown chart or the velocity report.

How has it helped my organization?

With the introduction of Agile, the need of having a common, synchronized view on the project tasks assignment, their completion status and the effort spent became critical for a geographically distributed and self-organizing team. Instead of spending time on e-mail exchanges or longer meetings, JIRA provided instant access and a unified view to all the required information, enabling the team to properly apply the Agile / SCRUM methodology and become more efficient in the way they communicate. Being instantly notified when an issue is changed by someone working half way across the globe and being able of giving immediate feedback is a tremendous capability.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see JQL extended to return other types of information than just sets of issues. To give a simple example: a COUNT-like operator to determine the number of issues that match a given criteria. Today this is possible through JIRA's REST API or by writing custom plugins, but it would be nice to have it out of the box directly via JQL.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using JIRA for more than two and half years in several different software development projects.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None so far.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None so far.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None so far.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: I actually found all the information I needed on the Atlassian documentation pages and forums and never ran into the need to call the Atlassian customer service.Technical Support: Excellent so far, considering the fact that the existing documentation gives almost all the required answers without the need to call or e-mail support.

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

In a previous project we have used Microsoft's .NET framework and the suite of support technologies like Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS contains an issue tracking system fully integrated with Visual Studio and the only extra thing needed was the equivalent of an Agile board. This we found in the form of Telerik's TFS Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard, which offered similar functionality to JIRA's Agile Board.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup required a bit of thinking on how to organize and when to use the different types of JIRA issues, what fields are relevant in the context of our team processes and what kind of dashboard information is required, not only for the team but also for the stakeholders. This is not so much JIRA related as it is process-related. Once all of this is agreed upon, JIRA makes things easy by selecting for example Agile SCRUM as methodology, configuring the appropriate issue screens and workflows, defining the relevant filters and adding widgets to the dashboards.

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

I believe this goes together with my earlier comments. The day to day cost of using JIRA is minimal, since each team member shares the responsibility of keeping issues up to date so that the overall status is in sync with the real project status. There are also the occasional changes to JIRA board, issue or dashboards configuration driven by the evolution of team processes, which is a normal consequence of being an Agile team.

What other advice do I have?

I recommend JIRA Agile to anyone looking for a mature, easy to use and customizable issue tracking system, especially in the context of large, geographically distributed teams. I also believe it is important not to spend excessive time trying to configure it to cover every process and situation from the very beginning, but to focus on the essentials first and then adapt as the project evolves.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6912

Owner with 51-200 employees

Mar 6, 2014

Pros: Flexible, Open-ended, Useful default values and fields. Cons: Deep and complex, it takes a while to familiarize

Want Project Management Tool?

I tried OpenProject.org and got frustrated with its performance (because it's Ruby-based ?) and skimpy features. That was what pushed me to go ahead and spend the princely sum of $30 (one time) for JIRA, and two modules (Agile, and Stash, which is a Git web UI), and what deal I've got myself.

JIRA is a platform. And because it is a platform, it is open-ended at what we can use it for. And it's written in Java, deployed in a Tomcat instance, and it gives *me* the choice of which database to use. Kudos for the development team for not strapping customers with MySQL.

Installation

As painless as Wordpress, which is very good. Have a database created (I use PostgreSQL) with its user and password to fill into the web-based installation wizard, and also your SMTP out server settings.

Setup

It takes a bit of reading to get started but given the number of facilities and features available, that's to be expected. Some kind of best-practice steps would be helpful. The most challenging aspect of installation is to get JIRA and Stash to work together. I want both JIRA for Kanban boards, and Issues-tracking, and Stash as a front end to my own Git repository. After bouncing back and forth establishing 2Legged OAuth-based permission, I finally can see my code commits from JIRA, as well as access the Issue from Stash. That is really neat!

Work Tracking

I used JIRA previously in one of the project with my client. We got into the habit of keeping track how many hours I've worked on a particular task by using JIRA, and we got synchronized enough to base our billings on it. Having two measurements is really useful at the end of the project to see the Estimated vs Actual hour. It helped me to estimate more accurately.

Overall, a mature tool that is supported by robust and features that make sense, once we've overcome the complexity and use it for some time.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user335340Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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Dec 17, 2015

JIRA has been developed primarily as an issue and project tracker out of the box, you can use JIRA for requirements management in conjunction with Confluence. Issue Level Requirements

You're able to create a JIRA issue type specifically for requirements with it's own workflow, custom fields and reporting. Subtasks offer a quick way to add and manage your requirements, and you can link related requirements together or with feature requests. I hope this helps.

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it_user6381

Manager of Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

May 5, 2013

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JIRA is good once you've gotten the project started.

Valuable Features:

Maintained by a big company. Simple installation process. Extremely customizable. Front-to end exposure (repository, issue tracking, feature management, etc.). Enormous user base with lots of exposure. Add-on plugins. Excellent documentation and support. We can take advantage of the 10 user certificates of confluence and green hopper. Will be good to use when the project is going to start.

Room for Improvement:

Generally, customization, granted that it is done only at system productions state, is hard and time consuming. Most of functionality that is not required for use of system, cannot be deactivated; you need to dig through all superfluous stuff, in many cases. Even though JIRA documentation is immense and solid, filled with tutorials, you really need docs, to use JIRA, the system is so complex that you need to read docs almost for every customization task and even then, some views are hard to understand.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user116970Works

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Jul 23, 2014

Sorry, Meant bulk change on the tools menu

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it_user795

Senior Manager of QA at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Sep 16, 2012

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JIRA is a versatile tool with good support and is cost effective.

Valuable Features:

Large user base. Great for tracking defects but that's not really all it can do. It is used for tracking "issues" in general. Issues can include Defects, Change Requests, Requirements, User Stories (Agile), Sprint Planning (Agile), Progress Tracking, etc. The pricing is also excellent and they offer flexible subscription plans. Great technical support being a commercial product. Quite stable as hardly seen any downtime in the few years I've used it in different companies.

Room for Improvement:

The workflow and layout can be confusing and takes a while to get used to.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1227

Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jul 20, 2012

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Project management and bug tracking tool suitable for small to medium organizations. Supports a large number of 3rd party plugins

Valuable Features:

Jira is one of best applications used for bug tracking, issue tracking and project management work. It has very good API integration features and supports a large number of plugins like for supporting Crucible, SVN, CVS, Bamboo build integration etc. It can be very easily integrated with other tools provided by the Atlassian. It has a great feature for showing up updates on comments through email notifications. It also supports configuring basic visibility levels for different sections.

Room for Improvement:

Jira is not a highly customizable platform, all you can do is use various plugins and widget to fulfill your needs and if you need more than that, then you might have to look for other project management tools. It is also known to occasionally run out of memory. Customizing the Jira settings and configurations is a bit difficult and complex for first time users. Jira is primarily suitable for small to medium organizations only.

Other Advice:

Jira is one of the best bug tracking, issue tracking and project management tools available in the market. It can be easily integrated with various 3rd party plugins related to project management, source code control systems, code review systems etc. Jira user interface is not very good, but is pretty decent. It is primarily suitable for small and medium organizations

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user474846Customer Relations Advisor at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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Jul 6, 2016

JIRA is great, but it can be overwhelming for new hires. It's also overkill for smaller operations. We used it for 2+ years before finally understanding we weren't using it to it's full potential... But it is great.

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