Jira Reviews

I use it to manage my scrum projects and some of the Kanban projects.

In terms of version, they have been updating it every three weeks. It is a kind of a sprint that they do, just like Google Chrome. So, there is no going back and forth. We use a cloud-based application. So, it is always the updated one.

The type of cloud depends on the client. I've been through all kinds of situations: completely public, semi-public, and private. If it is a public cloud, then it is directly from Atlassian. They are providing it. So, there is no middleware.

It definitely streamlined the process of managing the projects. Earlier, we had a system scattered all over the place. We had information in Excel, Microsoft Project, and some of the other applications that we have, but now, we have everything in Jira itself. So, we create user stories and groom the product backlog. We have kept everything in Jira. It is our single source for project information that anyone can go to. So, we could see a lot of transparency with Jira.

Overall, it is very intuitive. It is so lightweight and easy to use. It is easy to manage our product backlog and user stories, and it produces great reports.

It is good for single projects, but if you have to manage the portfolio level of the projects, they have a few add-ons that we need to buy and integrate. They can improve this part to manage it in a better way.

It is not capturing the number of hours for which each person has worked on certain things. We use many add-ons to let resources enter the time in the user story itself. We use an add-on called Tempo, but it is kind of a lousy add-on. It is not straightforward. Rather than helping us, it creates a lot of confusion. So, instead of looking out for the additional add-on, I would prefer to have the timesheet entered as a part of Jira itself. They are anyways capturing every information they could for each user story, and then we are able to break down all the task lists. For each task, we're also assigning a resource. So, while we're doing it, why can't they allow the users to enter the time that can be created as a report? Right now, we need to acquire the add-on, and the add-on is not great. It is not helping. The add-on is also not free.

There could also be some additional reports.

I have been using Jira for seven to eight years.

Stability-wise, it is very good. It is very lightweight. I have used other enterprise-level products to manage the same kind of scrum and Kanban projects and other projects. Other products have many enterprise-level features, but they're very slow and kind of hard to manage.

It is a cloud-based one, so I don't see much difficulty in scaling it. If you want to go from 100 users to 200 users, you will be able to do it without much hassle.

I've been doing a lot of consulting. So, I've seen from five users to the entire organization with more than 500 people using it.

I did contact them through email and discussion forums. I had a limited opportunity to work with them. So, I don't know much about their support.

Jira is a kind of the last one I settled on. Before that, I have used products such as Rally and VersionOne. These two are enterprise-level scrum and Kanban tools that are similar to Jira. 

I have also used Asana and Trello. Trello is lightweight, but I wouldn't call it equivalent to Jira. Jira has many features that not many solutions have. 

Most of the time, we are working with the cloud-based one. So, we don't have to set up everything. It is all there. You just buy a monthly subscription package. The workflow configuration, however, would be a bit difficult while you're trying to set it up. In addition, if you have to go down to the permission level, it is a bit different.

Workflow-wise, you need to plan well because once you configure it, you cannot often change a workflow. For each project, the workflow might be different. You might have a development team, a QA team, a configuration team, and a deployment team. When you start a task, you just need to make sure you are covering everyone. In terms of the workflow, you should know what would happen if someone is not there, and what are you going to do. So, you need to make sure that you are covering those things. Other than that, you need to know how much you are going to take care of the hierarchical level permissions. These are two primary things, and then, later on, you can relabel quite a lot of things in terms of how you're using the backlog product and user stories.

I would rate Jira an eight out of 10.

It's pretty much for engineering development, Scaled Agile purposes for engineering development, for managing basically the epics and the stories and the capabilities and everything that we have to deliver in sprints. We're not using it as a ticketing tool or anything like that, for operations. We're using it purely for managing the development stuff in a Scaled Agile manner.

The solution is easy to use. It's pretty dynamic. It allows us to basically handle everything that we need in terms of a backlog, and we're trying to do it in an organized manner, so we know who works on what and how to size the story points so we can ensure that our epics burn down from sprint to sprint.

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. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The stability is pretty good.

There are a few things about it that I think need to be improved in terms of the ability to build reports. We would like to be able to use the data from Jira to help drive Gantt chart roadmap-type views of not only what we're building, but rather where we're going.

What we've elected to do in a couple of cases is just pull the data out of Jira and then pull it into Power BI so that we can try to get some of the more sophisticated information that we want out of it. We actually experimented with building portfolio views so we can see stuff in real-time. In some ways, it's okay. In some ways, it's just a little lethargic for our purposes.

We'd like to be able to manage things in real-time and by looking at stuff. 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.

For some of the portfolio stuff that we did, the queries were so complicated that it was just taking forever. It was like watching paint dry for the results to come back. We would be in a meeting and then we'd hit a refresh and you're waiting for what seems like an eternity.

The solution could use API integration to take feeds from other tools so that we can read them better. We got one camp using an ITBM tool from ServiceNow. We have Jira running in this other area, and having an API between the two so we could actually collaborate between the two tools. However, API integrations with other tools would be helpful so we could either take data out of it or put data in it, thereby making it more of a data-driven platform that integrates nicer with other platforms. That, I think, would be something I would like to see.

I've been using the solution for four years or so. 

I haven't heard people really complain that it's unstable. We haven't had very many performance issues with it. I don't know if it was a network problem or what it might have been, however, I haven't really heard people talk about performance problems other than when we were trying to use it for portfolio views and that got kind of weird as queries were just complicated. Beyond that, the stability has been fine.

The issues that we have with scalability aren't necessarily with the tool as much as it's how we're using it. We're a big company so there are a lot of people using Jira, however, we don't really see how the projects correlate across different activities within the company. When we're trying to get two integrated roadmaps and trying to get to a point where we're collaborating, doing inter-sourcing of a solution, and we're all in Jira, there are times where we're in it and yet we can't collaborate and work together, and so we start replicating things across the two projects.

I don't know how much of that is the issue with using it how we are versus the product itself though. 

We have 8,000 to 10,000 people using the solution currently. That's across many departments. We are a company of around 150,000 people. There may be people using it that I am not even aware of. I only have visibility of what I'm doing and what I'm exposed to in terms of integration with offerings and that kind of stuff. I know when we were managing licenses, we used to have a DevCloud team. For their scope, it was in the 8,000 to 10,000 user range. 

The solution is being pretty extensively used. Likely usage will grow as the company grows and takes on new business. I don't know if it's going to organically grow exponentially as it's already being used where it needs to be used and currently we're only using it for development activities across the different offerings and platforms. It's not used as a day-to-day run-and-maintain ticketing system to manage customers or issues or anything like that. I'm sure there'll be some incremental growth as we take on new business and grow as an organization.

We use Jira. We use Confluence as an extension of that, and then we also use ServiceNow, the ITBM capabilities of ServiceNow as well.

We had a DevOps team that ran our cloud environment, and they basically spun up a project for us, and it was pretty straightforward. It's not like we were installing it in the cloud. People just said, "Here you go, and you can just start using it." After that, we just created a project for what we were doing, and then we were on our way. I wasn't really involved with any part that was problematic or anything.

In terms of maintenance, pretty much everybody is maintaining their own instance. We've got somebody that manages what's in the cloud for the company, however, it's pretty much hands-off in terms of day-to-day support issues. We had a few people that were supporting it when there were problems, however, it's just a handful from what I understand.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I don't know what the latest version of Jira is, however, I'm pretty confident we are.

The advice I would give is it's not a solution for a novice person that doesn't know Scaled Agile. Users will get out of it what they put into it, and if you don't know what you're doing you could set yourself up for a nightmare when you're using the tool. My advice is that the better you structure yourself and understand Scaled Agile and how you want to set up the project the more successful you'll be at using it for your organization's purposes. If you're going in there as a novice that doesn't understand anything about Scaled Agile you could create a mess for yourself and then it won't give you the value you are seeking.

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

We are using it for project management.

It helps everyone to be on the same page.

Its integration with Bitbucket, Confluence, and other related products that Atlassian owns is most valuable.

If CI/CD is integrated with it, it would be better. I've used Azure DevOps before, and it's nice to have everything, such as CI/CD Repos and other things, integrated. Jira has fewer integrations. Azure DevOps has an easier interface, and it has got everything in one spot. I don't have to jump around in different applications.

It should have more Trello-like features. There are some things you can do in Trello, but you can't do them in Jira, which doesn't make any sense because Jira bought Trello.

It looks pretty solid.

It looks scalable. I haven't seen any issues.

It is being used extensively at the moment in our organization. Currently, IT departments are using it.

I have not interacted with them.

I wasn't around during the setup.

It has a lot going on. They own Bamboo, but right now, we're using Jenkins. 

I have used Azure DevOps at another company. I would advise going for Azure DevOps because it has everything. You've got your DevOps, and you have your Repos. Everything is integrated.

I would rate Jira a six out of 10.

I use the solution in my company as an ITSM tool. Our company's service desk and those working with the engineering team use the tool.

The integration between Confluence and Jira, along with Jira's ticketing system, is a valuable feature the product offers its users.

I opted for Jira since it was offering ITIL V4, and there seems to be a compatibility between ITIL V3 and ITIL V4.

From an improvement perspective, it would be better if Jira could offer more in the area of data analytics similar to what Power BI and Qlik offer to users. The tool currently lacks in the area of data analytics.

Jira needs to consider lowering its prices considering the competition in the market.

I have noticed a problem with Jira in the Philippines. In the Philippines, there are only a few companies that offer local support, which is alarming. In my previous company, when we requested support, basic support was not provided, and we had to schedule and deal with everything on our own.

I have been using Jira for around two years. I am a user of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

It is a pretty much scalable solution.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with ManageEngine and ServiceNow. If I need to deal with a project involving retail business, then Jira would be a poor choice because dealing with a retail business requires a tool to have an approach different from what Jira offers. Compared to ServiceNow, Jira is a bit better.

The product's initial setup phase was straightforward.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The solution can be configured within a week or so. If there are changes to be made in the solution, then it requires more time to configure it.

If I compare Jira's licensing model with that of other products, I think that the other products have a much better licensing model. Considering what is happening in the market presently, and as people are moving away from Jira and ServiceNow, more and more people have started embracing cheaper products in the market. I rate the product's price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

It is important to know that my company uses the free version of the solution since we are not a big organization. My company is currently looking into the configurations and other areas before going for the paid version of the solution.

Performance-wise, Jira is a good solution, but the problem lies in the part of its licensing area.

I rate the product's price an eight out of ten.

I am an Agile coach and consultant, and my clients use Jira to manage Agile teams, including tracking and gathering reports on performance at the team level as well as the team-of-teams level.

Since I work with different companies in my consulting work, there are different versions and implementations of Jira that I deal with. Most of the time I work with Jira on-premises, although I have worked a few times on the cloud edition.

In the near future, I most likely be using Jira Portfolio instead of the regular Jira because that will be my new responsibility.

I enjoy working with (and can recommend) Jira for a number of reasons. The best features are that it is friendly and provides good visibility. It's to the point and very effective.

When I start work with a company, one of the promises I give them is that they will get visibility, and very quickly at that. We are able to easily create boards and have the teams start work with story points. Then, we will make use of the Structure feature, which is another good feature that we get benefit from. 

In terms of the general Jira software, one element that is missing is budget management. Perhaps such functionality exists in add-ons, however. Once, several years ago, I tried to use one such add-on (the name of which I can't recall) but I dropped it because it was not effective enough. If we had this feature, I think we could provide the whole picture to top management.

I have been using Jira for about five years. 

It is stable. 

It's not scalable enough, in my opinion. To explain, I have a specific level of understanding of Jira so I am able to make specific customization to support activities at scale, but I don't feel like Jira is easily scalable out of the box. It's not always natural to scale up Jira without customization.

The technical support that I receive is not necessarily talking with any Jira support team, but rather it involves using the community's help from the internet.

On one hand, this avenue of assistance is quite good because I can often find answers there, but sometimes it's not enough. In these cases, Jira will ask to open a ticket and to vote on it so it gets priority. But it's frustrating because we might still not get answers, or we don't find anyone able to handle our issue for months or for years.

Overall, and for most problems, I think I have enough documentation so I can figure out what to do and how to do it. When compared with other tools, I think that Jira's documentation is clear.

I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position.

For application lifecycle management, I can definitely recommend Jira and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

What I like most about Jira is that it's flexible. It has the flexibility to be configured for any company.

An area for improvement in Jira is that it's not designed for test management. To use it for test management, you need an add-on or several add-ons, e.g. the most popular is Xray, or you can add Zephyr.

An additional feature I'd like to see included in the next release of the solution is the check in and check out feature for the test assets.

My team and I are currently dealing with Jira.

Jira is a stable solution.

I find Jira scalable.

The solution is very reliable, so support is not contacted often, but they are responsive.

Deployment of Jira can be completed within a few days. The number of people you use for its deployment still depends on the company size, but on average, you can use from one to two people for deployment, per week.

I was able to evaluate Micro Focus ALM.

I'm at a professional service company, and I'm the manager, so I don't work with any solution, e.g. my team works with the solutions. My team works with Jira plus Xray, then Azure DevOps, and Micro Focus ALM.

Micro Focus ALM is a very powerful solution, because you can link from the requirements to the test plan and the test lab. In the test lab, you can aggregate the test cases that you want to execute, including defect management. You can incorporate all these into a release, and inside this release, you can have several execution cycles. I'm referring to the functions of all the assets, e.g. functional testing. Jira doesn't have versioning, compared to Micro Focus ALM, so you can have different and fresh versions of the same asset. You can do that using different names, but Jira is not as well-designed as ALM.

I'm rating Jira an eight out of ten.

I use Jira for user stories, tasks, bugs, track releases, track backlogs issues, burndown, and test reports.

Jira has helped our company because it is easy to track releases and deployments. It is easy to track which tickets have been done or are still pending and left to be completed.

Jira's most valuable features are ease of use, simple to understand, and highly flexible. Additionally, you can use kanban or scrum which is a benefit.

The reports in Jira can be improved, especially for test reports. I find it difficult to customize and integrate for different testing purposes.

The out-of-the-box version of Jira has minimal to no testing functionality. I have to use Zephyr to be able to track testing. The time logging is also not easy to use, or user-friendly.

In the next release of Jira, there should be test cases in the test reports. Better burndown and burnup reports should be enhanced. Additionally, the usability of time logging could be better.

I have been using Jira for seven years.

Jira is stable and reliable, we have not had an issue.

I have found Jira scalable.

We have approximately 50 people using the solution in my organization.

I use the solution extensively in my organization, I use it daily.

I have not contacted support from Jira.

When I came to this company I had already used Jira. Previously, I was using quality control from Quality Center and Azure DevOps.

The initial setup was straightforward overall. The process takes only 10 to 15 minutes. However, the setup could improve.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house.

We have two administrators that do the patching and maintenance of the solution.

I would recommend Jira to others.

I would advise others to be sure to do the reports correctly because there can be some challenges in reporting and in the testing phase.

I rate Jira an eight out of ten.

For the past two years I have been administrating Jira for our enterprise organization, in which there are about 300 end users. Apart from an administrator, I'm also a hands-on Jira user now.

Our main uses for Jira include asset management, project management, Scrum project tracking, Kanban projects tracking, and cost tracking, as well as productivity measurement.

I feel the strongest feature of Jira is its workflow engine. It empowers us to 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. Also, its Scrum tracking capabilities are a great help, and these come out-of-the-box with Jira.

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.

Then, on top of that, we have to keep paying the maintenance charge for those third-party applications along with Jira's maintenance cost. The functionalities of some of these plugins are pretty basic, which a user would expect out-of-the-box, instead of having to pay repeatedly for it.

Also, on the security front, if Jira could have a default, inbuilt encryption mechanism for all the data it stores, it would help organizations which handle sensitive data like healthcare or financial sectors.

I've been using Jira since 2020.

It's pretty stable and I haven't had major issues with it.

The current deployment is not that scalable. But when we go for an alternative deployment model such as the data center model, it's scalable.

We were on the server model for Jira, which is being discontinued in 2024. The data center model is pretty scalable. I think that shouldn't have any issues, but it is limited. I think the data center is limited to only two instances of Jira running in parallel. That should be sufficient, and I think with data center being the only on-premises deployment model, I think it's all right to have that.

Overall, I'd rate the support an eight out of ten. I don't see any glaring shortcomings but I do see certain things which could be addressed better in their support rather than just providing documentation and saying, "Please follow this documentation."

If they could provide on-call support for some of the issues and give us a path to follow, that would be sufficient. They don't need to sit down and resolve the issue for us. But if they could point us in the right direction, I would be satisfied with that.

That said, we do get that kind of support, sometimes. There is personalized support and we have a dedicated Jira expert who helps us with our tickets. But if we are stuck, and we are not able to find a solution for our problem, then we should have a second level of support, which could be an on-call support. That would help us better.

Positive

It was straightforward to set up Jira, even though it was on-prem. But to set up the supporting modules for Jira, like the web component (e.g. Apache) or the database component, requires a little bit more effort. The Jira application does provide support on that front, but the support is pretty limited, because they do not vouch for the other modules that aren't built in to Jira.

Apache is a web server that interacts with Jira and I think they should better support the deployment of Jira with web servers at any enterprise or cloud-level. That should be provided as part of the deployment journey itself. As it is currently, their support that helps us integrate Jira with Apache comes off a little short.

We have our own compliance team who applies security patches and those patches are available from Jira directly. The maintenance is pretty easy and we pay a maintenance fee for Jira software. If there is any issue with downtime or service is completely stopped and we are not able to handle it, Atlassian provides us their support. Maintenance is not much of an issue with Jira.

The license model which we were on was a perpetual license model, which is the server edition of Jira, but that is being discontinued by Atlassian, which I can understand from their standpoint (in order to better compete). The server model means that we buy the license and we do not pay anything for the licensing part year-on-year. It means it's a lifetime license, but we do pay 50% of the license fee for the maintenance with the server. That is the recurring cost for us.

When we go into the data center model, which is the only on-premises model that we have, and the cloud offering from Jira, Jira Cloud, then you can see that both of them are subscription-based models. Data center is a yearly license, and as for the cloud, you can either pay monthly or yearly, depending on your requirements.

But this kind of licensing structure is actually a little heavy on the organization when it comes to the budget, I would say. The licensing which we had was a perpetual license with a year-on-year maintenance charge which we had to pay, which was half of the licensing fee.

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten.