One of the most popular comparisons on IT Central Station is AgileCraft vs JIRA.
People like you are trying to decide which one is best for their company. Can you help them out?
What is the biggest difference between AgileCraft and JIRA? Which of these two solutions would you recommend to a colleague evaluating application lifecycle management suites and why?
Thanks for helping your peers make the best decision!
Some of the fundamental difference between AgileCraft & Jira are
1) Jira was originally a bug tracking tool that has been modified to try and support Agile projects. AgileCraft was developed out of the box with Agile in mind.
2) Jira data structure is flat which means creating a hierarchy for rolled up reporting is problematic even with the 3rd party plugins.
3) AgileCraft was designed to support enterprise level Agile/SAFe while Jira was not and struggles in this area
As JIRA has a low CapEx it is attractive to a lot of people and there is a large user community. The OpEx, when you consider all the plugins you may need to acquire to do what you want , can create a annual cost that is equivalent to other ALM solutions.
Given this large user base other vendors (including AgileCraft) have created ways to stack their products on top of Jira to allow that user community to scale it. This is great for those that do not want to simply get rid of their Jira implementation. Jira is fine for small single team use but I am not a fan of it for larger enterprise wide programs that use SAFe or other enterprise Agile frameworks
Given the recent announcement of Atlassian (Jira parent) acquisition of AgileCraft it will be interesting how they blend the two product together.
Agree with Duane's comments for the most part. The two tools serve very different purposes. Where I disagree a bit is that Jira can be and is used by very large organizations to manage work. However Jira does not provide support for working across a set of related projects and services. This is what Agile Craft allows you do to - plus AC brings other capabilities like value stream management, a greater level of portfolio and business management, and management of delivery across a large set of programs.
It will definitely be interesting to see where Atlassian takes things.