Jira Software Reviews, Demo & Pricing – 2023

Our decision to transition our project management systems fully to JIRA is one of the biggest regrets I have made for our company. In addition to the cons notes above, things that should be core features are missing or available as a 3rd party plugin, for extra $$. What’s worse is that Atlassian has a plugin system with half of the plugins only available for the server version and then they don’t build features that should exist in the core product because they are available elsewhere… as long as you use the server version. Run AWAY from this JIRA as fast as you can!!

PROS

If you are willing to do the work, the advanced search is useful and the user experience isn’t bad except that to eliminate done tickets you have to deselect all then re-select every option except those of a done type.

CONS

Advanced search is the only useful way to reliably get information out, making getting even the smallest view of your data onerous. The core advantage of the tool – it’s lack of structure – make it difficult to complete even the simplest of tasks without a ridiculous amount of effort. It’s biggest failing is that everything is too flat by default. For example, I am working on a project now and the team has made duplicate tickets because the original tickets are too hard to find and are just dumped on the screen… we have sometimes used epics/stories/sub-tasks with sprints but these are truly inadequate… in today’s time why should someone have to spend 20-30 hours a week grooming the backlog and writing searches when if the tool was any good it should (!!) be able generate these views automatically. We are now investigating other solutions like Wrike (absolutely no affiliation, not even sure we will switch to it) and in 10 minutes of testing we were getting views that we have been struggling to get out of JIRA for over a year. Also, you can’t do something obvious like make a reminder in the future for a ticket, so you either get flooded with reminders for just about everything or you have to go outside the product to remind you to do something in JIRA. Seriously!?!