JIRA Portfolio vs Jira Align comparison

Jira Align and JIRA Portfolio are both solutions in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category. Jira Align is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8, while JIRA Portfolio is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.3. Jira Align holds a 4.7% mindshare in EAP, compared to JIRA Portfolio’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Jira Align users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of JIRA Portfolio users who would recommend it.

Jira Align

Read 41 Jira Align reviews

2,780 Views
1,688 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

JIRA Portfolio

Read 58 JIRA Portfolio reviews

711 Views
593 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Jira Align

JIRA Portfolio

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Jira Portfolio and Jira Align compete in the project management category. Jira Portfolio has an advantage due to its adaptability to agile frameworks and integration capabilities.

Features: Jira Portfolio offers a centralized database, configuration flexibility including workflow settings, and agile reporting capabilities. Jira Align provides strategic planning tools, program-level reporting, and is ideal for managing large-scale, multi-project environments.

Room for Improvement: Jira Portfolio users desire improved tool integration, customized reporting options, and easier learning with fewer add-on costs. Jira Align users face challenges with its complexity, particularly with dual menus and terminology, and often request better integration with existing Jira tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jira Portfolio is versatile in deployment, suitable for on-premises, private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Users mention improvement opportunities in technical support response times. Jira Align is cloud-based, offering efficient scaling across teams with generally positive support experiences, though users prefer more self-service solutions.

Pricing and ROI: Jira Portfolio is initially affordable but can become costly with add-ons as teams grow. Its transparency in pricing is noted, though smaller organizations may find the cost challenging. Jira Align is pricier, especially for small to medium enterprises, but offers extensive capabilities for larger organizations. Both solutions promise quick ROI through enhanced project visibility and management efficiency, with investment varies based on organization needs and scale.

To learn more, read our detailed JIRA Portfolio vs. Jira Align Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

JIRA Portfolio vs. Jira Align

November 2024

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Helped 831,020 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Jira Align

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (8th), Value Stream Management Software (1st)

JIRA Portfolio

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category, the mindshare of Jira Align is 4.7%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of JIRA Portfolio is 1.1%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

Featured Reviews

ShyiamaKishun

Senior Manager, Technology & Delivery at S&R TECHNOLOGY

Has a straightforward setup process and efficient project management features .

Jira Align supports program increment planning by facilitating the planning aspect, including team setup, dependency management, and defining the layout for each step or stage in a project. The platform aids in breaking down targets into parts, aligning with Agile principles, and ensuring a structured layout. The most impactful feature of Jira Align for project management lies in its capabilities related to planning and setting up projects. The platform visually understands targets, offering a clear and detailed layout. We can determine when to speed up the process or access the project. We can address the issues related to planning and development efficiently. It is a great product to use, aiding in project planning and alignment. I recommend it to others and rate it a ten out of ten.

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Gary Craven

Vice President, Consulting Services at Paradigm Consulting Group

Powerful, flexible solution with a bit of a learning curve

The weakness of the solution is that the interface is a little nonstandard, meaning it's very flexible. It's got a lot of power and gives the user the ability to combine different projects into the portfolio and move user stories between projects and link them. What I have found in a couple of organizations that I've used it with, is that the uptake tends to be a little slow because it's got a bit of a learning curve. It can dump data out to Excel and those programs, but it also has a big ecosystem of plugins and add-ons that you can get. I guess it has some strength in that regard, but if you're going to run it on-prem, you have to have people that are pretty well-versed in the program and have the time and capabilities to handle integration and make sure they're adding those modules correctly. Their interface is a little unique and I think that's partly because the core of the product has morphed into several sub-products, but the underlying architecture has stayed the same on all of them in that it was originally a help desk ticketing system. Now they are moving into these new use cases, including systems development, business projects, business processes, and redevelopment projects, but there is a problem with the nomenclature that they use, and some of the documentation is a little techy for moving it into those more business-focused use cases. It's a very tech-focused product and that's fair given its origins, but if they really want to expand their community of users, then they're going to have to move beyond that a little bit and polish it up.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The tool helps us with better tracking across various departments. Jira Align is highly valuable for organizations due to its flexibility. With my experience as an administrator, I can attest that it can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of any organization. It helps to eliminate the mess created by Excel spreadsheets."

"Defect tracking and dashboards are the most valuable features of Jira Align."

"The most valuable features in Jira Align are the dashboard and the reporting feature."

"Jira Align's most valuable features are the roadmap, the program board, and the reports."

"Velocity and reporting provide good visibility, burndown charts, and particularly velocity measurement."

"In my previous experience, the Portfolio and Structure feature in Jira is really valuable because it assists with forecasting for projects."

"The most valuable feature of Jira Align is the overall team vision."

"The biggest advantage of Jira Align, in my opinion, is its user-friendly interface, making it simple and easy for end users to navigate and utilize. The most valuable feature of Jira Align for me is its automation capabilities, allowing us to create automation rules based on logical conditions for our projects. In terms of cross-team collaboration, Jira Align's integration with our project squads has been highly effective. It enables seamless creation of stories linked to incidents and changes, facilitating better visibility and understanding of the relationships between them. Regarding road mapping and dependency tracking, Jira Align enhances our project planning by aligning with our best practices and providing robust capabilities for mapping out dependencies and tracking progress."

More Jira Align pros

"What I like about the product is its extensive features, particularly the wide set of attributes for tracking issues. Jira Portfolio allows us to track not only the overall project but also specific components within it. This is beneficial for all stakeholders, including developers and business owners. For example, business stakeholders can track all issues, regardless of status."

"JIRA Portfolio has many wonderful features."

"In a PC environment, it is quite stable."

"The customized workflows we can define are very valuable. JIRA's private projects is very useful as well. There are also a lot of plugins that they provide."

"The developers can simplify tasks and each one of them can undertake a task and then they continue with development. Our processes are more efficient and easier for our manager and developers to track them. Their work is more organized."

"In general, the valuable features of the tool are its capabilities concerning dependency reports and task status."

"The integration is very good. We've more or less integrated with everything including reporting and registering."

"The solution is stable and reliable."

More JIRA Portfolio pros

Cons

"Jira Align has price packages for different purposes. Users must do their own research and see if it fits their purpose."

"One area where Jira Align could improve is in its licensing model. There was a significant change in the licensing module about six months ago, which resulted in increased costs for customers like us. This change wasn't communicated clearly, and it made it challenging for companies to adopt Jira Align without facing higher expenses. In terms of features, I would like to see improved workflows in the next release, as that would greatly benefit our organization."

"I don't know if Jira provides training for people who want to be certified with the solution, so that is one of the problems."

"There are fewer customization options in Jira Align due to how it was designed."

"The synchronization between Jira and Jira Align takes too long."

"The product needs to improve its configurations."

"There is no linkage between the Jira records and the overarching schedule. We maintain the overarching schedule in Microsoft Project, and there is no linkage back and forth with the Jira tasks. They are independent of each other."

"Lacks sufficient reporting capabilities."

More Jira Align cons

"The workflow needs improvement."

"Currently lacks AWS integration."

"Some key features like integration, big data warehousing and data modeling need work."

"The product presently lacks visualization capabilities"

"It's got kind of a steep learning curve."

"If I get a feature but there is not a user story, and I want to know which epic it belongs to, it is really hard to figure out."

"The solution is sometimes complex to use"

"The team-centric view is slightly weaker in JIRA compared to its competitors, especially considering how I can evaluate how each resource has been placed, not just in one project but across JIRA."

More JIRA Portfolio cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"At our company, we were concerned about the cost of Jira Align, which is expensive"

"Jira Align is an expensive solution."

"My company pays approximately 399 USD per month for the solution."

"The tool is moderately expensive."

"The license for Jira Align is priced fairly."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate Jira Align a seven out of ten."

"Jira Align is an expensive solution."

"The pricing and licensing costs are rated lower, around six mainly due to significant increases in licensing costs that were not well-received by users."

More Jira Align pricing and cost advice

"I use the free version for personal use."

"Portfolio is very expensive, costing on average $2000-3000 per user per month."

"The price could be improved."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a six."

"The pricing continues to get higher."

"The price is reasonable"

"Given the solution’s significant functionality, benefits, and value, you get more than you pay for."

"The product is really not very expensive."

More JIRA Portfolio pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Jira Align?

I joined the company because they had a large project, and as a startup company, they needed to scale up efficiently. My task was to review the current baseline, assess the team's capabilities, and...

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What needs improvement with Jira Align?

The platform's communication features could be more robust for better team integration.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Jira Align?

We use Jira Align for business strategies, collaboration, and reporting. The solution allows us to manage the various products and features delivered on that platform.

See all answers

What do you like most about JIRA Portfolio?

The solution's tracking capabilities helped ensure we had full visibility into planned work and scheduled work.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JIRA Portfolio?

I am part of the delivery team and am not exposed to the commercial information. However, from what I understand, JIRA is competitively priced. It is not considered expensive in the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with JIRA Portfolio?

User experience should be more intuitive. Currently, it's not that intuitive. Additionally, a lot of querying and customization is needed for reporting. If there could be some templates out of the ...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenText ValueEdge vs Jira Align

Compared 46% of the time

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management vs Jira Align

Compared 20% of the time

Planview AgilePlace vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Rally Software vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Targetprocess vs Jira Align

Compared 4% of the time

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Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 20% of the time

Broadcom Clarity vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Project Server vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 10% of the time

Planview Portfolios vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 7% of the time

More JIRA Portfolio Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align

January 2025

Download Jira Align product report

Buyer's Guide

JIRA Portfolio

December 2024

Download JIRA Portfolio product report

Also Known As

AgileCraft

Portfolio for JIRA

Learn More

Atlassian

Overview

Jira Align is a cloud-based agile planning tool designed to help enterprises visualize, manage, and carry out large-scale software and IT projects. Jira Align’s features are designed to align the activities of your company’s development team with the overall goals of the organization by helping you achieve the following results:

Connect and coordinate enterprise-level business teams.
Make your entire enterprise’s work visible to drive and improve business outcomes.
Improve product quality with a fully aligned organization.
Shorten delivery cycles by increasing operational efficiency.

With Jira Align’s integration with Jira Software, businesses can simplify governing large-scale software development efforts by translating their strategy and goals into the technical execution and delivery of work.

Jira Align uses the aggregated data from Jira Software to produce reports on every aspect of the development process. Product stakeholders are granted immediate visibility into the progress that has been made and can easily identify delays and their causes.

The solution also assists in budget planning by assigning expenses to various work items and giving management real-time insights into ongoing expenditures and performance against set budgets.

Jira Align Features

Some of the top features and benefits of using Jira Align include:

Strategy management: Jira Align provides a clear visualization of where your enterprise is holding via strategic snapshots. The snapshot helps guide teams throughout the product. With the snapshot in view, it becomes easier to see and track the goals your company wants to carry out.

Progress monitoring: View a progress bar that provides indication of the level of completeness of your projects. The interface is populated with live data, which assists with planning and execution reporting.

Reporting and metrics: Jira Align creates valuable insights using the aggregated data it collects, ensuring that changes are tracked across teams and results are made visible early on in the process. These metrics allow managers to quickly determine what actions need to be taken.

Scalability: Jira Align is designed to work within organizations with hundreds of technical staff members and it can scale to support tens of thousands of users.

Backlogs and workflows: Effectively manage your work utilizing backlogs and workflow boards.

Customizable dashboard: Lay out key data points to help management keep tabs on important items. Easily make decisions based on active live consolidated data along with forecasting, risk tracking reports, and more. To help lower risks, Jira Align provides you with a visualization of program cross dependencies. It also displays a comprehensive view of resource utilization across projects, and highlights inefficiencies so that they can be resolved quickly.

Reviews from Real Users

Jira Align stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its program-level planning options and its reporting capabilities.

A project manager at a consultancy notes, “I like how things can be sorted out, and it shows the different objectives one can do. You could also create a team view that would allow your team to see work outcomes. Jira Align also helps with the reporting, because we can export data to Excel or another format.”

Jira Portfolio is an agile roadmapping tool designed to help teams build plans, envision the big picture, track progress, and share the process with stakeholders.

Jira Portfolio is planned based. A plan in Portfolio is a complete view of the tasks, teams, and release dates for your Jira projects.

Once you start to create a plan, there are three main factors you need to define:

Scope: A list of tasks that need to be carried out in order to complete the plan.

Teams: Who will be implementing the work? With the correct data in place, Portfolio can estimate how long it will take for the team to complete their tasks.

Releases: Your scheduled release date.

With Jira Portfolio, you can create a visual timeline to gain visibility across each of your teams and projects in a single place from a granular level and review cross-team and cross-project dependencies to prevent bottlenecks. This visibility can help you plan realistic release dates and manage your team’s capacity. The solution allows you to try out different scenarios with your roadmap and resources to help guide your decision making. Once you have a solid plan, you can easily integrate with Jira Software and commit your changes.

Jira Portfolio allows managers to easily add team members. The tool’s powerful scheduling algorithm assigns tasks to teams while taking priorities and dependencies into account so it can create a realistic forecast for project completion.

Jira Portfolio Benefits

Some of the top benefits of using Jira Portfolio include:

Roadmaps and roadmaps dependencies: Roadmaps list details about the tasks that need to be executed in order to complete a project, as well as predictions for when they will be completed, which teams are in charge of the task, and a list of resources they require. By setting dependencies on your team’s roadmaps, unnecessary bottlenecks are avoided.

Integration with Jira: Jira Portfolio is dynamically integrated with your Jira Software project data and constantly pulls your latest data from Jira Software, allowing you to plan your projects with updated information.

Envision scenarios: Create what-if scenarios and save them to Jira if you decide to adopt them.

Reporting: Share capacity reports and more to allow team members and stakeholders to gain visibility and insights into the process.

Task completion estimation methods: Estimate how long a specific task will take and compare these estimations with the actual time to completion to help assess team performance and efficiency and improve the accuracy of estimation calculations over time.

Reviews from Real Users

Jira Portfolio stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its roadmap creation tools and its flexibility.

Meeta L., a lead product manager at a tech vendor, says, “The valuable features of the JIRA Portfolio are the customization it provides which is very useful and the Agile project management capability.”

Juan P., a senior IT project manager at Avantica, writes, “Portfolio helps us increase the visibility of projects' status and management with remote workers who make up most of the company.”

Sample Customers

Anthem, nielsen, Homeland Security, NCR, dimension data

Rosetta Stone, Sprint, UBS, Workday, Expedia, J.P. Morgan

Buyer's Guide

JIRA Portfolio vs. Jira Align

November 2024

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