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 8.5. Jira Align holds a 5.3% mindshare in EAP, compared to JIRA Portfolio’s 1.2% 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

2,306 Views
1,409 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

JIRA Portfolio

Read 58 JIRA Portfolio reviews

547 Views
448 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: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

JIRA Portfolio vs. Jira Align

March 2025

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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 (9th), 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 April 2025, in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category, the mindshare of Jira Align is 5.3%, up from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of JIRA Portfolio is 1.2%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

Featured Reviews

Tonia Spight-Sokoya

Program Support for Third Party External SPM Lead Business Execution Consultant/PMP PM at Wells Fargo

User-friendly with good documentation and the ability to integrate with other third arty vendors

I am really focused on identity access management and getting access to the vendors. Right now, I'm setting up vendor access through Azure. You can do that or with the IAM. Sometimes we have to create several different types of access because we have vaulted databases. We have the Unix databases, I have MySQL, and we have Mongo, where I get access to those user classes or to the databases in the host group. Those are all different access scenario forms that I submit after I do the configuration in the form with the security team. I need clarity on the IAM. I'm not clear on PAM eighter. Is there a form that they have to submit to get access to the internal cyber-risk teams to get their access for people to be able to use the tool on the Confluence side? Do they have to send some kind of form to the operation's security or enterprise security? To be able to get the access for privileged access, do they need to be working on projects that have vaulted databases? I still need to figure out how that works. Other companies that are competitors of Jira and Confluence, are able to create their active directories for the vendors that don't come in internally. They only do access through the cloud and through third-party, two-factor identification. That's something I was wondering if that was already implemented in the packages, the package for Confluence. It would be nice to have that right in the solution.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Being able to do PI planning using the program levels is most valuable. I find that the program-level reporting is most useful."

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

"The product's most valuable feature is CMDB for services desk management and backlog projects."

"We use Jira Align for business strategies, collaboration, and reporting."

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

"Jira Align helps us manage communication and tasks for a variety of teams without overlap."

"The interface of Jira Align is very easy to use and manage"

"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 propose solutions to increase production capacity. Upon observing the process in Jira Align, I realized we didn't need to invest heavily in expanding capacity."

More Jira Align pros

"Jira's Structure, agile, and Kanban boards are helpful. I also like JQuery, which allows you to fetch the relevant set of data. We use JQuery, JQL, and the Structure board a lot. Kanban boards help us monitor daily tasks, and we review the progress using the burndown charts."

"We use Jira Portfolio in our organization for issue tracking and task management. We had many projects. We didn't use it much for forecasting, but we did use it a bit for release planning by assigning tasks to releases. We didn't use it for project management or scenario planning; we just used it for tasks."

"The solution has good reporting and is very user-friendly."

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

"The most valuable feature for me is the visualization and organizing of the tasks. We can have a pick, and then we can stick the multiple issues under that, and then we can again have a sort of hierarchical installation, and that's very useful."

"The most valuable feature is that it fits very well into an agile framework, and it is especially helpful with the planning aspects."

"The solution is very powerful and the underlying structure of it is well done. The company behind the solution is very open as far as their whole ecosystem is concerned. They also do a lot of work in the training area."

"We have found the solution to be stable."

More JIRA Portfolio pros

Cons

"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."

"It should just have the integration with Jira. We haven't looked at it since Atlassian bought the product."

"One of the biggest issues I found in the new version was once we clicked on one of the tasks that were specifically for our group and went to look at the other portfolios in other areas we had to browse all the way back to the beginning. If you click the back button, it would not work, it stayed the same place. Additionally, if you click on page B, but then you wanted to go back to page A it would not go back to page A. You would have to browse back to the portfolio and then find your group again and open it. This was the only issue that I had with it and I am not sure if it is a Jira issue or it was because of the way the site was laid out."

"The vendor should implement automation features"

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

"The workflows are scalable from portfolio to individual level but can sometimes be complex to navigate."

"I've encountered limitations in using Jira Align for certain aspects, particularly in implementing OKRs. Jira Align's highest hierarchy is Epic, which may not always align perfectly for specific initiatives. Additionally, while Jira Align offers functionality for tracking OKRs and generating dashboards, I've found that it lacks in some areas. As a result, we've explored alternative solutions that better meet our needs in these areas. Its Kanban feature is also limited."

"The solution’s stability could be improved."

More Jira Align cons

"It would be really nice if the solution provided a heads-up every time they enhance something or add new features."

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

"The solution’s pricing could be reduced."

"We would love to be able to have direct contact with Atlassian. Currently, they are not working directly with West African countries. We are considering using JIRA Align, but when we contact them, they say that as we are in West Africa, they don't directly work with West Africa."

"We are using the on-premise deployment, but it is slower and not as easy to manage as the cloud version."

"The kanban board could also use some more filters. We just had a project where the deployment for Jira didn't have any ETA, and it's a requirement for the client. We accommodate a lot of issues on the board, so the workaround was to create boards by project, not client."

"We are based in India; I would like the product to integrate local pricing. We earn in rupees but spend in dollars. Its pricing could also be lowered."

"We had to use assistance for the initial setup."

More JIRA Portfolio cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license for Jira Align is priced fairly."

"Our customers buy licenses. We are not involved in its purchase."

"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."

"Jira Align is an expensive solution."

"The software is very good, but the price is expensive. Our licensing costs are on a monthly basis, but there are no additional costs to the standard license fees."

"Jira Align was reasonably priced then, especially for a bundle license that accommodated around 50 monthly users."

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

"Jira Align has price packages for different purposes."

More Jira Align pricing and cost advice

"Portfolio is well-priced - a license for ten users costs $100 or $150 a month."

"I use the free version for personal use."

"When we first got the tool, it cost 3,000 euros a year for unlimited users, which was a great deal. But the prices kept going up over the years. I'm not involved with pricing anymore, but I heard they increased a lot, so we decided to stop using it."

"We have a license to use JIRA Portfolio, we are not using the free version."

"The price could be improved."

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

"The pricing of the solution is expensive."

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

More JIRA Portfolio pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

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...

See all answers

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

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Compared 44% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

Rally Software vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Broadcom Clarity vs Jira Align

Compared 3% of the time

More Jira Align Competitors

Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 24% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 12% of the time

Broadcom Clarity vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Project Server vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 10% of the time

Planview Portfolios vs JIRA Portfolio

Compared 10% of the time

More JIRA Portfolio Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align

April 2025

Download Jira Align product report

Buyer's Guide

JIRA Portfolio

April 2025

Download JIRA Portfolio product report

Also Known As

AgileCraft

Portfolio for JIRA

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.”

Atlassian

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.”

Atlassian

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

March 2025

Free Report: JIRA Portfolio vs. Jira Align

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