Jira Align vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management comparison

Atlassian and ServiceNow are both solutions in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category. Atlassian is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8, while ServiceNow is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8. Atlassian holds a 5.0% mindshare in EAP, compared to ServiceNow’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Atlassian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Jira Align

Read 41 Jira Align reviews

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1,494 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Strategic Portfo...

Read 32 ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management reviews

2,083 Views
1,447 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Jira Align

ServiceNow Strategic Portfo...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management and Jira Align compete in the category of strategic portfolio and project management. Based on features and deployment usability, ServiceNow appears to have an edge due to its extensive integration and user-friendly platform.

Features: ServiceNow offers a comprehensive CMDB, efficient incident and change management, and multiple integration options with platforms like Slack and Azure. Its platform provides seamless portfolio management, simplifying resource and cost management with a customizable ticket creation system. Jira Align excels in connecting PI Objectives with features, efficient story point tracking, and sprint management. It enhances collaboration with its roadmap and program board, supported by powerful dashboards and integration with external plugins.

Room for Improvement: ServiceNow is critiqued for its high cost, complex pricing model, and challenging customization. Users request enhanced AI and financial integration features, along with improved visualization. Jira Align needs better integration with Jira, a more intuitive UI, and improved task synchronization. Users report complex navigation, lack of mobile access, and high costs, and seek better automation features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both platforms offer deployment in Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and On-premises models, ensuring user flexibility. ServiceNow provides generally high-rated technical support with consistent assistance and extensive documentation, despite occasional slow responses. Jira Align has mixed reviews, with deployment options appreciated but seeking enhanced support experiences.

Pricing and ROI: ServiceNow is viewed as expensive with a complex pricing structure, discouraging smaller organizations. However, its ROI is valued due to integrated features and organizational visibility. Despite high setup and licensing costs, extensive integrations are valued. Jira Align is costly, especially for smaller firms, with larger enterprises finding its pricing reasonable. Though it offers significant ROI by improving team collaboration, cost remains a crucial consideration for users.

To learn more, read our detailed Jira Align vs. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align vs. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

January 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)

ServiceNow Strategic Portfo...

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Project Portfolio Management (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category, the mindshare of Jira Align is 5.0%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is 5.5%, up from 5.2% 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

Srinivasa Neelapu

Associate Director - ServiceNow Lead Platform Architect at Novartis Pharmaceuticals

Strategies and goals are aligned with demands and partners, making it a strategic approach for the enterprise but the finance part needs improvement

SPM is definitely strong for project management, but its finance capabilities are not as robust. While there is a separate Financial Management product, it would be beneficial to have more out-of-the-box support for finance integrations within SPM. I’m not suggesting replacing systems like SAP for finance, but there should be better support for financial integrations. Currently, connecting to SaaS solutions is complicated, and getting into detailed financial calculations is challenging. Forecasting is manageable, but handling actual financials is not as straightforward. The finance area needs improvement, specifically making finance application integrations easier. Generic finance capabilities should be more user-friendly and integrated into SPM. Although they have started this journey, it hasn’t been fully released yet. There seems to be a roadmap, and once complete, it will be very useful. Additionally, incorporating a Q&A feature for entire strategies or project demands and enhancing text analytics within SPM would be beneficial.

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

"It's easy to set up."

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

"I found Confluence most valuable."

"The deployment phase of Jira Align wasn't difficult."

"The technical support team responds quickly and resolves issues effectively."

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

"Jira Align's most valuable feature is the view of strategic control reports for high-level directors."

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

More Jira Align pros

"It manages portfolios and aligns our current portfolio with internal changes."

"The demand management tool is very strategic because it helps assess risk, gives you a visual of different demands, and rates those values."

"It's a very complete solution."

"You don't need a lot of plugins."

"The stability is excellent. ServiceNow is one of the leading platforms when it comes to stability."

"The program is stable."

"The PPM module is an excellent service."

"The resource manager is useful."

More ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management pros

Cons

"The initial setup was a little bit complex."

"One area for improvement is that Jira Align's double menu and multiple menus can be difficult for new users."

"I would like to see Jira Align merge and integrate better with Jira as a whole. A lot of the time, the data from Jira won't map very well into Jira Align."

"The solution’s stability could be improved."

"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."

"Jira Align's user interface needs improvement because its user experience is really bad."

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

More Jira Align cons

"I would like to see some artificial intelligence incorporated into the management functions."

"ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management must improve its interface, which is not very interactive or user-friendly compared to other tools like Zendesk. The real-time reporting feature doesn't help much in our decision-making process. It's quite complex to use and lacks the rich features needed for visualization. Overall, I find it to be very poor."

"When we import a really big project with a lot of tasks on it, we face some issues with dependencies. The links between tasks are not working very well. There is definitely room for improvement there. Microsoft Project, in my opinion, is the best option for such a use case."

"The configurations are fine, but the user interface could be improved."

"We track salaries or paychecks of the resources. They change from time to time, such as every six months or every year. If they can come up with a default or out-of-the-box feature to manage those multiple payable costs so that we can automatically calculate the project costs rolled up. That would be the coolest feature that we can expect from ServiceNow. We would like to have an automatic feature to manage the payable costs. We should be able to manage or maintain multiple pay costs so that while calculating the project roll-up costs for individual projects, the respective pay costs in a particular period are picked up automatically from the backend. Currently, we have to customize that. It is doable. We have done it but through customization."

"The portfolio managed is good for IT, but it's not good for non it's not necessarily great for construction projects, such as the building of physical infrastructure."

"It could be more user-friendly."

"The timing reporting module, and how it's used is a bit difficult to understand. Everything related to project management is quite extensive. It needs to be simplified. At first, our users didn't want to use it, because it seems a bit complex."

More ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Jira Align is quite expensive for small-to-medium companies, but it's quite reasonable for larger ones."

"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."

"The tool is moderately expensive."

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

"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."

"I would rate this solution a nine out of ten for pricing. The price of the solution depends on the number of people using it and the projects you are working on."

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

More Jira Align pricing and cost advice

"The licensing is based on metrics and is tailored to customer's needs."

"The pricing is negotiable based on the contract and licensing perspective."

"The solution was quite expensive."

"The cost of the solution should not be more than $50,000 annually."

"The solution could improve by being less expensive and the pricing model is confusing. Many people are getting charged different amounts. There are additional fees that they are adding on."

"The tool is expensive."

"They sell some things in bundles, and it could be handier that some of those things could be sold in another way, like purity models and other packages. Another thing that I'm struggling with is the pricing of ServiceNow's FYE experience, which includes the tools that are positioned for supporting HR."

"We have a team of about 6,500 employees across the globe. So, the amount of money I'm going to save by putting the money on the table for the implementation and licenses is very high."

More ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Healthcare Company

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 ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?

We mainly use the solution to support operations and align our ITSM operations with our business goals. This involves coordinating between our application development, support teams, and network en...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?

It's a bit costly currently. Efforts are being made to explore cost-benefit measures for investing in it.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?

There is always scope for improvement. As of now, making the product more cost-beneficial would help more organizations consider investing in it.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 45% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Planview AgilePlace vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Targetprocess vs Jira Align

Compared 4% of the time

More Jira Align Competitors

Jira vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Compared 17% of the time

monday.com vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Compared 6% of the time

Smartsheet vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Compared 4% of the time

Planview PPM Pro vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Compared 4% of the time

More ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align

February 2025

Download Jira Align product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

February 2025

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management report

Download ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management product report

Also Known As

AgileCraft

IT Business Management, ServiceNow IT Business Management Suite, ServiceNow ITBM Suite, ServiceNow ITBM

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

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is a highly regarded value-added Portfolio Management solution and also a top-ranked Enterprise Agile Planning tool. Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) relates to the tools and processes that business organizations utilize to manage their usable resources and satisfy calculated business objectives.

ServiceNow SPM ensures organizations are able to precisely identify and promote the best investment initiatives that accurately match the organizational objectives, which will facilitate that the most profitable outcomes are consistently achieved.

Enterprise organizations can include the desired various factors of their business processes to include in their unique strategic portfolio. These factors can include but are not limited to employee performance initiatives, product promotions, client services, and more. When assembled together, these factors become integral elements to promote the most effective business process decisions that will ensure appropriate outcomes that align with the organization's overall goals and objectives.

ServiceNow SPM Best Practices

Evaluate and catalog: Organizations should ensure that all stakeholders are aware and in agreement with the organization's goals and objectives, both short and long-term. Additionally, all the elements and components that are needed to accomplish those objectives have been accounted for and are available.
Set effective parameters: The organization should set clear parameters to monitor processes and performance to ensure that objectives are being maintained and consistently satisfied.
Productivity analysis: Review processes to eliminate redundancies to maintain balance and process alignment so that desired outcomes can be achieved.
Continuous process management: ServiceNow SPM provides a single transparent view that includes all processes (pending, ongoing, or completed) and how they align with the overall organizational goals and objectives.

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management Benefits:

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management has many valuable benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

Big Picture Visualization
Improved Decision Making
Improved Process Management
Seamless Scalability
Increased Productivity
Improved Efficiency
Improved Time Management
Better Outcomes
Improved Communication
Comprehensive Reporting and Tracking
Improved Return on Investment

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management's primary focus is to align business strategy with work. Decision-makers are able to plan, complete and easily track progress across different methodologies and processes. The solution has been developed to ensure that the appropriate activities and processes are being completed in a timely manner to satisfy the organization’s goals consistently and achieve the most profitable outcomes.

Reviews from Real Users

“The feature I find the most valuable is the one that lets you see how much time has been used in processing a ticket. This allows us to better monitor performance.” Lenny L., Support Engineer at a tech services company

“The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very intuitive to set up. Everything has a logical sequence, and you can see how it all links together. It's a good win for ServiceNow.” Fabrizio M., Head of Business Applications at Bio Products Laboratory Limited

“The demand management tool is very strategic because it helps assess risk, gives you a visual of different demands, and rates those values.” A Manager at a manufacturing company.

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

Anthem, nielsen, Homeland Security, NCR, dimension data

Proximus, UNT SYSTEM, SAP SuccessFactors

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align vs. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

January 2025

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