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Jira vs SAP Portfolio and Project Management comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
283
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Application Requirements Management (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
SAP Portfolio and Project M...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (12th)
 

Featured Reviews

RituRaj - PeerSpot reviewer
SDE 2 at Virtusa
Centralized sprint boards have transformed our planning and now improve cross‑team visibility
While Jira is very powerful, there are definitely areas it could be improved, especially for usability and simplicity. One common challenge is that Jira can feel overwhelming for new users. The number of features, configurations, workflows, and settings is huge. Onboarding non-technical teams or new employees sometimes takes longer than expected. A simple default experience for a beginner would help a lot. Another issue is performance. In large organizations with heavy customizations, large backlogs, or complex dashboards, Jira can occasionally feel slow, especially when loading filters, reports, or larger boards. Pricing can also become expensive as an organization scales and multiple Atlassian products and plugins are added. Some smaller teams sometimes feel the ecosystem becomes costly over time. The mobile experience would be smoother for project managers or leadership users who mainly want quick update approvals or dashboard views on the go. Overall, Jira's biggest strength is flexibility, but that flexibility can also create complexity if not managed carefully. Improving simplicity, performance, and ease of adoption would make the platform even stronger. An additional improvement I would mention for Jira is around balancing flexibility with simplicity. Jira gives organizations a huge amount of customization power, which is great. But over time, many teams end up creating overly complicated processes. After a few years, some Jira environments become difficult to maintain because there are many workflows, custom fields, permissions, and automations layered on top of each other. It would help if Jira would provide a strong built-in recommendation or health check for keeping a project clean or efficient. For example, identifying unused custom fields, suggesting workflow simplicity improvements, flagging redundant automations, or recommending dashboard optimization.
Nalin Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance Group Lead at Samsung
End-to-end project management capabilities and offers seamless vendor and client contract alignment
The system is old, so there are several issues that arise when we fetch data from integrated systems. Sometimes the data gets stuck, and there are instances where we need to access multiple pieces of information simultaneously. This creates problems that I have personally experienced. Therefore, these aspects need to be much more free-flowing and seamless. If something gets stuck, it takes time to resolve, and during the contract phase, we have Service Level Agreements (SLAs). If those SLAs are breached, it becomes problematic. Given that there are approximately 3000 projects running concurrently worldwide, utilizing the system with a vast database and numerous activities taking place. It could benefit from decentralization. Currently, it operates as a central system, but if it could be centralized for specific subsidiaries, it would be easier for us to manage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The adaptability of the Scrum and Kanban boards for other uses, with careful use of the customization features."
"I like it for team collaboration and task management. I also like its analytics and dashboards."
"We are able to track the development work for a particular story or set of stories through the Kanban board easily."
"It's easy to use, and it also offers excellent notifications."
"It's an organized, collaborative, transparent way of working and that's really helped the organization overall."
"I feel the strongest feature of Jira is its workflow engine, which empowers us to automate our workflows within our organization and is the one characteristic of Jira that I think can help any organization, be it in any domain."
"This solution has been established in the market and is commonly used in many project management sectors because it can be easily used once you have experience."
"We do not have a lot of time for investigating new things, but Jira has saved us a great deal of time. It has a nice user interface and we can do a lot of things with it."
"SAP is gradually introducing more flexibility and customization options to the system, allowing users to adapt it to their specific needs."
"The integration portion with SAP models is valuable."
"The stability is good, and I have nothing bad to say about it."
"The SAP PPM software is a very complete solution."
"With SAP Portfolio and Project Management we were able to have a full track of project progress and get useful insights about our projects."
"It improves productivity, cash flow management, and inventory control for clients."
 

Cons

"Jira could provide more insight into sprints such as how did we perform in the last sprint compared to other sprints. It would be helpful to have metrics and a dashboard feature for others to see."
"It can have a more high-level view of portfolios. It has quite detailed views, but I would like a high-level view of portfolios. We want to integrate Jira with Microsoft Active Directory, and I don't know how easy or hard it is going to be. I don't know if Jira supports this. We are starting that integration in the last quarter of this year. I hope to find all the required tools for this integration."
"We would like to see the integration of a lite-version of Confluence, just to manage some of the templates and documents."
"The reporting tool and the approval tool need work."
"The inbuilt search functionality is quite buggy and lacks even the basic features."
"Overall, Jira is a little bit old fashioned, it could be more user friendly."
"ClickUp is a good alternative to Jira, so they have a better interface [GUI]. I don't like Jira's graphical interface - it could be more user-friendly. Jira looks old school."
"I also wish Jira had an indicator to tell you that you are approaching the limit for the story points that can be delivered during a sprint. I don't think there is an indicator like that, but such an indicator will be very helpful because then I will be easily able to see that we are approaching the limit."
"The initial support package of version 5.0 has some setup difficulties."
"The platform's support structure needs improvement."
"It would be valuable if SAP integrated seamlessly with some products like Jira and Bitbucket."
"The system is old, so there are several issues that arise when we fetch data from integrated systems. Sometimes the data gets stuck, and there are instances where we need to access multiple pieces of information simultaneously."
"The product itself could have an advanced analytics layer with an improved user interface that is adapted to the new digital era."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The basic price of Jira is reasonable, but for each plugin, we have to keep paying more. When you add it all up, it can be expensive. The main problem we face is we are forced to purchases plugin licenses for users who are not going to use them. For example, we have Jira licenses for approximately 450 people but if we only want a purchase a plugin for few people it is mandatory to buy the license for the 450 people who have Jira licensees. This is a problem because sometimes we need plugins for the product manager or for people in charge of the report, not everyone. For us, it can be very expensive in the end, they should alter this policy to allow plugins for only a set number of licenses."
"There is an annual subscription to use Jira."
"I don't have the number, but I sure wish Jira was less expensive. Its price point should be a little lower, and it should be more flexible for users who are just ticket viewers."
"Jira is expensive and a lot of people are choosing DevOps because they are cheaper, open-source, easy to use, and have basic licenses. Jira should decrease its price to be more competitive."
"It does not cost that much."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"It is not too expensive. It is just comparative to other tools like Microsoft Teams."
"The price of Jira could be lower."
"The product pricing varies based on whether the client is new or existing and the complexity of their business processes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise153
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?
Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
Jira operates on a subscription model, typically priced per user. It is quite affordable, and the setup cost is low. Licensing is simple and easy to get started with.
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Also Known As

Jira Software
Portfolio and Project Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Joy Global Inc., Citrix, EMC Corporation, Concho Resources, Concho Resources, RZD Russian Railways, Family Dollar Stores Inc., Lenovo
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Planisware, monday.com and others in Project Portfolio Management. Updated: August 2026.
911,602 professionals have used our research since 2012.