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Jira vs SAP Portfolio and Project Management comparison

 

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
284
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Application Requirements Management (2nd), 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 (10th)
 

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

"It is a very convenient tool. We can organize our sprints through scrum or kanban. There are scrum boards, and there are kanban boards. If you prefer scrum, you can use Jira. If you prefer kanban, you can still use Jira. You can create your kanban boards in a similar way as you create your scrum boards. It is very useful. It also seems to be very popular these days."
"The product is good, stable and very cost-effective for small teams."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of replication of tickets."
"The dynamic communication and the ability to customize it the way we want are the most valuable features."
"Each project participant began to think before writing, employees started to plan their time and try to work faster and better, and customers can create tickets and requests via JIRA so most requests are processed faster."
"It is a good solution and a very popular one, as well, so I would recommend it if you are going for agile methodology."
"Jira offers tools for managing projects using Agile methodology. I think it is good to encourage the development team to use Jira, so that the organization benefits from the proper execution of projects on time. Basically, it helps our organization to execute in a better way."
"You no longer need to email people. You can mention them right in Jira and have conversations there."
"SAP is gradually introducing more flexibility and customization options to the system, allowing users to adapt it to their specific needs."
"It improves productivity, cash flow management, and inventory control for clients."
"The stability is good, and I have nothing bad to say about it."
"With SAP Portfolio and Project Management we were able to have a full track of project progress and get useful insights about our projects."
"The SAP PPM software is a very complete solution."
"The integration portion with SAP models is valuable."
 

Cons

"I think that for users the solution is very intuitive but for project administrators, the way the product is defined is not very intuitive."
"We're doing PI planning, Program Increment planning, and that kind of stuff, and it's not always a good facilitator for that. We tend to pull it out and put it into other tools to manage that, and then we get it back into Jira as that's our system of record for where all the stories are kept. That's probably the biggest headache with it."
"If I'm comparing it to ALM Octane, the documentation is not as robust as ALM Octane's documentation. So, they can improve on the documentation side."
"Ease of administration and customization. It is really clunky in this area."
"Integration with some of the automation tools could be improved."
"The stability could be improved."
"There's been the odd amount of JIRA downtime (not self hosted) and sometimes tickets that can't be accessed."
"Having more seamless integration with Confluence would really help us track our product management activity and other product details in one place."
"The platform's support structure needs improvement."
"The initial support package of version 5.0 has some setup difficulties."
"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."
"It would be valuable if SAP integrated seamlessly with some products like Jira and Bitbucket."
"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

"I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"We are on an annual license and could be less expensive."
"It is certainly a long-term solution for our company and for previous companies that I have worked for. They have these long-term term licenses, but I'm not sure if they really pay on a yearly basis. They are certainly using it for a really long period and for a lot of users."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"There is an annual subscription to use Jira."
"The price seems reasonable to me. It's very similar to Splunk."
"It is not too expensive. It is just comparative to other tools like Microsoft Teams."
"There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. The product offers flexibility in pricing since it depends on the memory bits you have used."
"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
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Construction Company
12%
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 Enterprise152
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?
In terms of pricing and setup cost, my experience with the pricing and licensing of Jira was generally positive, especially compared to the operational value it provides for project management and ...
What advice do you have for others considering SAP Portfolio and Project Management?
The platform integration with SAP finance systems has unified language and criteria, reducing the time for growth periods and ensuring international financial control and management. The resource m...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Portfolio and Project Management?
The product pricing varies based on whether the client is new or existing and the complexity of their business processes.
 

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: May 2026.
900,125 professionals have used our research since 2012.