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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
284
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

"No other platform can compete on speed or search."
"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."
"It enabled us to track and manage product commitments over the entire enterprise."
"It is scalable, and it can cover many projects and a lot of job delegations."
"The most useful features are the Kanban dashboard, the ability to create tasks, bugs, epics with child issues, time estimation, and Jira reports."
"The integration of other open source tools with Jira is very useful. It allows us to create documents and transcriptions, making it versatile beyond software development."
"The solution helps a lot with scrums, is great for development, and the documentation is quite good."
"I really like the linking and user stories, and the formatting on the solution."
"The SAP PPM software is a very complete solution."
"The stability is good, and I have nothing bad to say about it."
"It improves productivity, cash flow management, and inventory control for clients."
"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 integration portion with SAP models is valuable."
"SAP is gradually introducing more flexibility and customization options to the system, allowing users to adapt it to their specific needs."
 

Cons

"The solution can improve by including test management functionality in a native bundle without plugins."
"The performance is not so good sometimes. I know that fully depends on the implementation and the IT environment of Jira or the version of Jira installed. The performance is sometimes not so good. I would like to have a better response time from the Jira server. And it fully depends on the administration side of the Jira."
"There are so, SO many areas that I couldn’t even begin to count. The most basic of requests have been allowed to languish for years, many over a decade."
"In general, it is not user-friendly. For a non-technical person to use, Jira is not intuitive."
"It would be good if we can grant access based on the roles. This is something that Jira can look into. Currently, anyone with Jira access can access everything. Being able to define access based on the roles will give us more flexibility in managing Jira. I would like to have more reports in Jira. Currently, eight or nine reports are there. You can use Screen Test to get more reports or data from Jira, but you will have to get more add-ons, plug-ins, and stuff like that. It would be good if they can increase the number of reports."
"In Jira Cloud, integration with Excel is missing. Previously, I could import our Excel files into Jira, and I could also download a big Jira report in the Excel format, but now, it needs to be manipulated after that, which is not good. It looks like they've done that on purpose, but I don't understand the reason for it."
"The workflow and layout can be confusing and takes a while to get used to."
"When we use the plugin in Jira so, there are two different systems which we are working on, Jira and the X-ray plugin. The X-ray plugin should be incorporated into Jira because we have to fetch two reports. One report is faxed through Jira, and one can be faxed through X-ray. So there needs to be clarity about which the Jira team should reflect."
"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 platform's support structure needs improvement."
"The initial support package of version 5.0 has some setup difficulties."
"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

"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."
"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."
"The price is quite competitive."
"We feel that the product is a good value for the cost."
"It is not too expensive. It is just comparative to other tools like Microsoft Teams."
"We are on an annual license and could be less expensive."
"Its price is good and similar to other products. It is about five or six dollars per user."
"There are no additional costs to the standard licensing."
"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
15%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise154
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 is a good tool and it is not that expensive. The setup cost is pretty straightforward and the onboarding is smooth.
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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.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.