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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
283
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 NSIT - 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

"This solution is a top-of-the-line CRM, I have used the others solutions, and it has the most flexibility and the best visibility."
"The solution is very powerful, has many good features, in particular a good reporting capability."
"I recommend JIRA Agile to anyone looking for a mature, easy to use and customizable issue tracking system, especially in the context of large, geographically distributed teams."
"The sprint tracking is really helpful and very convenient."
"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."
"Once you learn how to configure the system, it is extremely powerful."
"It is easy to integrate Jira within our current IT environment. Jira has connectors and supports various integration."
"I like seeing which tickets are open and what our response rate is. They have a lot of good metrics in their system to see what's going on."
"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."
"It improves productivity, cash flow management, and inventory control for clients."
"SAP is gradually introducing more flexibility and customization options to the system, allowing users to adapt it to their specific needs."
"The stability is good, and I have nothing bad to say about it."
 

Cons

"From a very software-centric or a lead developer standpoint, there should be the ability to work at multiple levels. You have epic stories and use cases or epic stories and tasks. It would be nice to be able to have multiple levels of stories and multiple levels of epics work with it. It's lacking a little bit there, and this is the big thing for me because it makes it difficult to do a real sprint when you're limited to one story per epic. It's really hard to isolate tasks at multiple levels to match the type of use cases you normally do. That's the biggest difficulty. Other than that, they've been improving year to year, and every version seems to have a level of improvement."
"Workflows can be improved. We don't use workflows because we can't handle that much complexity. Its interface could be more intuitive for workflows."
"Improvements in Jira for the next release could include adding AI tools for dashboarding, making it easier to report insights, and enhancing business intelligence capabilities. It should also improve on-prem support. As far as I know, Jira's on-premise support is being discontinued. From last year onward, they stopped providing on-premise licenses and now only offer cloud support. This shift happened gradually, and I believe they now only offer cloud licenses."
"One common challenge is that Jira can feel overwhelming for new users."
"I would like to see more robust release management within the tool."
"Reporting is something Jira could work on. The reporting capabilities should have the same flexibility we see in Excel, including the ability to manipulate data and create graphs. They need to have that, so we don't need to export to a spreadsheet."
"In Jira, sometimes developers are not getting alerts when Jira is moving out of the SLA to the product development team."
"The part when it comes to the testing area is a bit hard to handle. The screen is too small, you can't really read what you're typing in, and it's only for the testing area. It looks like they have pressed in more than the UI system could handle to display it properly."
"It would be valuable if SAP integrated seamlessly with some products like Jira and Bitbucket."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the starter pack of three users, up to five users, is free. So you can try it out."
"The licensing cost for Jira is typically around seven dollars per user, though it may vary depending on regional variations. This cost is for a subscription-based model rather than a one-time purchase. I rate its pricing a seven out of ten."
"It depends on the type of license. In terms of subscription, it is cheap, and it works pretty well."
"Worth the extra cost."
"We are using the enterprise license which is nice because it ensures that we always have the latest versions of Jira software."
"I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"One of my customers told me that they were receiving better pricing for a similar tool from Microsoft."
"There are other solutions that are free making this solution seem expensive in comparison."
"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
14%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
Construction Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business108
Midsize Enterprise61
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?
Jira itself is fairly priced for the features it provides, but pricing is a bit higher than some alternatives, mostly because many plugins and add-ons are paid and licensed per user. So even if onl...
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 Jira vs. SAP Portfolio and Project Management and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.