Jira Reviews

We have been using Jira for schedule management as well as for making updates to our projects. I mention this in my capacity as a project manager. I most recently used the solution this year and did so for scheduled management of our varied tasks and projects. JIRA is actually used to put together an entire portfolio for each one of the teams, meaning for everybody. The solution listed each of our projects individually, with us needing to provide daily and regular updates. 

A most valuable feature involves the ability to customize the entries and to update them quickly. Unlike what was previously available, the solution allows us to create specific codes and symbols for the individual teams. The new version allows one to customize and to use demarcators. There is a code that can be entered in Align upon completion of a project or task and this apprises the project manager that it is time for its removal. 

Something I do not like about the new version is that there is a need to browse all the way back to the beginning, should a person click on a task that is specifically for his group and wish to go back and look at the other portfolios or people. However, I cannot state definitively if this situation owes itself to the way our team put the site together or to something administrative. When clicking the back button it would take the person to the wrong page, not to the one he desires. One would actually have no choice but to browse back to the portfolio and to find his group again and open it. Again, it is not clear to me if this problem lies with Jira or with the way our team laid out the site. 

I feel Jira is stable. The only hiccup which comes to mind is the one I mentioned, although it is not clear to me if this owed itself to the network we were using or to limitations of the application. Except for this, everything about the solution is stable. The only time a person can not look at the information is when the administrator announces his intention to remove it. 

The scalability is pretty good and we started on this process from the moment we started utilizing the solution. While we had only three teams and three sections, between December and January 15th the developers came together and expanded from three to 76 different tasks across the different teams. By February there were over 300 teams. Expansion is easy and did not just encompass our teams but also provided links to others that were outside of our main team set so that there were reference points available.

I would say the tech support is pretty good. I got back a couple of answers in response to an email I sent out. 

It was quite easy for me to set up my own pages. I had a field day with creating my own test pages and was able to play around with them and simply test out the different settings. Pulling in new documentation was very easy. The same holds true with pulling in attachments and it was, consequently, easy to set up. As well, I was able to set up certain sub-pages for our team for going in and checking JIRA.

There were initially eight people involved in the maintenance of the solution and deployment of updates. They had the people to whom they answered. We are talking about a large-scale effort. Without taking into account the Jira support line, I would say there were around 12 people managing and administering this version. For our specific team, there were around three. They were the actual decision makers. 

I am not in a position to comment on licensing costs. 

Our team does not use the solution exclusively. There are multiple ones which do, although I cannot state how many teams are doing so. I do know that the entire section of our agency is doing so and this accounts for a lot of people, well over a hundred. 

The solution is pretty good and is geared towards those with multiple teams who are using it for the same purposes as us. We use it for providing daily and scrub updates, for which it is really good, as it allows one to track every entry and see when it's entered, timestamp and all. So, if a person has a lot of mission-critical or time-sensitive activities, JIRA is pretty good for tracking and helping to keep everything organized.

While I am still biased towards services at the moment, I rate Jira as an eight out of ten, at it is really good and very functional. 

We are basically using it to register all the requirements and issues so that we can track them and control the flow and different states. We also use it for reporting and configuring dashboards for portfolio management.

It is a SaaS solution, and we are using its latest version.

The flexibility to create different flows is most valuable.

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.

I have been using this solution for two years.

Its stability is very good. I have no complaints.

It is scalable because it is a SaaS solution. It is the best choice for us because it responds to our needs all the time.

We have around 100 people in our organization who use this solution. They are developers, QAs, and managers.

Their support was very good for some of our questions. We didn't have too many issues.

We also have a partner who helps us with all the contracts, payments, and other things. If there is an issue, we contact them, and they provide support.

It was easy because the person who helped with portfolio management had previous experience with Jira. So, it was easy for us. It took about three weeks.

The most important thing is to precisely decide your flows and different stages and cycles. If all these are very clear, you won't have a problem setting up Jira.

I would rate Jira a nine out of ten.

I use the Jira app, not the desktop version. 

I work at a university and we use Jira to create tickets, epics, and stories. We link Jira to spec documentation with Confluence. We can also link it to TestRail.

Within the university that I work for, there are roughly 4,000 people using this solution — all staff members use it. 

I like that it's integrated with the specs. You don't have to put the specs in a shared folder or a shared server. It's all linked together with Confluence. We just put the specs into Confluence and then link it to the ticket in Jira. Once our developer has finished his development, we can link it to TestRail to create test scenarios, test them, and analyze the results of the test.

It should be connected to ServiceNow. We use ServiceNow for deployments from our test environment to QA, then to production. If it was linked to ServiceNow, it would be perfect — it would be more integrated. Still, at least we can link our test scenarios, specs, and the tickets themselves so we can track the requirements — that's good. We have to use ServiceNow separately to deploy and move corrections from one environment to another.

There are a lot of features that need to be added on top of Jira for management, sprint planning, and agile topology for project management. My project manager says that there are not a lot of features for project management in the agile mode. They have to buy other products to put on top of Jira to be able to properly manage and to track what people are doing.

I have been using Jira for two years. 

I was always able to connect. Once you're inside, it's good. We have never experienced any bugs, glitches, or crashes. 

I think it's scalable. It can be integrated with other products easily. It's not a standalone product. Integration is the most important thing when it comes to scalability. I believe it uses a certain technology to make it even more scalable. 

I've never had to contact support. I've never had a bug or a bug message that I needed to open a ticket for. 

We used to use Remedy, but it didn't have everything that Jira has. Jira supports agile methodology. I used Remedy with waterfall projects, but for agile, Jira is the way to go. I've heard people say that Jira is better than DevOps tools.

I don't think it's complex to set up. The features are standard and come included with the product. You only need to know how to use it, create new Jiras, and how to link them. I don't think the setup is complicated. I've installed Oracle E-Business Suite a lot — that's complicated. Jira is much more direct. 

If you're interested in using Jira, you have to just go ahead and buy it and use it. Try to use all the functions that are available. There's a lot of things to do in Jira. I recommend it. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Jira a rating of seven.

In terms of using Jira, I was more on the user side and not really acting as, for example, service desk or support for the Jira installation. That was not my part of the project. I was more tasked with setting up the infrastructure from the architecture point of view. We needed a ticketing system and we need a planning system and the team that was responsible for the tools was installing and providing them with the workflow that we needed.

The solution is pretty flexible. I have worked in different projects using different features. From agile to just normal project management and task management. It's got a lot of great features. 

If we're talking specifically about project management, the solution is pretty nice. There are a bunch of modules and plugins and add-ons that you can use if you need to.

The test management aspect of Jira is pretty pure. They have a lot of great plugins that really expand your options.

There's always room for improvement, however, it depends on how you intend to use the solution. It's hard to pinpoint exact features that are lacking as the solution is quite vast.

From the project management perspective, I would say there are a lot of different issues that could be tweaked. There can be small improvements with traceability, for example.

I have no idea how long I've been working with the product at this point. It's probably been about ten years or so.

The pricing is fair. Right now, I'm using the solution for my small projects. For example, I'm using the Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud, which are pretty nice. For small teams, it's a very, very interesting option.

We're just a customer.

I'd advise, for those users who don't need an enterprise-level environment, that they go for a cloud deployment. For others, they don't really have a choice. They will have to follow up with enterprise security and other protocols. There are not that many options, I would say. 

I have learned that Jira, starting in 2024, will not be available as a server installation anymore. Soon there won't be any options at all. It will be the cloud or nothing. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's a very good product.

For small teams, the cloud works well. You can do basically whatever you want there, so it's fine. It's also not cost intensive if you're talking about using it for small teams.

I am a consultant, and we have some customers with projects who use Jira.

We have customers with different Jira installations because there are so many vendors. It is mostly used as a bug tracking system with tickets, issues and tags.

The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is a quite powerful user tracking system. Also, we use it to print tasks for planning so you can also see what's happening in the system and follow the tickets.

In terms of what could be improved, there is not much I don't like. It is a little bit faster but with Firefox it can be slow, but that is also the case with many other tools as well. It has quite a lot of options and fields, so I'm not too familiar with them all. That makes it a bit trickier. It could be a little bit easier, it is not that simple or straightforward. 

The tool itself is so powerful and the customer's expectation is very high because you have so many things you can do with it. That can make it a little non-user friendly.

I would want to see Jira include some improvements, like drag and drop and color, to make it more straightforward. If you compare it to Microsoft or Octane, they have good features that I would like to see in Jira as well.

Overall, Jira is a little bit old fashioned, it could be more user friendly.

They should make it simpler, to just be able to do some functions, whereas now it takes longer. There are too many clicks.

I have been using Jira for around 15 years or so, but not all the time.

The stability is fine. We have some issue now with our customers, it could be due to the network or other issues, I don't know if it is because of Jira itself. We have quite a complex environment and system for our customers. At the moment we have several tools and different systems. We have some issues with downtime but I am not sure why.

My advice to anyone thinking about Jira is that it would be wise to at least find out the most crucial functions that you need in the product, what features are most important, determine how the project will use Jira, and the most important thing is to have some kind of user training plan because the tool is so complex and flexible that you can use it in many, many different ways. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Jira a nine.

I would give it a nine because of course it needs some improvements. For example, the usability and its speed.

Some of the features that are most important to me of JIRA Agile are the sprint planning, being able to write user stories and being able to use task management. JIRA appears to be constantly evolving, developing, and adding new features throughout the process. 

I have had problems with performance and unresponsiveness. All of a sudden, the performance slowed down and I had a number of users that could not use the tool but, JIRA support responded immediately. Within a couple of hours, the problem was resolved.

I would give tech support a rating of eight out of ten.

I have prior experience with what was originally called HP Quality Center but is now called Micro Focus ALM. In comparing Micro Focus ALM vs Jira,I did not find it as intuitive or user-friendly as JIRA. I also have experience with and have compared CA Agile Central vs JIRA, but my preference is always JIRA because it is more established and very intuitive to work with.

The setup was on-premises and it was basically installing it on a server. I found the setup relatively easy and straightforward to install from scratch, in-house.

My advice to future users is to check out sources like YouTube and look at the main features you want. Potentially with JIRA, particularly with the cloud version, they have a seven day trial. I suggest that future users sign up for the free trial to make sure the features of JIRA meet their personal requirements. Also, the user should make sure that JIRA is a good fit for the user's organization.

The adaptability of the Scrum and Kanban boards for other uses, with careful use of the customization features.

It has simplified our PM work tremendously, as we switched from VersionOne. We have much more buy-in from dev teams and we see a marked difference in productivity.

Ease of administration and customization. It is really clunky in this area. Also, permissions are nice, but they need more refinement so a project admin has more capability and less reliance on the system administrators.

We have been using this solution for approximately four years.

There were issues with deployment. Because we use it on-premises rather than in the cloud, for regulatory reasons, we are often behind, but not for long. Apart from that, our PlatOps team always runs into problems, though I cannot speak directly to those issues.

There weren't terrible issues with stability, but it is easy, when customizing, to make a mistake that will "break" JIRA for all users. It takes a lot of care.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Customer service is excellent, although they are only available via email.

Technical support is excellent, because they are responsive.

We used VersionOne and it was simply too powerful, so to speak. It was bulky, expensive, and simply became a mess with so many users. VersionOne isn't a bad product at all, but our IT department just isn't big or complex enough for an "enterprise" product.

We implemented it ourselves.

Our ROI is very good. Almost all licenses are taken and it is even being used by the rest of the business, outside of IT.

The licensing model is annoying. They nickel and dime you.

We evaluated Asana and even Trello, as we were trying to simplify. But those solutions, among others, were too simple.

Ensure that your admins learn by first installing to a QA server for experimentation, if you are doing it on-premises. As for those learning it in the cloud version, create dummy projects, categorize them as such, and be careful about how many changes you make at once.

The features of the Technical Account Management (TAM) which have been most valuable for us are understanding the limitations of tools, suggested sizing and approach for operation teams, and suggested approaches for onboarding and educations.

The TAM provided good insight as to how we can more effectively perform troubleshooting, and scale down operational costs.

Co-location. Working out times with someone on the West Coast is painful. Also more ROI material. Big blue can spin out ridiculous documents that executives love as to why spending millions of dollars on IBM will somehow make us richer.

The TAM was able to assist us with issues we had involving deployment.

It was a struggle with TAM vs. Premier but eventually we were able to address some stability issues. We had an app crashing every other day for several weeks before it got the attention we thought this contract would bring.

In terms of the TAM and scalability the only issue was just an upsell to datacenter really. But the TAM is helping look at forecasting triggers etc to understand the need for more instances. It is really difficult to get any sizing recommendations for horsepower though. The feedback is “well every customer is unique, so it’s difficult to say” and push to Premier Support for that.

A few mismatched tools. The Atlassian ecosystem has tools that do one function very well, but pull together nicely as a platform. Would like more consistent navigation and provisioning integration though like what is seen in On demand/cloud offering.

We had setup well before the TAM agreement. Pretty straightforward other then lack of sizing recommendations across the board.

Yes, TeamCollab, Home grown tools, Redmine, Jenkins, XLDeploy, Jazz/BuildForge and RTC. RTC and XLDeploy/Jenkins combo is still widely used and seen as an internal competitor.

I would recommend buying premier support for half the price and training your folks internally. It’s really not at all what we felt was advertised.