Jira Reviews

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.

Private Cloud

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.

On-premises

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.

More than five years.

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:

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

Technical Support:

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.

Getting our Service Desk out of a system of stored emails and into a ticket system where we can queue, assign, track, report, and store knowledge has been great for us.

JIRA was our first experience with ITSM implementation. It allowed us to reduce the amount of tools we were using, standardize our procedures, and measure our work. This allowed us to show the need for additional staff resources, additional training, track our busiest times and prepare for them.

Administration: JIRA administration is not as efficient as it should be. JIRA is aware of many relationships but doesn't bother to show them to you on the admin side. Example. JIRA knows what roles I'm using for a project because they are listed in the permission scheme. Rather than just showing me the roles listed in the scheme it will show you every role in the database. This makes the page load slowly and is frustrating to scroll through. There are many other examples of this same function for administrators.

31 months

No, deploying JIRA in our VM environment was not a problem.

We did have some issues with stability in the beginning. We were pushing the ticket limit is 4.1 and it caused some issues. We later tested the High Availability Clustering and the archival tools for this which were very nice and did work, but were to expensive at the time.

We did have some limitations but that was not an issue after 4.4 when the ticket limit was doubled.

Customer Service: Customer service has not been helpful but I have not minded since the wiki documentation and Atlassian Answers forum have been great. The developers I have done beta testing for have also been great. They are good about using your feedback as they design.Technical Support: The wiki and forums are wonderful. I get all my answers from those two sources. Talking to a customer representative has not led to anything useful.

We had a system called EPIC that we had created in house and did not have the functions and capabilities JIRA had. JIRA was also a more cost effective solution.

I did have complexities in the beginning and again as I was scaling but they were not the tool as much as establishing efficient shared processes and procedures.

In-house. Two of use spent time learning the tool and implementing it in our area first and then across the University.

In dollars, nothing. We are not charging to use our implementation. In employee resources, project planning, training, staffing, process efficiency, a lot. It would be hard to say the actual cost.

Our original cost was about $2000 for our licenses and hosting costs to get started. We are currently paying about $6000 dollars per year for our current installation.

We tested three or four other options including, BaseCamp, Footprints, Drupal, and a lite version of BMC. We were a small area at the time and JIRA's combination of cost model and function won.

This is a very cost effective application if you are looking to do application development, incident management, request fulfillment, problem management, knowledge management, or project tracking at a low maturity.

Jira is used by my clients across their organizations. They use it for everything related to IT solutions.

Jira has been a good, powerful tool for collaborating across large groups of people.

I use structures as well as the reporting features, personally. The JQL feature is powerful and easy to use. 

The Jira dashboards could be more useful. The dashboards have good widgets but the comparison of data over time or extraction of trends from the data is not easy. This is important for us from a governance perspective. Currently, we do this outside of Jira in Excel manually or using other reporting tools. 

Secondly, it would be useful if the graphs in Jira could be more customizable. If you draw a graph on Excel sheet, you are able to do a lot of customizations. Those kinds of customizations are not possible with the current implementation of Jira. 

When you create structures such as hierarchy, including epics and stories, if you change something, the fields are not correlated. This makes the tracking of changes a manual process.

I have been using Jira for more than a year, but I'm working on a project which has been using it for five years.

This is a stable solution but it can be quite slow. The speed at which Jira operates depends on how it is implemented. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

Public Cloud