Track Issues, Enhance Collaboration, and Drive Results

Jira is a useful tool that works in every step of the project management and software development cycle, from planning, coding, and deployment to operation and collaboration.

Whether you are a startup, a growing business, or an enterprise, Jira is suitable for any team from size 1-20k.

It offers amazing features, privacy, security, and valuable tools to support your journey. Jira is also scalable to promote your growth without any friction.

But does it really deliver what it promises?

In this article, I’ll review Jira and help you decide whether it’s worth investing in.

Let’s start!

Jira Software: An Overview

Jira Software is one of the best agile project management tools that teams use to plan, release, track, build, and support software solutions with more confidence. It can help you move faster, develop better products, and stay aligned with your goals.

Jira is trusted by over 100k+ organizations and individuals due to its impressive offerings, flexibility, and support that it provides to agile teams. It comes with an out-of-the-box feature set as well as best practices so that teams can build and evolve their own agile practices.

If you don’t have an idea where to get started, you can use Jira’s ready-made templates and start building your products. You will also get to enjoy a higher degree of customization with Jira, as it can quickly adjust to your work style. It also supports many integrations so that you can use everything from a single place without switching tools.

And the best part is that Jira offers a free plan alongside different paid plans, catering to different shapes and sizes of businesses. The free tier comes with limited features, while the higher plans can accommodate growing needs.

Why Do You Need Jira?

Competition is high everywhere, and you need to come up with best-class solutions in order to stay relevant in the market.

This is why teams are now going agile and looking for tools, technologies, and methods to speed up their project development process and produce quality solutions.

Jira can help you there by providing you with the capabilities and features your team will need to streamline your workflow and deploy only the best products.

Jira Software is suitable for any agile methodology for project management and software development. It offers plenty of valuable tools to plan, track, measure, estimate, and report workflows for agile teams. 

Given below are the features of Jira that can help you build and support your software and manage everything effectively.

Features of Jira

Jira Software is suitable for any agile methodology for project management and software development. Here are the below features of Jira:

#1. Agile Boards

Jira allows you to manage your workflow efficiently with powerful Kanban and Scrum agile boards.

Kanban boards: With flexible, easy-to-use Kanban boards, you can visualize your workflow clearly, maximize team efficiency, and limit work-in-progress. DevOps and agile teams commonly use Kanban boards to accelerate continuous product delivery and bring about improvement.

Scrum boards: These boards can help you break complex, large projects into smaller, easy-to-manage pieces of work. This enables your team that works in sprints to ship products faster. This accelerates the overall workflow.

#2. Roadmaps

With roadmaps, you can keep your organization and team synchronized with each other. They also offer better visibility into your workflow so that teams get the full context of what’s going on. This information helps you make better decisions at the right time while keeping your long-term goals aligned.

#3. Insights and Reports

Using Jira Software’s out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, you can gain critical insights into each work along with the context. This enables teams to stay up-to-date and set their sail to success.

#4. Drag and Drop Automation

Let Jira automation do everything else while you just focus on important things. Jira automation is not only a powerful tool but also simple and fun to use. You will get hundreds of automation templates to save time and skip starting from scratch.

With Jira automation, you can automate many tasks with some clicks. This feature is available for all customers of Jira Cloud. You just need to choose the templates and stay focussed, save time, and connect the different tools you use. Some automation includes:

• Automatically publish post-incident reviews (PIRs) in a connected Confluence space
• Auto-assign issues
• Synchronize work
• Daily Slack summary
• Summing up story points of a sub-task to the parent task
• The Automation Playground, a secure sandbox environment, helps explore hundreds of automation templates interactively and see how each one of them works.

#5. Deployment and Code Status

Allow your developers to focus on their code while visualizing all your deployments and code status quickly in Jira. You can view:

• Repositories: If you include a specific issue key in a code commit, PR, or branch name, it will get automatically updated in the Jira Software.
• Development status: You can visualize and create new branches, view commits, and pull requests directly inside Jira’s issue development panel.
• DevOps: You can view and measure the overall project’s progress, right from ideation to planning and production.

#6. Open DevOps

For DevOps teams, a single vendor is not enough to deliver everything they need for software development. On the other hand, if you involve too many vendors and tools, it can be messy.

With Open DevOps powered by Jira, you don’t have to struggle with either situation. You can use Jira as your DevOps practice’s single source of truth. This will help you leverage the extensibility of a diverse, open toolchain and improve coordination.

Open DevOps automatically integrates partner tools and Atlassian. You can bring the tools you use or swap their tools in a few clicks. Its features are:

• Simplified tool configuration

• Developer tools for integration

#7. Project Flexibility

Jira ensures project flexibility with its structure and autonomy, customizable workflows, and powerful integrations. You can choose from company-managed or team projects, whatever suits your workflow, and Jira will adjust accordingly. In addition, you can create workflows and customize them according to your work style.

#8. Integrations

Jira is highly extensible, with more than 3000 integrations and apps. If your team uses a tool, there is a high chance you can integrate it with Jira. You can add the tools you use from the Atlassian marketplace and do everything from a single place – Jira.

Just browse through their category pages and learn about useful applications you might be new to. Some of the highly used integrations are GitLab, Git, GitHub, Jenkins, JFrog, Miro for Confluence, Figma, Lucidchart, Freshdesk, Power BI, Slack, Teams, Sentry, Zephyr Squad, etc.

#9. Security and Privacy

Jira is designed for scalability and security, leveraging modern capabilities. You can utilize Atlassian Access, a subscription for your entire organization that will connect your products in the Atlassian Cloud (like Trello, Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc.) to an identity provider (like GCP, Azure AD, Okta, OneLogin, etc.).

With Atlassian Access, you will get improved data governance and security for all your Atlassian Cloud solutions and products. It can empower organizations of all sizes to add enterprise-level features for identity and access management (IAM ) directly in your centralized admin console.

Security features:

• Automating the user provisioning process (SCIM)
• SAML SSO
• Revoking unauthorized API tokens
• Enforcing 2-step authentication
• Monitoring usage to detect suspicious behavior, streamline usage, and handle shadow IT
• Reviewing audit logs organization-wide

Templates

Jira provides you with dozens of beautiful, pre-configured templates for different categories, departments, and teams. These will help you get started quickly and guide your team on the project and achieve success. These templates will save you significant time since you don’t have to do everything from scratch.

Jira offers templates for:

• Software development
• Work, product, and service management  
• Marketing
• Finance
• Human resources
• Design
• Operations
• Sales
• Legal
• Personal

Use Cases of Jira

Jira is much more than a simple tool to build and support software solutions. Some of its use cases are:

#1. Software Development

Jira helps software development teams with the help of its tools for planning and creating roadmaps, managing budgets, stakeholders, and feature requirements, bug tracking, deploying new features, and more. It also allows the integration of various tools to ease the workflow.

#2. Agile Software Development

Jira’s performance reports and time-tracking capabilities allow agile teams to track project and employee performance over a specific time period. They also use it for work logging, project-level permissions, and email notifications.

#3. DevOps

DevOps helps automate and integrate processes between the development and operations teams. Thus, they can plan, create, test, and deploy their software quickly and with reliability.

Jira is the backbone of Open DevOps by Atlassian. It helps seamlessly integrate a team’s internal and external or third-party tools throughout the DevOps lifecycle.

It does so with the help of tools like GitHub, GitLab, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc. This enables you to focus on best practices such as automation, continuous delivery, feature flagging, security, and so on.

#4. Tracking Bugs and Errors

If your system captures a bug, Jira can automatically allocate it and prioritize this immediately. This enables project managers to track the bug and the fixing process. It’s also helpful in bug tracking with issue backlogs, customizable workflows, project rules, bug linking, etc.

The project, Task, and Product Management

Many teams use Jira for the project management due to its excellent configuring capabilities and the way it accommodates projects. It provides many templates to get started quickly and customize them as per the needs. Jira helps in:

• Project configuration
• Planning
• Choosing a suitable team and giving them access
• Task and progress tracking
• Manage project completion
• Adding dates, notes, reminders, etc., to tasks

Pricing

Jira offers different pricing plans suitable for teams of all shapes and sizes. You are free to choose between monthly and annual plans based on your team’s needs and growth.

#1. Free

This is a totally FREE plan that won’t cost you a dime. It’s always free for up to 10 users and available in a monthly subscription only. This plan is best for startups and small businesses.

Features:

• 2 GB storage
• 1 site
• Insights and reporting
• Basic roadmaps and backlog
• Unlimited project boards
• Community support

#2. Standard

It costs $7.75 per user. To test if it’s beneficial for you, you can start a free trial. This plan is more suitable for growing businesses.

Features:

• It offers all the features from the FREE plan plus these:
• Up to 35k users
• 1 site
• 250 GB storage
• User roles and permissions
• Audit logs
• Standard or business-hour support

#3. Premium

Jira Software Premium is the higher plan of Jira Software, costing $15.25 per user. You can take a free trial to check if it’s worth investing in. It’s more suitable for medium-sized businesses. 

Features:

It has all the features from the Standard plan plus these:

• Unlimited storage
• 1 site
• Up to 35k users
• 90.9% uptime SLAs
• Privacy Shield and GDPR to handle data with care.
• 24/7 premium support

#4. Enterprise

If you want to enter 801 users or more, you can get this plan. It’s available only as an annual plan. You can contact sales and explain to them your needs to get a quote for this plan.

Features:

It has all the features from the Premium plan plus these:

• Unlimited websites
• 99.95% uptime
• Centralized security controls and user subscriptions
• 24/7 enterprise-grade support

Jira Alternative

Despite all the goodness of Jira, some users still look for its alternative solutions. The reason could be anything, like better pricing, usability, features they specifically need, and so on. So, if you are one of them, here are some Jira alternatives for you:

#1. Notion

Notion is an excellent Jira alternative with its amazing capabilities and features. It’s a connected workspace where you can work better and faster. You can create and manage your projects and documents without any hassle, whether you are a startup or an enterprise.

Features:

• Product roadmap to organize and manage your projects, tasks, and products easily with their timelines.
• Centralize your entire knowledge like setup guides, processes, etc.
• Consolidate all tools into a single platform
• Visualize, filter, and sort tasks
• Customize tracking information
• Get templates for OKRs, meeting notes, vacation planners, habit trackers, and editorial calendars

Try Notion for free.

#2. Asana

Asana is one of the best platforms for performing cross-functional work. It will help you drive efficiency throughout your company and is easy for everyone to use and deliver better work faster.

Features:

• Manage the planning, content development, and other tasks effectively with details
• Assign and organize tasks with the list view
• Create timelines and manage tasks that are dependent, unscheduled, or overlapping
• Focus more on tasks with boards and prioritize work
• Automate and customize workflows
• Supports 200+ integrations

Try Asana for free.

#3. Monday.com

Boost efficiency, productivity, and team alignment with Monday.com, which will help you create and customize workflows as per your needs. You can centralize all your tools, work, and processes in it and streamline everything.

Features:

• Easy-to-use automation
• Real-time notifications
• Enhanced visibilities into every task with views and dashboards
• Integration with many tools like Slack, Adobe, Dropbox, etc.

Conclusion: Is Jira Worth It?

Jira is an excellent tool that you can use for software development, project management, product and task management, bug tracking, and so on. It has a great set of capabilities and features from basic to advanced levels. And the best part is that it’s free forever.

However, the free plan has limited features. So, if you are a growing business or an enterprise, you can try its paid plans that come with advanced features at good pricing points.

Given its capabilities and pricing, Jira is definitely worth trying out. But if you are not satisfied with it, you can go for any one of the Jira alternatives mentioned above.