When comparing Basecamp vs JIRA Agile, the Slant community recommends Basecamp for most people. In the question“What are the best project management tools?” Basecamp is ranked 3rd while JIRA Agile is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Basecamp is:
They offer many ways to get support, such as FAQs, Help Guides, Sample Projects, Videos, Twitter, quick response ticket system, and more.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Provides several method for support
They offer many ways to get support, such as FAQs, Help Guides, Sample Projects, Videos, Twitter, quick response ticket system, and more.
Pro Easy navigation
Puts everything in one place. Rather than creating more navigation, such as using sub pages, the UI is sheet-based and uses layers instead.
Pro Highly customisable and powerful workflows
You can provide custom workflows for all the different types of issues. For example you can make features go through a flow of "Backlog -> Needs design -> Built -> Needs QA -> done" with bugs going through a different flow. These workflows are very powerful as you can configure them to automatically assign your QA lead when moved into the needs QA state. These features do require some learning curve to set up, but make the tool a lot more efficient to use as things like managing who is assigned to an issue can be automated.
Pro Powerful tools for issue management
Issues in a current sprint are viewed in a Kanban interface. But for the issues not in a sprint Jira provides a compact view with many powerful tools to search and filter the list. You can create custom filters such as "Show me all issues not yet designed that are assigned to me" and a variety of other tools that make dealing with large backlogs easy.
Pro Has App Marketplace for extensions
Pro Helps you focus on what's important
Jira is a truly Agile software as you may concentrate on the active sprint and the tasks you have to do.
Cons
Con Only free for a short period of time
Con Only free for a short period of time
Con Lacking communication tools
Basecamp lacks communication methods compared to other services.
Con Not for power users
Basecamp is designed for a really rudimentary skillset. You mostly see it used in creative agencies.
Con Lots of clicking to get to what you want
There is a proliferation of pages within Basecamp. You have to click all over the place to get to what you need.
Con Slow to use
Every view switch and action takes a second or two. Doesn't seem too bad when you first start using it, but the UI is complicated enough that you need to manipulate it a lot and all that time adds up.
Con Merely a thin interface to a massive database
Too many configuration details, too confusing, too difficult to search and modify numerous tickets.
Con Email defaults are crazy-bad
The default is seemingly to email everyone on the team every change on every ticket. Which is stupid-bad. It means you get spammed with so much JIRA garbage you miss actual message tagged with your name.
Con Terrible editors barely work
The in-page editor for issues have lots of issues, plus several hacked-together features that barely work with each other. It's nice that you can drag and drop an image, but just try to format inline text as code, or block text as code, or to use the styles, and you'll find several places where things just FAIL.
Con Expensive
User based price model
Con Ancient
Non-reactive interface.
