When comparing Basecamp vs JIRA, the Slant community recommends JIRA for most people. In the question“What is the best task management software for small teams?” JIRA is ranked 14th while Basecamp is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose JIRA is:
It integrates well with a lot of other tools, including other products from the Atlassian suite. Plus there are a ton of plugins, including charting tools, screen capture, etc.
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 Lots of integrations and plugins
It integrates well with a lot of other tools, including other products from the Atlassian suite. Plus there are a ton of plugins, including charting tools, screen capture, etc.
Pro Backed by a trustable company
Jira is developed and maintained by Atlassian, which is not an unknown venture, especially for developers. Atlassian has a great number of other products used by million of users worldwide, including BitBucket, HipChat, Confluence and Stash.
Each of these products have hundreds of thousands of users who use them daily and this has allowed Atlassian to garner a lot of goodwill from the dev community.
Pro Very cheap for small teams
Pro Supports version-focused work-flows
JIRA is not a plain long list of tickets, but can be configured to be version-focused, so planning and understanding the progress in a software project becomes clear.
Pro Great reporting tools
Jira offers amazingly powerful reporting tools like activity stream, different graphs of opened and closed issues over time etc...
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 New releases often change the GUI largely
Sometimes the usage becomes worse, e.g. when creating a new ticket, you need to click the notification to keep it on the display.
Con Locks you inside its own ecosystem
If you use Jira you are pretty much locked inside their ecosystem. For example, if you want to add a tool to your project management stack (like a wiki) more often than not you will have to buy one of Atlassian's tools.
Con Client application support
No free client applications; IDE connector development was discontinued. Users are effectively locked into using web interface which requires context-switching.