When comparing Kanban Tool vs JIRA Agile, the Slant community recommends Kanban Tool for most people. In the question“What are the best online Kanban tools?” Kanban Tool is ranked 3rd while JIRA Agile is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Kanban Tool is:
You will probably figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Intuitive
You will probably figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Pro Time tracking reports
Great and seamless time tracking with best time tracking reports.
Pro Customizable and reassuring
Thanks to the visualization of work, it's much easier to see the progress of work. Boosts the confidence in what you endeavour upon and reassures each step of the process. The customization allows to fit a system right to the process you've planned, so that we don't have to match our work to an external way, but build our own.
Pro Good number of integrations
Kanban Tool integrates with: Zapier, WeWiredWeb, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, Google calendar, iCal, Outlook, flexible and well-documented API for external systems integration, RSS feeds for boards, Chrome extension for adding tasks, JIRA® integration (Chrome extension - Kanbanira), adding tasks and comments from email, export/import Excel/CSV.
Pro Simple customization
Kanban Tool provides a collection of power-ups that allow you to customize it to meet your needs. Especially, "Developer tools" are worth mentioning. With this power-up you can add custom scripts and stylesheets to your board.
Pro Scalable
No matter how big a team you work in, kanban tool fits nicely. Thanks to the ability to customize the boards, it's easy to match a board to the size of the process. The kanban tool has been growing with our process for the past 3 years, we started with 3 people and 2 boards, now we have 24 employees and 16 main boards with several process steps each and the system works just as well.
Pro User friendly interface
Pro Work statistics
You can clearly see on a graph how much of planned work have you done already. It's very motivating.
Pro Pleasant design
Pro Swimlanes and customization
You can very easily adjust the board layout to suit your needs and even add swimlanes to have all projects on the same Kanban board.
Pro On-site version available
Pro iOS app coming soon
Just been told by the Support Team there will be an iOS app soon.
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 Not immediately self-hostable
To self-host, your server needs to have 10 or more users, and prices on self-hosting are not disclosed.
Con Search could be better
Search is not reliable.
Con Non libre/open source (propietary)
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.
