Kanban Tool vs JIRA
When comparing Kanban Tool vs JIRA, the Slant community recommends Kanban Tool for most people. In the question“What is the best task management software for small teams?” Kanban Tool is ranked 3rd while JIRA is ranked 14th. 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 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 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 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.