When comparing Taiga vs JIRA, the Slant community recommends Taiga for most people. In the question“What is the best task management software for small teams?” Taiga is ranked 8th while JIRA is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Taiga is:
User stories can be organized in both Kanban and Scrum task management systems.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports both Kanban and Scrum modes
User stories can be organized in both Kanban and Scrum task management systems.
Pro Free and open source
Taiga is licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Simple to use
Pro Comprehensive Agile software development toolset
Taiga tries offering a complete Agile software development toolset. It includes complete solutions for issue tracking, videoconferencing, documentation (in the form of a wiki) and either a backlog or a Kanban board for managing user stories.
Pro Built-in issue tracking
Taiga has built-in issue tracking tools. The issues can be organized by user-defined type, severity, priority, creation date, assignee, creator, tags as well as filtered by subject. Taiga can also integrate with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket.
Pro Built-in wiki
Each project has a wiki. It has Markdown support as well as a WYSIWYG editor.
Pro Built-in video conferencing tools
Integrates with either AppearIn or Talky to provide a video conferencing solution.
Pro Migration from RedMine
Pro Export/Import feature
You can extract all your data from one Taiga instance and move it to another one. You can read more here.
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 No Kanban metrics
Taiga is said to support Kanban but it does not generate any of the usual Kanban metrics (cycle time, lead time) or graph (Cumulated Flow Diagram).
Con Can be overwhelming at first
Taiga presents users with a lot of information and functionality right from the beginning with little guidance. Figuring how stuff works might take a bit.
Con Too much functionality for small projects
While it's possible to disable any unwanted features (modules), the amount of functionality that's present might be more than a small, short-term project needs.
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.