JIRA Agile vs JIRA
When comparing JIRA Agile vs JIRA, the Slant community recommends JIRA for most people. In the question“What are the best project management tools?” JIRA is ranked 12th while JIRA Agile is ranked 18th. 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
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Pros
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.
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 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.
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.