No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Jira vs aqua comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

aqua
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
36th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
AI-Augmented Software-Testing Tools (29th)
Jira
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
284
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (2nd), Project Management Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of aqua is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 11.4%, down from 15.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Jira11.4%
aqua0.7%
Other87.9%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

it_user347709 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It has JMeter integration which provides visualizations during tests and instrumentation of each agent.
It has a strong reporting and dashboard mechanism. Reporting and metric management are so important in our company that we get value from the reporting functionality of the product. It has Jmeter integration that provides visualization during test and instrumentation of each agent so you do not need to pay extra for a licensed performance test tool.
RituRaj - PeerSpot reviewer
SDE 2 at Virtusa
Centralized sprint boards have transformed our planning and now improve cross‑team visibility
While Jira is very powerful, there are definitely areas it could be improved, especially for usability and simplicity. One common challenge is that Jira can feel overwhelming for new users. The number of features, configurations, workflows, and settings is huge. Onboarding non-technical teams or new employees sometimes takes longer than expected. A simple default experience for a beginner would help a lot. Another issue is performance. In large organizations with heavy customizations, large backlogs, or complex dashboards, Jira can occasionally feel slow, especially when loading filters, reports, or larger boards. Pricing can also become expensive as an organization scales and multiple Atlassian products and plugins are added. Some smaller teams sometimes feel the ecosystem becomes costly over time. The mobile experience would be smoother for project managers or leadership users who mainly want quick update approvals or dashboard views on the go. Overall, Jira's biggest strength is flexibility, but that flexibility can also create complexity if not managed carefully. Improving simplicity, performance, and ease of adoption would make the platform even stronger. An additional improvement I would mention for Jira is around balancing flexibility with simplicity. Jira gives organizations a huge amount of customization power, which is great. But over time, many teams end up creating overly complicated processes. After a few years, some Jira environments become difficult to maintain because there are many workflows, custom fields, permissions, and automations layered on top of each other. It would help if Jira would provide a strong built-in recommendation or health check for keeping a project clean or efficient. For example, identifying unused custom fields, suggesting workflow simplicity improvements, flagging redundant automations, or recommending dashboard optimization.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It has a strong reporting and dashboard mechanism."
"The features on offer are great. It has everything we need."
"Jira has been designed with a focus on task achievement, is instantly usable, and is flexible to work with."
"I like it for team collaboration and task management. I also like its analytics and dashboards."
"Overall, the solution is very nice and has a variety of great features."
"The timeline management is great."
"I have found the most valuable features of Jira to be ticketing, life cycle workflow, definition, and creation. Many of the features are useful."
"What I find valuable about Jira is that it's an ecosystem."
"Jira is very user friendly, easy to install, and easy to access."
 

Cons

"It is a client application, and should have web GUI because the installation and upgrade process is a little bit difficult."
"We haven't seen Jira's progressive area so far, and we are not sure what it might do in the future."
"We have found that improvement is needed in their customer support (communication, which is ironic)."
"There is a difference between their cloud and their server versions. The next-gen project, which is an advanced feature that allows you to visualize the road map of your delivery over multiple products and over time, is not available yet for the sever version. It appears there in the list, but it's still not right. I've tried to use it many times and I am watching the device show their tracker, but it seems they intentionally want this to increase the utilization of the cloud instead of the server. It is really a nice feature and it's a shame that we don't have it."
"So at one point in time, they did a huge UI upgrade. At that time, I felt like they had changed something, so it was hard to figure out. Now that we are habituated, it's not an issue now."
"I want Jira to have more plug-ins, which will allow for more free plug-ins that help with the area of reporting."
"The reporting needs to be improved."
"The permissions can be challenging to get right."
"The user interface and views on different devices should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The cost is about $10 per user, per month."
"Our client handles the licensing aspect. They have not yet purchased the premium version."
"Its price is fine, but we would like it to be less expensive. We are paying on a yearly basis."
"There are no additional costs to the standard licensing."
"I think the starter pack of three users, up to five users, is free. So you can try it out."
"The basic price of Jira is reasonable, but for each plugin, we have to keep paying more. When you add it all up, it can be expensive. The main problem we face is we are forced to purchases plugin licenses for users who are not going to use them. For example, we have Jira licenses for approximately 450 people but if we only want a purchase a plugin for few people it is mandatory to buy the license for the 450 people who have Jira licensees. This is a problem because sometimes we need plugins for the product manager or for people in charge of the report, not everyone. For us, it can be very expensive in the end, they should alter this policy to allow plugins for only a set number of licenses."
"It is an affordable tool."
"I am not sure if the client is using a commercial version. I think it is on a per-user basis, and it is around 15 Canadian dollars for a user, but I'm not sure. It also has a free version."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites solutions are best for your needs.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
15%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business108
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise155
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?
Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
Jira is a good tool and it is not that expensive. The setup cost is pretty straightforward and the onboarding is smooth.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

aqua ALM
Jira Software
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yapi Kredi, Berlin Hyp, megapharm, Crem Solutions, Takko Fashion, Omnicare, Markant
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian, Microsoft, OpenText and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.