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Atlassian ALM vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

Atlassian ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
16th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 June 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 11.0%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Jira11.0%
Atlassian ALM2.4%
Other86.6%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

BRIANJOHNSON2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independant Consultant at B&H Designs Ltd
Long-term testing workflows have improved integration of test planning and defect tracking
The deployment depends on whether you are deploying it on your computer or across the program. Cloud-based system deployment takes some time, as it depends on your rights to your computer. I would rate the deployment as a seven on a scale of one to ten. It took a couple of hours to get it right. The IT department deploys it.
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

"The Atlassian ALM suite consists at least of JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket and HipChat - just the tools you need for organizing your teams in a very efficient way."
"In Bitbucket, the reviews are pretty good."
"The interface between the repository and test plan stands out as valuable, and I appreciate building the tests and scenarios in Test Lab and the ability to link defects throughout the system, which Atlassian ALM does better than any other testing products."
"If you can spend the little effort to configure Jira to support your more complex requirements management, then you can concentrate everything in one tool."
"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite, and we have good integration with work management and software build automation (Bamboo), which is the major strength from this provider."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The traceability mapping feature is something that became very useful, especially during releases and bug fixes."
"Jira is flexible and accessible for the end-user, lets users track their requests, has a look and feel that is good for our purposes, and because we are connected to Power BI, we have better visibility and a range of metrics that give good insight."
"It's easy to use, and it also offers excellent notifications."
"JIRA's technical support is absolutely fantabulous."
"It covers most of the development process, and almost everyone uses it, from business owners and product owners to testers, developers, and DevOps, with all features, stories, tasks, and test cases managed in Jira so everything is done in Jira."
"We can cope with processes easily without adapting the tool, but adapting the tool to processes."
"The links between tickets are very valuable and the boards I found to be configurable and usable. The boards allow some level of extended configuration and they can be customized according to our project needs. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"We love the bulk edit feature. Jira also integrates well with Bitbucket."
 

Cons

"The solution is stable but at times, the performance is poor. It takes time to load and the response time is not up to the mark."
"Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents."
"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."
"All Atlassian products are based on JAVA which makes it a bit difficult to trace problems if you don't have much JAVA skilled staff around."
"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."
"However, it is not really scalable, so if you want to use it for anything larger or plan to use it for product portfolios, then it starts to be problematic."
"Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive."
"Frankly it's a really daunting exercise - challenging, problematic and very flaky."
"They can maybe dumb down the directions for building the automation a little bit because to be able to build out the automation, I had to play around with it and learn what all the fields meant and what they were referencing. I don't have an IT background originally. My background is in biology, and I got into project management by chance. I am good at it, but I haven't really worked with coding languages. In terms of writing automation, it is easier for devs because they intuitively know what they're being asked, but as a PM who originally didn't have IT experience, it was a little bit daunting at first. It could also have an extra hierarchy to be able to allow tasks under stories. It could be the way it is set up at our organization, but currently, under stories, you can have sub-tasks, but you can't create a task. Being able to customize your hierarchy a little bit more would be beneficial because sometimes, the devs would say, "Well, here's a story, and now we need sub-tasks," but as we were building out the sub-tasks, sometimes we had to go a step lower to dig in a little bit more, and we couldn't do that."
"Managing a large number of users on Cloud version is extremely challenging due to lack of this capability."
"It is not capturing the number of hours for which each person has worked on certain things. We use many add-ons to let resources enter the time in the user story itself. We use an add-on called Tempo, but it is kind of a lousy add-on. It is not straightforward. Rather than helping us, it creates a lot of confusion. So, instead of looking out for the additional add-on, I would prefer to have the timesheet entered as a part of Jira itself. They are anyways capturing every information they could for each user story, and then we are able to break down all the task lists. For each task, we're also assigning a resource. So, while we're doing it, why can't they allow the users to enter the time that can be created as a report? Right now, we need to acquire the add-on, and the add-on is not great. It is not helping. The add-on is also not free."
"JIRA is written in JAVA and therefore a bit hard to trouble-shoot."
"Once the solution is deployed, it's not easy to configure."
"I find it unacceptable, and may potentially lead us to look for another solution."
"The workflow and layout can be confusing and takes a while to get used to."
"We encountered occasional timeouts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a community edition available, but if the price were lower for the addons then more people would use the full version."
"We have an enterprise license that includes cloud service and support."
"It does not cost that much."
"The tool's pricing is expensive. The new pricing is indeed quite expensive compared to what it was a few years ago. Last year, when we intended to renew our subscription, we found the pricing considerably higher."
"The price of the solution could be lower."
"Jira and its solution off the shelf are cheap. It is cheap for startups."
"The cost is about $10 per user, per month."
"It is an affordable tool."
"The standard package of Jira is for 100 users. They should offer more packages for other increments, such as 500 or 2,000. In my previous company, there was a free package that provided a minimal number of users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise152
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian ALM?
Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Atlassian ALM?
I am still not satisfied with the requirements area of Atlassian ALM. Atlassian ALM has four parts: test plan, Test Lab, requirements, and reporting. The requirements portion continues to be an are...
What is your primary use case for Atlassian ALM?
I have been using Atlassian ALM for twenty-five years. It used to be called Quality Center, and I first used it in 2000 and 2001. The company changed, but the product remained. Atlassian ALM has no...
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?
In terms of pricing and setup cost, my experience with the pricing and licensing of Jira was generally positive, especially compared to the operational value it provides for project management and ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Jira Software
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, NASA, Cisco, eBay, Redfin, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Gilt, CSIRO, Autodesk, The Daily Telegraph, CODE, Illumnia
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian ALM vs. Jira and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.