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Atlassian ALM vs Jira comparison

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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 (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.4%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 11.0%, down from 17.7% 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 most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"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."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"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."
"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"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."
"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 product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
"I liked the flexibility of the application. It was pretty user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of Jira are the dashboards and user interface. The processes within Jira to monitor, maintain and release are beneficial. It is a continuous development solution."
"As long as a company has the money for storage, it's scalable to any size."
"Everything that Jira offers is outstanding."
"Scaling the product wouldn't be difficult."
"The scrum dashboard is the product's most important feature. It provides an overview of tasks, who is working on what, and the status of each task."
"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"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."
"There are times when Jira goes down, and we find it difficult to log in."
"If I'm comparing it to ALM Octane, the documentation is not as robust as ALM Octane's documentation. So, they can improve on the documentation side."
"I'm mostly focusing on the requirements traceability with my thesis, the integration could improve for other tools. The companies are not only using Jira. For example, for the test cases or for the documents templates, we are using Polarion and we have been having some integration issues."
"It is not intuitive."
"Because I am a developer, I would like integration with Git Source Code Management so that for tickets, we can reference the code where the change has happened and where the issue is. This feature might be there, and I probably haven't discovered it."
"Although it covers the overall requirements and measurements, it'll help if they had their own test execution feature."
"Ease of administration and customization. It is really clunky in this area."
"An area for improvement in Jira is that it's not designed for test management. To use it for test management, you need an add-on or several add-ons, e.g. Xray or Zephyr."
 

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."
"Almost everybody uses JIRA nowadays because it is the most cost-effective solution."
"We used to be on a perpetual license provided by our clients."
"We are on an annual license to use Jira."
"It depends on the type of license. In terms of subscription, it is cheap, and it works pretty well."
"There is an annual subscription to use Jira."
"The licensing cost for Jira is typically around seven dollars per user, though it may vary depending on regional variations. This cost is for a subscription-based model rather than a one-time purchase. I rate its pricing a seven out of ten."
"We had a perpetual license but have changed to a subscription."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
 

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 Enterprise154
 

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?
Jira is a good tool and it is not that expensive. The setup cost is pretty straightforward and the onboarding is smooth.
 

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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.