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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 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."
"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"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."
"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 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."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"The two features that have been most valuable have been backlog management and sprint planning and tracking."
"I found it super useful, as it is customizable for different teams and users."
"Without Jira, I don't see how we would be able to manage and trace in a very consistent, effective way."
"What I like most about Jira is that it's flexible, as it has the flexibility to be configured for any company."
"Jira's collaborative features, such as comments, notifications, and real-time updates, facilitate better communication."
"The timeline management is great."
"This solution is easy to use and takes a lot of burden off the QA team."
"It is an excellent tool to summarize and get our stacks of data into a platform for operational overview and interface tracking."
 

Cons

"For project management, the scheduling of the project tasks should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid using the Atlassian Portfolio."
"Frankly it's a really daunting exercise - challenging, problematic and very flaky."
"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."
"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."
"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents."
"The hierarchy for Jira tickets is too flat."
"I prefer to use Azure DevOps instead of Jira for stability or the frequency of use."
"They are not supporting in-house servers anymore and I think I've got until January to port this to something else."
"Lately, I think Atlassian has been adding too many simplified features that look nice but don't offer the same level of flexibility, and made some fields not available through the API, which is kind of frustrating."
"The only complaint I have about Jira is that there is no field-level permission for the issues in the Jira cloud version."
"Out-of-the-box reporting is limited. It would be helpful if more customisation was possible."
"I think that there is some ease of use that could be brought in to improve certain things."
"I want the tool to integrate connectors."
 

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."
"The license is yearly. It is a large, long-running program."
"Compared to the value Jira provides, it’s not that expensive. It has an yearly licensing cost."
"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."
"One of my customers told me that they were receiving better pricing for a similar tool from Microsoft."
"The price seems reasonable to me. It's very similar to Splunk."
"We had a perpetual license but have changed to a subscription."
"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."
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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.