5 Best JIRA Alternatives

Project management tools are becoming a common thing in business organizations. According to Statista, 76% of U.S people say that they use project management tools in their organizations to manage tasks. And who can blame them when it is essential for handling dynamic projects that require constant changes in their workflow.

Most organizations prefer JIRA as their agile project management software to handle workflows. However, there are some alternatives that might work better for your team. This article will list some of the best JIRA alternative tools and their features.

• Why the Need for Project Management Tools
• JIRA – Agile Project Management Software
• Top 5 JIRA Alternatives
  • Base Camp
  • Pivotal Tracker
  • Asana
  • Trello
  • Redmine

Why the Need for Project Management Tools

Project management tools will help organizations effectively collaborate with their team members.

• Every organization will have multiple teams. With these tools, they can manage teams individually and also integrate with other teams whenever needed.
• These tools provide features like version management. This feature helps employees to keep track of the latest as well as older versions of the files and recover resources whenever needed.
• This also simplifies the file-sharing process by deciding who should access what files and channels. This method also ensures security.

JIRA – Agile Project Management Software

JIRA is an issue tracking and project management software tool. It is developed by Atlassian. This tool was initially developed to identify bug tracking tools which later evolved as an agile project management tool.

Agile project management is quite different from other project management functions. To handle the dynamic nature of agile projects, these tools focus on frequently updating and refining the workflows. This agile project management can handle unlimited projects and multiple users with a team foundation server.

JIRA Software is one such agile project management tool with multiple unique features that promotes project collaboration and an enterprise-class platform.

Features:

• JIRA furnishes two boards to manage projects. Out of which the Scrum boards break down large projects into smaller and manageable sizes while Kanban boards help the team visualize workflow and boost the efficiency of the teams.
• Their roadmaps synchronize the teams and organizations that help the team members with the project-centric decision-making.
• This tool is highly compatible with more than 3000 apps and ensures team collaboration and workflow management.  

Though JIRA is widely preferred by most organizations, it is a complex software that does not suit all sorts of project teams. This is quite expensive compared to other software. 

Also read: Jira Slack Integration – An Ultimate Guide in 2022

Top 5 JIRA Alternatives

1. Base Camp

Base Camp is a resource management tool that fosters collaboration among teams. This tool provides a way to manage multiple projects and gives a unified view of all activities in a remote location. Base camp is one of the best project management tools as they delegate tasks efficiently with a quality time tracking system.

Features

• Promotes native mobile support for both Android and iPhone users. Team members can stay connected with their teams through phones as well.
• Helps users in project planning and team priorities.
• Their time tracking features help to measure the capacity of the project and the team members.
• Base Camp offers a pay-as-you-go model. The users can pay for the tool as per the usage.
• They offer 500 GB storage space that allows unlimited projects and users to work with this tool.
• The Base Camp business model is available at $99 per month. The organization does not have individual users. It allows multiple users to access the tool.

2. Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is one of the best JIRA alternatives to manage projects and monitor team progress. These tools support agile teams and implement agile practices for updated project progress. This tool fosters collaboration ad enables a shared look for the team members so that they can prioritize tasks and split work among themselves.

Features

• This tool will display a backlog list from which users can pick and work on the available tasks.
• This software calculates team velocity and story points of every step to evaluate and analyze the team and individual performance.
• This tool has an automated consistency tracker to automate the analysis function.
• Pivotal tracker presents the time and trends with their dashboard reporting process.
• Pivotal Tracker offers a free service for 5 users. They cost from $10 per month and that varies according to the number of users and the functions they offer.

3. Asana

Asana is an easy-to-use intuitive interface for software development teams. This tool provides a transparent work environment where the team members can view their team members’ work and comment on it. This will let users help their teammates to mutually benefit each other.

Features

• These Asana tools automatically streamline workflows to handle the frequent updates in agile projects.
• Also provides boards to view and manage tasks of agile projects. These boards help the users in breaking down and handling projects in small sizes.
• It ensures a real-time chat for every single task.
• Users can assign tasks, set priorities and track time, and display the details on a common board for reference.
• Their premium plan ranges from $10.99 per month while the business plan costs around $25 per month.

4. Trello

As Trello is also owned by Atlassian, it comes with similar features to JIRA and also possesses its unique features. This is one of the most suitable too for cross-team collaboration, which allows people of multiple projects to work together. They use cards through which users can create a task checklist and track them throughout the working process.

Features

• Trello also allows the users to add Gantt Charts or Burndown charts.
• Trello has different views for different sorts of people. They customize the boards for company view, client view, and team view individually.
• Their easy drag and drop method helps the users to move cards from one category to others. This helps agile projects handle updates from multiple users.
• They provide business-level and enterprise-level packages. The business-level costs nearly $10 per month while the other ranges from $25.

5. Redmine

Redmine supports cross-platform and cross-database project management. This is specially focused on an issue tracking system that is built on the Ruby on Rails framework. This is an open-source tool that is issued by General Public License. It is compatible with Android, IoS, and other windows operating systems as well.

Features

• This tool comes with multiple plugins to extend its features within this tool.
• Issue tracking, Budget management, and Project management are its main focus.
• Being an open-source tool, it is free of cost. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Closing Thoughts

Project Management tools and software automate the management tasks of project managers and effectively collaborate among team members. Being a project manager or organizational head you would have enjoyed all the benefits of JIRA. 

JIRA can also trouble people with its high cost and complex process. If you are one among them who are looking for a shift, you can try one of the discussed Agile management tools like Trello, Asana, Pivotal Tracker, and a few more. These tools bring together clients, customers, teammates, and organization people to a common place where they can view and analyze the entire project progress. 

If you are looking forward to working on Jira but don’t know where to start, try our online course for beginners.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!