This article is a part of Astral Web’s Comprehensive Guide to JIRA!

Previously: Introduction to Atlassian JIRA: A Great Platform for Project and Issue Tracking Part 1

In Part 1 we introduced the basics of JIRA, but now we want to understand why JIRA is so popular.

Why is JIRA Popular?

(source: www.atlassian.com)

So, we have heard about JIRA before and how it is gaining popularity, so we studied demos to see if it is good for our company, too. Similar development companies like us have shared their success cases proving that JIRA works.

As of 2017, Atlassian claims JIRA is being used by more than 75,000 customers of all sizes around the world. But, why?

More about Atlassian customers and their success stories:
https://www.atlassian.com/customers

Atlassian Develops Great Features

(source: www.atlassian.com)

As we listed in Part 1, Atlassian has the experience of developing various project management tools. And with thousands of customers, they constantly get feedback to continue improving.

We believe JIRA is no exception and is continuously growing to have many great features, which help us decide over other options.

• Manage project tasks: This of course is the first requirement for a management tool. JIRA excels at allowing us to visually track issues using various methods and provide advanced options to customize how issues are processed.
• Tracking bugs: Bug tracking comes by default in JIRA Software. This is helpful if you do not want to customize issue types yourself.
• Customer support: If you add JIRA Service Desk, it is similar to other tools like Zendesk, which lets you track support tickets similar to JIRA Issues.

Their expertise of development and quality are definitely reasons for their great reputation.

Atlassian Marketplace Has Hundreds of Plugins And Extensions

Because of JIRA’s popularity, there are hundreds plugins and integrations that have been developed by 3rd parties, just for JIRA. We will introduce a few that we use later on, but some of these tools greatly enhance JIRA or how you process issues alongside JIRA.

However, some issues we have are:

• If you use JIRA Cloud, plugins and extensions tend to charge you by total number of users on your JIRA account.
• Quality of the plugins are sometimes not great and is difficult to choose between several similar options.
• Some plugins are not available for JIRA Cloud (and vice versa).

See everything at the Atlassian Marketplace:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com

Combined with the relatively low cost to get started and features offered, we were able to quickly study and decide if JIRA Software is good for our company.

So far, JIRA has helped streamline all of our internal work and improved how we communicate project status with our clients.

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Next: What Are Alternatives To Atlassian JIRA?

This article is a part of Astral Web’s Comprehensive Guide to JIRA!

Previously: Astral Web’s Comprehensive Guide to Atlassian JIRA

Looking for a tool to help manage your project and tasks? We have been experimenting with various tools, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses. However, since 2017, Astral Web has focused on using JIRA by Atlassian, which is a great tool for software development teams to work fast and accurately to deliver our great products to our clients.

In this part 1 article, we will go over the basic information about JIRA.

1. What is JIRA?
2. What are Basic JIRA Concepts?
3. How much does JIRA cost?
4. What’s the difference between JIRA Cloud and Server?
5. Atlassian Product Ecosystem

What is JIRA?

 

(source: www.atlassian.com)

JIRA is a project management tool developed by Atlassian that has bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management functions. However, there are two different types of JIRA: JIRA Core and JIRA Software. Our articles discuss JIRA Software (previously known as JIRA Agile), which has stronger features for agile development processes, such as working from backlogs and processing issues using a Kanban method.

JIRA Core is focused on organizing tasks for teams, which should is more useful for businesses.

Both have many default functions that make it easy to launch new projects and advanced customization to tailor the whole platform to work how you want it to work.

Our recommendation is JIRA Software, if you are a development company that uses agile methods such as Kanban or Scrum boards.

More about the features of JIRA Software:
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/features

More about the features of JIRA Core:
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/core

What are Basic JIRA Concepts?

(source: www.atlassian.com)

Projects

A project in JIRA is a group of issues. You can organize your issues depending on your project needs. Astral Web organizes projects into live software development, sales team, marketing team, and more to optimize all aspects of our work within the company.

Issues

An issue in JIRA is what represents your issue to track, such as bugs, task, or requests. You can add and customize issues according to how your project team works.

Workflows

A workflow in JIRA is the status and transitions that define how your issues process within your project. You can customize workflows for each type of issue to optimize how they transition from status to status. Each status and transition can have their own backend actions for further customization.

How much does JIRA cost?

 

 

(source: www.atlassian.com)

You have two options on how to use JIRA.

IRA Server lets you self host, which requires a single payment depending on how many users you plan to add. As of June 2018, 10 users license is only $10 USD, and can go up to $33,000 for 10,000 users.

JIRA Cloud requires a monthly fee. It’s $10 USD a month for up to 10 users and jumps to $77 USD from 11 users. The more users you have, the less cost per person, potentially down to $1.52 USD per person (with 2000 users). It’s even cheaper if you pay annually.

Latest pricing information:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing

What’s the difference between JIRA Cloud and Server?

JIRA Cloud has its benefit to be hosted by Atlassian servers, because they claim 99.9% uptime with 24/7 customer support, and are very secure. Also, plugins and applications are easy to install and remove.

JIRA Server has more administrative functions, which are limited out Cloud. For example, on server you can host on custom domains, more users, or import and export your own data.

Astral Web uses JIRA Cloud, which is hosted on Atlassian’s servers. We love to work on cloud and fits our office working style. It’s also helps us to worry less about maintaining our own servers.

More details on restricted features: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/restricted-functions-in-atlassian-cloud-apps-744721664.html

Atlassian Product Ecosystem

Atlassian also produces other tools that deeply integrate with JIRA.

• JIRA Service Desk can be useful for a customer support style platform.
• Confluence can be useful for document collaboration right inside JIRA.
• Stride, Trello, and Hipchat can be useful for communication and more task management.
• Bitbucket can be helpful to manage your Git repositories.
• And more…

Each tool seem pretty good for standalone use. We are currently studying both Atlassian and other 3rd party tools to see if they are beneficial to add onto our workflows. Since our core workflow is on JIRA, our priority is to be able to integrate new processes seamlessly.

Full list of Atlassian Products:
https://www.atlassian.com/software

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Next: Introduction to Atlassian JIRA: A Great Platform for Project and Issue Tracking Part 2