Atlassian Jira Alternatives in 2025: Should You Consider Switching?

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Overwhelmingly Complex

When not absolutely necessary, Jira’s flexibility often results in chaos. Issue types, workflows, fields, scripts, and more can all be customized and turned into a convoluted mess when not handled by Atlassian experts (who are often needed just to maintain instances).

This creates a steep learning curve, and getting the most out of more advanced features requires extensive training and services from Atlassian. Its web of complexity creates brittle setups and high overhead, so look for an alternative platform with the same functionality depth but more user-friendly tools.

Outdated UX

Partially due to the fragmented nature of Atlassian’s ecosystem, Jira’s interfaces can be inconsistent, cluttered, and dated.

Despite performance improvement, Jira Cloud is still sluggish, even for simple actions like navigating boards. Although Jira is advertised as scalable, these performance issues seem to amplify with scale and customization, significantly reducing a major “benefit” of the platform.

This friction drags down user experience, creating frustration and degrading productivity.

Lacks Built-In Features

Jira isn’t built for development-specific tasks like test case management, requirements tracking, or traceability. In other words, you need to download or buy extra third-party apps and plugins to extend Jira’s functionality. This patchwork of add-ons doesn’t scale well and increases compliance risks.

A further lack of electronic signatures and regulated workflows makes this less than ideal for industries like medical, aerospace, finance, and telecommunications.

Cost Complexity

Unlike other tools available (e.g. SpiraTeam), Jira uses “named-user” licensing, which inflates your costs. Every single user, including occasional ones like leadership, must be licensed for the base Jira platform as well as each additional app and plugin.

On top of this, organizations often have to pay consulting teams to implement systems and integrations, even for simply setting up Jira Help Desk. This complexity and cost inflation make it unpredictable for budgets and compliance, especially compared to the simple concurrent licensing.

Jira Server Discontinued

In 2021, Atlassian stopped selling new server licenses for many of their products, including Jira Software. At the same time, they increased the price for the remaining on-premise alternative, Jira Data Center.

As of February 2, 2024, Atlassian ended support for all server products, significantly limiting the deployment options for this ecosystem. This is especially impactful for customers in regulated industries, who often rely on on-prem tools for security. Learn More...

Jira Cloud Limitations

While Atlassian is investing in its cloud services to provide feature upgrades, that doesn’t mean everyone can (or wants to) move to the cloud.

Many customers in high assurance industries or running projects on secure networks are unable to ever use a cloud-based solution for regulatory, security or compliance reasons.

In addition, Jira Cloud has known issues of poor performance, inflexible data localization options, and increasing instability and unreliability due to its need for many plugins to achieve basic functionality.

Switching to Jira Data Center?

If you are considering a switch to Jira Data Center, consider:

Important new functionality, like Jira’s Next-Gen Projects, aren't available.
You need to order minimum 500 users, affecting the cost for the plugins you need to use as well.
It is more expensive than the server product.
It is more complicated to maintain, as it consists of nodes behind a load balancer rather than a single server instance.
Atlassian has a clear intent to move all of their customers to the cloud in the long term, so this will lose support eventually.

Unlike Jira and Atlassian, Inflectra and Spira have a long-term commitment to giving you, the customer a choice of hosting in our secure cloud (multiple data localization regions) or self-hosting on-premise. We offer flexible and easy to understand licensing based on concurrent users, with on-premise customers having both annual and perpetual license options. We even make the migration from Jira easy!

Best Jira Alternatives for Software Development

Our recommendations for organizations looking to switch away from Jira and the Atlassian ecosystem are:

SpiraTeam
Assembla
YouTrack
Nifty
Digital.ai
Zoho Project
Targetprocess
Active Collab
PivotalTracker
ClickUp

See a more in-depth guide to the best Jira alternatives here.

Spira Is For All Teams:

Agile

Spira includes out-of-the-box support for popular agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban and Scaled Agile. With Spira you don't need separate plugins for testing, code management or project scaling, it's all available, fully integrated from day one.

DevOps

Baked into Spira are seamless integrations with Git for source code management, Jenkins (and others) for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, as well as integrated DevOps features such as code collaboration and viewing.

Collaboration

Spira makes team collaboration easy, with integrated discussion threads, instant messaging, subscriptions and notifications, RSS feeds and a built-in document management system.

Featured Case Study

Information Technology

Customer Case Study

Net Fusion Technology (NFT)

IT Consulting Company Switched From Jira and Trello to Spira To Provide Better Tracking of Development Progress and Incorporate Test Management & Scaled Agile

Read now

All The Features, No Hassle
or Third-Party Add-Ons

Issue Tracking

Spira has a powerful and flexible issue tracking system that supports configurable issue types, statuses, priorities, and custom workflows. No code, no fuss.

Project Management

With Spira you have enterprise project & program management at your fingertips. You can manage projects, releases, sprints, programs and porfolios with ease.

Agile Boards & Git

Spira comes with out-of-the-box agile planning boards that support Scrum, Kanban, and scaled agile projects. Integrated Git code viewing is also included.

Time Tracking

Spira includes work estimation, resource management, reporting and time tracking available out of the box without any third-party plugins needed.

Test Management

At the heart of Spira is our world-class test management system SpiraTest that provides best-in-industry support for manual testing, automated testing and test traceability.

Reporting & BI

Spira provides you with real-time reporting of all your development, testing, and project activities. Includes integrated executive dashboards and a custom reporting engine.

Explore all of the Features in Spira...

Trusted By Industry Leaders

Major global leaders use Spira across a variety of industries like Liberty Mutual Insurance, Generali Insurance, Leica Biosystems, the National Institutes of Health, Ericsson, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.

Featured Resources

Jira Server Discontinued by Atlassian - Inflectra Spira is Here for You

SpiraTeam, the Seamless Alternative to Jira

How to Export Projects from Jira Server to Spira

Jira End-of-Life: Why You Need an Alternative?

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How Does Spira Map to Jira's Ecosystem?

Product	Atlassian	SpiraTeam^®	SpiraPlan^®	KronoDesk^®
Project Management Features
Portfolio Management	Jira Software + Portfolio ()
Program Management & Roadmaps	Jira Software + Portfolio ()
Project Estimation & Management	Jira Software + Agile
Release/Sprint Planning	Jira Software + Agile
Issue Tracking	Jira Core
Task Management	Jira Software
Project Baselines
Risk Management
Resource Management	Tempo Planner ()
Time Tracking	Tempo Timesheets ()
Agile & DevOps Features
Requirements Management	Structure () RM for Jira (RM4J) ()
Test Management	Zephyr () XRAY () TM4J ()
Automated Testing	Tempo Planner ()
Scrum Boards	Jira Software + Agile
Kanban Boards	Jira Software + Agile
Source Code (Git) Integration	Bitbucket () Git Integration for Jira ()
Build Management	Bitbucket ()
Collaboration Features
Document Management	Documents for Jira () Structure ()
Wikis and Content Management	Confluence ()
Instant Messenger (IM)
Service Desk Features
Knowledge Base	Jira Service Desk
Customer Support Forums	Jira Service Desk
Help Desk Ticketing	Jira Service Desk
Reporting & BI Features
Executive Dashboards
Customizable Graphing	EasyBI ()
Customizable Report Generation	EasyBI ()