Competitive Comparison
TrackStudio Enterprise 3.5 vs. Atlassian JIRA 3.11
Potential and existing customers often ask us to compare TrackStudio and
JIRA. As the results of any such a comparison depend heavily on the
chosen criteria we have decided, for the purpose of this exercise,
to use the criteria that the Atlassian itself uses to compare the
various versions of the JIRA product: Standard,
Professional and Enterprise. Obviously, a comparison of this kind, based as
it is on the feature-set of the alternative product, will show
JIRA in its best light and will not do as much as we might to
highlight the advantages of TrackStudio. Despite this we are
confident that comparative strength of TrackStudio will show
through.
Another thing of which to be aware of is that, whatever licence
you chose for your TrackStudio product, you are buying the right
to use the complete feature-set. You will not be faced with
the situation where, having used the product for a little while,
you realise that there is a key feature that's missing for which
you will have to upgrade your license.
| Brilliant web interface |  | | | You decide |
| Superb issue organisation | | | | |
| Issue Navigator | | | | |
| The Dashboard | | | | Using KlipFolio |
| Customizable workflow | | | | |
| Available workflows | Fixed | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Workflow editor | | | | |
| Saved filters | | | | |
| Subscribable filters | | | | |
| Shared filters | | | | |
| Multiple dashboards | | | | Using KlipFolio |
| Custom fields | | | | |
| Field Configurations | 1 | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Field Screens | Global | By project | By project & issue type | By project, issue type, user group, user role |
| Field Screen Tabs | | | | Tab-based interface |
| Global & user column ordering | | | | |
| Per filter column ordering | | | | |
| Permission schemes | | | | |
| Project permissions | | | | |
| Dynamic role-specific permissions | | | | |
| Issue security levels | | | | |
| LDAP configurator | | | | |
| Sub-tasks | | | | |
| Task sequencing | | | | |
| Email integration | | | | |
| RSS integration | | | | |
| MS Excel integration | | | | |
| Remote APIs | | | | |
| Install JIRA plugins | | | | No, use scripts instead |
| CVS repositories per project | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Project categories | | | | |
| Component leads | | | | |
| Project e-mail addressing | | | | |
| Legendary Service | | | | You decide |
| Unlimited users | | | | |
| Unlimited projects | | | | |
| Unlimited issues | | | | |
| Upgrades | | | | |
| Email support | | | | |
| Priority Email and Phone support | | | | |
| Our famous free JIRA t-shirt | | | | |
| Source code | | | | Unlike JIRA, not required for extensive customization. Available for an additional fee. |
| Commercial License | $1200 | $2400 | $4800 | $1000 |
| Support & Updates (every year) | $600 | $1200 | $2400 | $300 |
As you can see from the table, the functionality of TrackStudio
Enterprise is similar to that of JIRA Enterprise - the features of
both products considerably surpass the features of JIRA Standard and
JIRA Professional.
To further extend the comparison of the two products it is instructive to
see how TrackStudio measures up against prospective future developments of
JIRA. To do this we will use the JIRA Popular Issues page to find out
which are the most popular requests for features that JIRA users currently lacks
(as at August 31, 2007) and see whether and how
these features may already be implemented in TrackStudio.
The "Why is this feature so important?" links will take you to
the JIRA users' explanation of why the feature is being requested while the
links under the Solution Description column will take you to a more
detailed explanation of how the issue is addressed within TrackStudio.
Present in TrackStudio Enterprise, but not available in JIRA Enterprise:
Not available in either TrackStudio Enterprise or JIRA Enterprise:
As you can see, 25 out of 30 of the most popular features requested have
been outstanding for several years, are still not available in JIRA
Enterprise but have, for some time, been available in TrackStudio Enterprise.
Three more of the unresolved issues are
JIRA interface-specific (if you extend your analysis to the 50 most popular features,
the picture continues to be the same)
Why, you may wonder, is the progress in the development of Atlassian is so
slow? The answer to this question lies in the history and origin of the product.
Simple open source systems (Bugzilla, Mantis) were very popular
only a few years ago. The appearance of JIRA stimulated the market,
drew attention to commercial systems and considerably raised the
level of user requirements. The logical model of the system taken from Bugzilla and the simple user interface
quickly made JIRA popular but they now slow down its further
development. The implementation of the requested features is actually going
to require turning JIRA into a hierarchical issue tracking system that, in
turn, will necessitate the complete rewriting of the system kernel
and considerable changes made to the interface.
In conclusion, its more powerful and flexible internal structure allows
TrackStudio to have a number of important features that are unlikely to appear in Atlassian JIRA in the next few
years. Here are the situations in which choosing TrackStudio instead of JIRA is
especially beneficial to our customers:
- Choose TrackStudio if different teams inside your company are
going to use the system. Create several independent projects, each with
their own teams (departments) and their own administrators inside
one system. Using one single system allows you to make administration
much easier, to delegate rights and to improve integration. Besides,
you will save a lot on the cost of the licenses and training.
- Choose TrackStudio if you are going to use the system both to
organize work inside your company and to communicate with your
customers. Atlassian developers uses JIRA primary to communicate
with external users, but they do not use it to manage software
development (you can read details
here and
here).
Having much more flexible permissions, the ability to block access to some
fields in tasks for customers (spent time, priority, budget, etc.)
makes TrackStudio the better choice in this case as well.
Update, September 7, 2007. Don't just believe us - please read the whole
posts in the links above, and decide for yourself.
- Choose TrackStudio if your company has several major customers and
you want to integrate your workflow with your customers' workflow.
The ability to customize the system individually for each
customer will allow you to achieve better integration with each of
them. You will be able to use one system to work with all customers,
while they will not even be aware that there are other customers' projects
in the system.
- Choose TrackStudio if your company manages a large number of projects.
TrackStudio allows you to effectively manage thousands of projects:
it is possible to arrange projects into a hierarchy, search for
projects by their parameters, attach files to projects (for instance,
technical specifications), create custom fields for projects (release date,
customer, agreement number) and much more. If you do not want your
project list to look like
this page, choose TrackStudio.
- Choose TrackStudio if you want to automate a regularly modified
workflow or a complex workflow consisting of a large number of states.
Do several managers have to approve a task before it is complete? Need
tasks to be approved concurrently? Want to include technical writing,
sending invoices or user technical support in your workflow?
TrackStudio will help you automate a complex and changing workflow in the
much more effective way.
- Choose TrackStudio if you are going to use the system to manage
software development projects. TrackStudio supports task hierarchy, which can be
used to implement Work Breakdown Structure - the key element in project
management systems. You can read more detailed information about using
TrackStudio for project management
here.
- Choose TrackStudio if you want to integrate various services
(bug tracking, help desk, knowledge base, asset management,
requirements management, ...) into single system. Using single product
will make integration of all departments in the company much easier:
you will not have to create accounts for employees, projects,
configure permissions and e-mail notification rules in each system. It
will become much easier to move information from the help desk to bug
tracking, and from bug tracking to the knowledge base.
- Choose TrackStudio if you use a hourly payments with employees
and customers. TrackStudio allows you to make time estimates not
only by projects and people, but also by operations. For example,
you can find out how much time was spent on fixing high-priority
bugs and how much time was spent on testing. You can specify which
of your employees can enter time estimates and whether clients can
view how much time developers spend. It is possible to set any limits
for comments that explain what has been done (for example, software
developers must write not less than 20 characters for each hour in
their work in comments, while it will be not less than 30 characters
for managers). More details about TrackStudio time tracking features
are available here.
- Choose TrackStudio if you and your customers are located in
different time zones. Every TrackStudio user can specify an individual
locale and time zone TrackStudio will use to enter and display dates.
For instance, if a customer from New York specifies that the problem
must be solved by 10/19/07 3:02 AM, a developer in Bangalore will
know that it must be finished by 19/10/07 12:32 PM.
- Choose TrackStudio if you need to integrate the task management system
with your internal software. Its powerful features of e-mail notification,
import from CSV files and the full-featured SOAP API make TrackStudio the
better choice if you are interested in integration with other products.
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