ActiveCollab vs. Atlassian Jira

Active Collab is great for small teams who want a web-based project management platform to help them on their day-to-day workflow tasks, billing, estimations, vendor assignments and even client communications. It is also great for agencies with users who are sometimes remotely working. Active Collab starts to show shortcomings when you have an immense amount of projects in the system (1000+), and, being a web-based platform, can sometimes experience downtime.

Incentivized

Jira facilitates software development, bug tracking, and sprints. It's ideal for structured workflows, issue management, and customer communication. However, more straightforward tools might be more efficient for highly creative, unstructured tasks or tiny, agile teams with quick visual overviews. Jira's complexity can be overkill for basic task lists.

Incentivized

• Project Management - Makes it very efficient to manage projects using Gantt Charts, daily email reports and custom reports!
• Collaboration - Allows to collaborate with team members, tag them in tasks, send files/attachments.
• Task delegation - With just 2 clicks you can delegate tasks to other team members/users.

Incentivized

• As a developer, it is easy to create, track and manage tickets efficiently.
• Customizable issue types (eg: Bug, Task, Story, Epic) allow teams to categorize and priorizate work.
• Great text editor and markdown support for detailed issue descriptions.
• Assign issues to team members, set due dates and define priorities.
• Integration with Jenkins, GitHub and other CI/CD tools to automate builds and deployments.

Incentivized

• It isn't possible to set members of staff as part time, so if someone is unavailable on certain days you must manually enter them as OOO every single day that they are not in, that other teammates work. Hours also can't be edited individually - everyone is treated as working the same hours in a day, rendering capacity planner useless for flexi working teams
• Subtasks cannot be assigned their own hours and deadlines, meaning the To Do list view can't be seen in actual date order and capacity planner does not reflect all time allocated to an individual's schedule unless every task is set up as a separate task rather than subtask
• There is no way to see all tasks of a certain type across multiple campaigns (e.g all copywriting tasks vs all technical tasks) - support team suggested exporting data and making spreadsheets
• Kanban view isn't available for people's own task lists ('board' view here shows a list)
• Not possible to have one task be assigned to more than one person
• Notifications are not sent when tasks are updated, so you have to leave comments and tag people each time

• The interface is not intuitive to learn for new users
• JQL is similarly challenging for newbies
• It's possible to accidentally move issues from one sprint to another without realizing your mistake
• Certain issue attributes aren't available in certain view (e.g. story points from the epic overview)

Incentivized

JIRA is highly integrated into our organization. Nearly every department uses it, and many have multiple JIRA projects set up to track different types of work. We rolled out JIRA in a staged manner, but it continued to be adopted by more and more people and departments because it continues to show results. I expect we will continue to renew our JIRA license for years to come

Incentivized

Atlassian Jira is relatively easy to use, but there are several ways to configure it, which can make it more complicated if you configure it incorrectly. Keeping the customizations and complexity limited to being the project would be suggested to ensure you don't lose in-built Atlassian Jira features, then change the configuration as you find things aren't meeting your exact needs.

Incentivized

Did not face any issues and whenever they plan maintanance they update all of us very well in advance also so in that view we are good with the product stability.

Incentivized

Performance is really good though it holds lot of data it loads quickly especially search operation also get the results very quickly as needed hence its good

Incentivized

The support team is responsive to requests and their annual support fees are reasonable. Honestly, we don't have to contact them much. Updates happen automatically and the platform is very solid and does not require a lot of support. Documentation is good and the platform is easy to learn.

Incentivized

I have not had a chance to contact JIRA's customer support. It does offer extensive documentation, although it often feels too technical for me. There is also a JIRA training app that lets you take little lessons and quizzes on different areas (e.g., JIRA basics, agile). I did find it a helpful way to teach myself.

Incentivized

Had received training from our own internal user so it was good and also very easy to understand topics and many tasks in the UI are self explanatory and we can do by our own

Incentivized

One of their strong points i stheir documentation. Almost all of the basic set up needed within JIRA is available online through atlassian and its easy to find and very precise. The more critical issues need to be addressed as well and hence the rating of 8 instead of a 9.

Incentivized

Take your time implementing Jira. Make sure you understand how you want to handle your projects and workflows. Investing more time in the implementation can pay off in a long run. It basically took us 5 days to define and implement correctly, but that meant smooth sailing later on.

Incentivized

Since we moved from fixed capacity project to T&M we need some tool who support our billing & invoicing. HP ALM did not provide good support for invoicing so we moved out from HP ALM to ActiveCollab. The features like Timer, reminders are not available in other project management tools like JIRA, Rally & ALM making AC the first choice since we have strict SLA's & AC helps in meeting that.

Incentivized

Jira is more feature-rich than Trello and also has better integration with other tools. Trello is a lot more focused on work tracking, while Jira can do a lot more than that. Both can also be combined, although they're often considered mutually exclusive alternatives—I've seen cases where companies choose to use either one or the other, but I haven't met an actual case of a company using both.

Incentivized

Atlassian Jira is highly stable and good with its performance and its has all the required scalability features as business needs

Incentivized

• A central communication portal is used to keep all members of the team informed as to the status of specific projects. All staff have access to read past discussions to enable contribution to the current discussion.
• We have found it difficult to get our clients to adopt usage of ActiveCollab for communication on a reliable basis.
• The cost per person is high when using it as a communication center.

Incentivized

• JIRA has increased the teams' productivity and efficiency; the sprint timelines have improved by 15-20%.
• JIRA's integration with tools like Bitbucket and Confluence has improved functional collaboration, leading to faster decision-making and issue resolution by approximately 10-15%.
• Additional functionality requires additional third-party plugins, which require additional costs; the requirements of these plugins increase the costs by approximately 15%.

Incentivized