For agile project management, Jira has been the go-to tool for years. Teams rely on Jira to streamline workflows, manage sprints, and track issues. But it’s not always smooth sailing.
Jira’s complexity can overwhelm, its costs can sting, and its learning curve can feel insurmountable. You’ve probably asked yourself, “Is there a better way?”
Here’s the reality: While Jira is powerful, it’s not always the perfect fit for every team. Imagine spending weeks onboarding only to realize its features bog you down and add bulk to simple workflows.
Frustrated? You’re not alone. There are plenty of alternatives to Jira designed to meet the specific needs of modern teams—offering customizability, affordability, and ease of use.
This blog will guide you through the best Jira alternatives, tailored to your needs, so you can make an informed choice without the guesswork.
Key pointers
- Jira is a robust project management tool from Atlassian, originally designed for bug tracking, that now supports agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban. It streamlines workflows, tracks issues, and integrates with thousands of apps, making it a leading choice for software development teams.
- Despite Jira’s advantages, its complexity, pricing, limited customization, and retrofitted AI features leave teams searching for simpler, more flexible solutions. Many users also cite performance issues and a steep learning curve as reasons for exploring alternatives.
- The best Jira alternatives include DevRev, Basecamp, Asana, Trello, Notion, Linear, GitLab, Monday.com , Hive, and nTask. These tools offer unique features like AI-driven workflows, flexible integrations, and cost-effective plans tailored to diverse team needs.
Why consider alternatives to Jira?
Teams are looking for alternatives to Jira because despite its strengths, Jira is not without its flaws. While Jira remains a powerhouse in agile project management, its complexity, cost, and other limitations can hamper team productivity and hinder business growth, making it worth considering alternative project management platforms.
Based on user reviews, here are a few reasons why teams are looking for Jira alternatives:
1) Not pocket-friendly for growing teams
Jira’s paid plan starts at $875 per year (Standard plan) and $1,700 per year (Premium plan) when billed annually. The cost varies depending on the number of users and their respective tiers if you pay yearly. While Jira does provide a free forever plan for teams with 10 users or less, it doesn’t come with crucial features like dependency management, external collaboration, or AI-powered features. So, growing teams looking for cost-effective solutions might find Jira’s pricing expensive.
2) Limited AI capabilities
Several users have pointed out that Jira falls short when it comes to strong AI-powered features as the platform lacks a powerful AI chatbot and AI connectors to facilitate third-party integrations. Moreover, given Jira is a legacy platform, its AI features are retrofitted much later and isn’t built with AI from the ground up.
3) Steep learning curve
Users report that Jira’s complexity makes it challenging for new users to adopt quickly. Teams often face a significant learning curve, especially those unfamiliar with agile project management. The abundance of features can make its interface cluttered and difficult to navigate, users say, leading to delays in onboarding and reduced initial productivity.
4) Complex customization options
Users have noted that Jira’s customization capabilities are quite complicated. This makes it difficult for teams to fully adapt the platform to their unique workflows. Also, while Jira integrates with many tools, users have pointed out that it doesn’t support all their third-party applications, further limiting the options for customization.
5) Performance issues
Jira often becomes sluggish when handling large projects or extensive data, according to some users. Teams with complex requirements have experienced noticeable delays, impacting efficiency.
6) Limited mobile functionality
Jira’s mobile app is underpowered compared to the desktop version, as per the reviews, limiting on-the-go productivity for users.
Top 10 Jira alternatives you should consider
Here’s a quick roundup of the 10 Jira alternatives before we see each of these in detail:
Jira alternative | Pricing | G2 rating | Key features |
|---|---|---|---|
DevRev | Starts from $9.99/user/month | 4.5/5 |
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Basecamp | $299/month | 4.1/5 |
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Asana | Starts from $10.99/user/month | 4.4/5 |
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Trello | Starts from $5/user/month | 4.4/5 |
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Notion | Starts from $10/seat/month | 4.7/5 |
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Linear | Starts from $8/user/month | 4.5/5 |
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GitLab | Custom pricing | 4.5/5 |
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Monday | Starts from $9/seat/month | 4.7/5 |
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Hive | Starts from $5/user/month | 4.6/5 |
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nTask | Starts from $3/user/month | 4.4/5 |
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DevRev
Imagine a world where product management can converge with customer support and software development on one AI-native platform, helping you bring the voice of your customer to product planning and engineering development. That’s DevRev in a nutshell.
DevRev Build app helps teams of all sizes automate their product ops and engineering ops by leveraging generative AI. With AI-driven insights and powerful automations, you get to amplify the customer’s voice so your roadmaps can drive real revenue impact.
Unlike Jira, DevRev actually helps you bridge the gap between customer impact and development effort with its AI-first approach. With DevRev, you bring back agility to your project management with rich insights and automated workflows—all completely powered by AI.
Here’s why companies choose DevRev over Jira:
1. Leverage AI in all stages of project management:
DevRev is an AI-native platform which powers every aspect of project management. With its powerful Turing AI, you’ll get AI-driven sprint insights and GPT-generated, context-aware messages so you can optimize your workflows to the fullest possible extent and gain a competitive edge.
2. Build customer-focused product roadmaps:
DevRev helps you build product roadmaps that’s prioritized by customer outcomes. The roadmaps are linked to support tickets and issues affecting customers, ensuring that every feature or task is tied to real customer needs. This fosters a customer-centric approach to product development, as teams can focus on building features that directly address user pain points, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving long-term loyalty.
3. Never lose sight of issues with centralized tracking:
DevRev’s issue-tracking system centralizes all bugs, feature requests, and tasks in one place. These issues are enriched with customer data, making it easier for developers to understand the “why” behind each task and align technical work with business outcomes.
4. Monitor dev productivity and DX in real time:
DevRev’s robust Product 360 analytics gives you at-risk customers, development velocity, and product health—all in real time. This helps you boost product velocity, developer experience (DX), and developer productivity.
5. Make sprints truly agile and intelligent:
Teams can reduce sprint planning time from weeks to minutes with AI-powered insights on smart resource allocation. You can choose between lightweight Kanban-style lists and traditional sprint boards to find what works best for your team.
6. Customize your platform with 3 types of add-ons:
DevRev’s Marketplace offers three different types of add-on modules that allow extensive customization of the platform. Integrations let you connect DevRev with existing systems such as Jira, Automations perform tasks within DevRev like responding to customer conversations, and Airdrop helps you bring data from external sources to DevRev and keep them in sync.
Pricing:
DevRev Build’s pricing comes in 3 tiers to suit the needs of teams of all sizes:
- Starter (ideal for startups and small engineering teams): $9.99/user/month
- Pro (ideal for growing teams): $24.99/user/month
- Ultimate (ideal for enterprise teams): Custom pricing
You can also try a 30-day free trial of the platform.
Basecamp
Basecamp is a project management platform designed to enhance collaboration and streamline project tracking for teams, particularly small teams. Its user-friendly interface and straightforward design make it accessible and intuitive, allowing teams to focus on their work without the complexity often associated with project management tools.
Key features:
- Progress visualization: Basecamp’s Hill Charts feature offers an intuitive view of where tasks stand, highlighting areas that may require attention. This feature enables teams to assess progress in real time and make informed decisions to keep projects on track.
- Centralized communication in-app: To avoid having project-related discussions scattered across emails and other chat apps, the Message Boards feature allows teams to post updates, share ideas, and discuss topics in a centralized location, ensuring that everyone has access to the same information.
- Automatic check-ins: This feature helps reduce the need for frequent meetings by scheduling regular prompts for team members to provide updates. This approach keeps everyone informed about progress and challenges without interrupting workflows, thereby maintaining productivity and reducing meeting fatigue.
Pricing:
$299/month (billed annually) and $349/month (billed monthly). Both plans support unlimited users.
Asana
Asana is a versatile work management platform that empowers teams to organize, track, and manage their projects. Whether coordinating daily tasks or overseeing complex projects, Asana offers the tools necessary to keep teams aligned and on track.
Key features:
- Project views: The platform lets you organize projects as a Kanban board, list, timeline, calendar, or Gantt chart. You can switch between project views with a single click, create multiple custom views within a project, and even drag and drop tasks to instantly update project timelines.
- Workload management: This feature allows managers to monitor workloads, balance assignments, and prevent burnout by ensuring that no team member is overburdened. Drag and drop tasks for reassignment and accurately visualize workload into the future.
- Custom workflows and automations: Users can set up custom rules that trigger actions based on specific criteria, streamlining workflows and allowing team members to focus on more strategic activities.
Pricing:
Starts at $10.99/user/month (billed annually) and $13.49/user/month (billed monthly).
Trello
Trello, also from Atlassian, is a versatile project management tool that utilizes a visual approach to help teams organize tasks and projects effectively. While Jira is a structured tool to support the complex processes of dev teams, Trello is a more versatile tool that supports a wide range of teams and use cases.
Key features:
- Customizable boards and views: Trello boards, like Kanban boards, help teams plan projects and break down each step of the way. Its Timeline view helps teams stay on top of every sprint and stay on track of every goal, while Dashboard view lets you visualize key metrics like due dates, assigned cards, and cards per list to keep stakeholders aligned.
- Versatile integrations: Trello offers two kinds of integrations to help users bring additional features or information into their Trello account. While the Integrations feature brings information into Trello from external apps, Power-Ups lets users add an extra feature to Trello boards
- Workflow automation: Trello’s no-code automation tool, Butler, enables users to automate repetitive tasks and workflows. By setting up rules, triggers, and commands, teams can streamline processes such as moving cards between lists, assigning members, and setting due dates.
Pricing:
- Standard: $5/user/month (billed annually) and $6/user/month (billed monthly).
- Premium: $10/user/month (billed annually) and $12.50/user/month (billed monthly).
- Enterprise: Starts at $17.50/user/month (billed annually).
Inside scoop:
Trello can be a versatile tool with a relatively low barrier to entry, but software developers might find it unsuitable for managing large and complex projects. Having a lot of developers working on a single board on Trello can be difficult. So, software developers are better off choosing a more robust platform like DevRev that caters better to the needs of software development and engineering.
Notion
Notion’s all-in-one workspace gives teams the functionalities they need to manage a project of varying sizes and complexities. Its versatility and configurability allows teams to complete tasks without switching contexts in the middle and optimize for efficiency.
Key features:
- Automated sprints: Notion provides out-of-the-box workflows for engineering and product teams to optimize their sprints, work on backlogs and track bugs. Every task has a page that contains all the required project information to ensure transparency and alignment across teams.
- Diverse database views: With Notion, you can visualize the work in distinct formats, whether it’s calendars or boards. Teams can always see the bigger picture of how projects fit together and resolve dependencies.
- AI-powered workflows: Notion AI automates time-consuming project management tasks like adding user stories, key results, and updates. Teams can also leverage AI to generate a first draft for project documents or revise existing docs—all in seconds.
Pricing:
- Plus: $10/seat/month (billed annually) and $12/seat/month (billed monthly).
- Business: $15/seat/month (billed annually) and $18/seat/month (billed monthly).
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Inside scoop:
The benefit of using Notion can become its biggest drawback—its overall simplicity. Lack of robust features like dependency visualization, goal tracking or reporting, which are essential for project management, puts Notion at a disadvantage. Here’s where DevRev really shines, as it equips you with strong AI-powered features like reporting and analytics to manage projects of all complexities.
Linear
Linear is a project management tool developed with the purpose of empowering product teams with planning, building, and shipping. Its keyboard-first design aims to deliver a focused experience for fast-paced development environments.
Key features:
- Unified product timeline: This feature allows team members to map out their product journey and plan visually. Teams can highlight key dates, divide projects into more granular phases, figure out critical dependencies between projects, and consolidate all their project documentation in a centralized location.
- Instant analytics: Linear Insights delivers deep, real-time visibility that lets teams aggregate, segment and visualize data across entire workspaces. Teams can track effort distribution, bug clearance, and data hygiene with accurate insights.
- Issue tracking: Linear lets teams create bug reports, feature requests, and other issues in a streamlined interface. Teams can create Slack messages into issues on Linear, and its AI highlights related issues and possible duplicates to ensure efficiency.
Pricing:
- Basic: $8/user/month (billed annually) and $10/user/month (billed monthly).
- Business: $12/user/month (billed annually) and $15/user/month (billed monthly).
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
GitLab
Ideal for engineering-heavy teams, GitLab is a comprehensive platform to empower development, security, and operations teams. Its functionalities lend themselves to Agile project management and lean/Agile portfolio planning.
Key features:
- Dependency visualization: The platform lets teams track progress and identify potential bottlenecks with a bi-directional view into interdependencies in issues, epics, Kanban boards, and roadmaps.
- Issue boards: Teams can use this as a Kanban or a Scrum board to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. Issue boards pair issue tracking and project management, keeping everything together, so you can organize your workflow on a single platform.
- AI-led development: From planning and coding to securing and deploying, GitLab’s AI supports developers at every stage of their workflow. Teams can improve productivity, accelerate collaboration and boost efficiency across the software development lifecycle.
Pricing:
Custom pricing plans
Inside scoop:
No doubt GitLab is a comprehensive DevOps platform. But if you’re looking for a platform to make software development more customer-centric, DevRev is a better choice. DevRev links customer tickets to development tasks with an AI-first approach so your engineering team is always aware of what they’re building and how it adds value to the customer. Read more on DevRev for engineering teams.
Monday
One of the most popular project management tools in the market, Monday.com positions itself as a work platform that streamlines workflows across teams. There are 2 distinct offerings: Monday Work Management to manage projects and tasks, and Monday Dev to manage product development lifecycles.
Key features:
- Portfolio management: Monday Work Management offers a suite of portfolio management features to help teams gain full visibility over all projects and ensure overall project success. Teams can visualize project tasks, milestones, and dependencies within a set timeline.
- Sprint management: Monday Dev lets teams manage the entire sprint lifecycle—from sprint planning, daily standups, to retro and sprint review. The platform also helps you compare the actual remaining effort with the ideal progress to identify any potential bottlenecks.
- AI for product development: Monday AI acts as a product assistant that helps you turn customer feedback into product insights, helping you analyze vast amounts of data and feedback to get actionable insights that helps in building products based on customer needs.
Pricing:
- Monday Work Management: Starts at $9/seat/month (billed annually) and $12/seat/month (billed monthly).
- Monday Dev: Starts at $9/seat/month (billed annually) and $12/seat/month (billed monthly).
Hive
Hive is a project management tool that helps teams consolidate all projects, tasks, deadlines, requests, and notes into one single source of truth. It caters to a wide range of teams, whether it’s, business operations, marketing, design or education.
Key features:
- Agile management: Teams can streamline project activity through sprints and agile scoring. Weigh task and project importance, allocate resources, and track team availability.
- AI project planner: HiveMind, the platform’s AI model trained on Hive’s successful projects from the past, helps teams complete tasks automatically. It helps with creating project tasks based on user suggestions, writing content and copy for different situations, and summarize project documents
- Workflow recipes: To automate repetitive tasks, teams can choose ready-to-go actions and triggers from a library. These recipes span across multiple apps and comprise a trigger and one or more actions.
Pricing:
- Starter: $5/user/month (billed annually) or $7/user/month (billed monthly)
- Teams: $12/user/month (billed annually) or $16/user/month (billed monthly)
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
nTask
nTask is a project management solution that combines task management, project planning, team collaboration, and visual tools to boost productivity. The platform provides both Gantt charts for detailed planning alongside Kanban boards for agile workflows to provide better adaptability for projects with evolving requirements.
Key features:
- Risk management: The platform enables users to create customizable risk matrices and define custom risk drivers, and visualize progress. Teams also can create risk mitigation plans on the platform to keep everyone in the loop.
- Issue and bug tracking: Teams can set severity, issue status, issue priority, and link to tasks or projects. Also, teams can add variables to issues and bugs that are unique to the business with custom fields.
- Task management: Teams can instantly plan, organize and assign tasks in their projects to see what they will be working on, and what is left to be done.
Pricing:
- Premium: Starts at $3/month (billed annually) or $4/month (billed monthly)
- Business: Starts at $8/month (billed annually) or $12/month (billed monthly)
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Why DevRev stands out as the best Jira alternative
Among all the tools listed above, we believe that DevRev stands out as the best Jira alternative because of its AI-led approach to project management that helps you embed the voice of the customer in every stage of your product roadmap and software development, helping you ship products your customers love quickly and effectively.
Need proof? Goodmeetings, a remote sales productivity platform, were using Jira and faced issues with data discrepancies. Having switched to DevRev, they brought their team closer to their customers and improved their customer experience. Here’s the full case study.
And here’s what its co-founder had to say about replacing Jira with DevRev on LinkedIn:
Would highly recommend DevRev which has replaced JIRA for us and in the process it has neatly integrated our customer support workflows too.
Ready to leverage an AI-native platform for successful project management over legacy platforms with AI as an afterthought? Book a demo now to see how DevRev could be the Jira alternative you’re looking for.
