Atlassian Jira vs. OpenAir PSA

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

I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.

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

• We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
• It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
• Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.

• 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

• The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
• I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
• Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?

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

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

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

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

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

We have not had any outages.

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 performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

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

As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.

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

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

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

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

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

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

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

It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

• 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

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized