GitHub vs. Jira Service Management

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
GitHub is a platform that hosts public and private code and provides software development and collaboration tools. Features include version control, issue tracking, code review, team management, syntax highlighting, etc. Personal plans ($0-50), Organizational plans ($0-200), and Enterprise plans are available.
$4
per month per user
Jira Service Management
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk, now including features from the former Mindville Insight, acquired by Atlassian in June 2020) is a service desk software that is purpose-built for IT, service, and support teams. The software provides everything IT and support teams need out-of-the-box for service request, incident, problem and change management. Jira Service Management integrates seamlessly with Jira Software so that IT and development teams can work better together. Users…
$0
per month
Pricing
GitHubJira Service Management
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year per user
Free
$0
per month
Standard
$20
per agent/per month
Premium
$40
per agent/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHubJira Service Management
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubJira Service Management
Considered Both Products
GitHub
Chose GitHub
GitHub compared to GitLab and Bitbucket seems to have an easier and nice to use interface. This is mainly due to the fact that GitHub is the No1 choice for most of the Open Source projects. Developers out there are already famaliar to it's UX/UI and use it every day.

Another …
Chose GitHub
GitHub is the king in this department. If you need a place to share, store, manage, contribute and review code then GitHub is easy your choice. You can make a public or private project and the free version should cover most of your needs. I recommend it for your developers and …
Jira Service Management
Chose Jira Service Management
At the time we chose JIRA Service Desk, we had been using GitHub to track project issues and features. We were looking for something that would add more project planning features and allow us to put more project information together in one place. JIRA succeeded somewhat in …
Chose Jira Service Management
Jira has every necessary feature, including tracking tasks and helping teams to plan tasks. You can create user stories for tasks and also can create documentation for tasks. It can easily integrate with APIs and other service platforms. You can easily assign work to anyone who …
Features
GitHubJira Service Management
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
9.3
10 Ratings
7% above category average
Jira Service Management
-
Ratings
Branching and Merging9.610 Ratings00 Ratings
Version History9.610 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools9.79 Ratings00 Ratings
Pull Requests9.710 Ratings00 Ratings
Code Review Tools8.89 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Access Control9.110 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration8.810 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration8.810 Ratings00 Ratings
Branch Protection9.89 Ratings00 Ratings
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
-
Ratings
Jira Service Management
8.7
86 Ratings
5% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings9.085 Ratings
Expert directory00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Service restoration00 Ratings9.52 Ratings
Self-service tools00 Ratings8.477 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings8.072 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards00 Ratings6.973 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
-
Ratings
Jira Service Management
10.0
1 Ratings
19% above category average
Configuration mangement00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Asset management dashboard00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
-
Ratings
Jira Service Management
7.6
80 Ratings
12% below category average
Change requests repository00 Ratings8.373 Ratings
Change calendar00 Ratings6.52 Ratings
Service-level management00 Ratings8.078 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitHubJira Service Management
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 7.3 out of 10
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHubJira Service Management
Likelihood to Recommend
9.8
(131 ratings)
7.9
(85 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(10 ratings)
8.3
(10 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(26 ratings)
9.1
(25 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubJira Service Management
Likelihood to Recommend
GitHub
GitHub is an easy to go tool when it comes to Version Controlling, CI/CD workflows, Integration with third party softwares. It's effective for any level of CI/CD implementation you would like to. Also the the cost of product is also very competitive and affordable. As of now GitHub lacks capabilities when it comes to detailed project management in comparison to tools like Jira, but overall its value for money.
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Atlassian
I think using a ticketing system is very easy to use and allows multiple teams to create help desks in the same portal. In terms of internal usage, I think this is a great option. However, suppose you're trying to keep internal items and external helpdesks in the same instance. In that case, this is not ideal, as there is no effective way to separate the two instances to protect internal data better.
Read full review
Pros
GitHub
  • Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
  • Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
  • Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.
Read full review
Atlassian
  • Integration with many of the most common tools companies are using (Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, ... etc)
  • Natural workflow with Jira (as product development / project management tool) which makes the full fix and follow up of the tickets / issues very easy to follow
  • Allow multiple different entry points and work flows for as many different needs your teams / company have
Read full review
Cons
GitHub
  • Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
  • Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
  • Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
  • While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.
Read full review
Atlassian
  • Navigating through issues outside of a kan ban board can be confusing and task heavy.
  • It's easy to clutter up the tool. It could use some easy clean up capabilities.
  • User interface is decent, but could use work to make it more intuitive.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
GitHub
GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.
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Atlassian
In the current contect the requirments is around having a tool that is focused and can handle large ticket volumes and tracking incident, problem and user requests concerning end users. Jira has built in functionality to address the above practice needs faily easily and has a substantial amount of customizable reports for generating the relevant intelligence.
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Usability
GitHub
GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.
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Atlassian
If you're used to other tools in the Atlassian ecosystem, you'll feel right at home with JSM. It's also a platform that technical folk can easily pick up. However, I wouldn't recommend using JSM as a company's first jumping off point into Atlassian. There are a lot of other 'newer' tools that provide sleeker ITSM systems at a similar cost.
Read full review
Support Rating
GitHub
There are a ton of resources and tutorials for GitHub online. The sheer number of people who use GitHub ensures that someone has the exact answer you are looking for. The docs on GitHub itself are very thorough as well. You will often find an official doc along with the hundreds of independent tutorials that answers your question, which is unusual for most online services.
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Atlassian
I gave JIRA a 9 rating since for me JIRA works according to its purpose. Since there is a customer portal, our clients can leave a comment or communicate with us using the PR ticket that way it is easier for us to also request any additional information we need for our investigation.
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Alternatives Considered
GitHub
While I don't have very much experience with these 2 solutions, they're two of the most popular alternatives to GitHub. Bitbucket is from Atlassian, which may make sense for a team that is already using other Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, as their integration will likely be much tighter. Gitlab on the other hand has a reputation as a very capable GitHub replacement with some features that are not available on GitHub like firewall tools.
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Atlassian
Zendesk is a similar ticketing system that our organization used before JIRA Service Desk. The main drawback of Zendesk was that it can only be used as a cloud service. This means that our company data would be living on the internet at the hands of their security team. Another drawback of this is the price is significantly more expensive rather than hosting it yourself. Zendesk does have some additional features such as commenting on multiple tickets at once that JSD does lack. However, switching to JSD was significantly more cost effective because we have the ability and the infrastructure to host our own ticketing system, something that Zendesk could not provide. Ultimatley switching to JSD saved us money and allows the ability for integration with all of the other Atlassian Suite products that we use on a day to day basis.
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Return on Investment
GitHub
  • Team collaboration significantly improved as everything is clearly logged and maintained.
  • Maintaining a good overview of items will be delivered wrt the roadmap for example.
  • Knowledge management and tracking. Over time a lot of tickets, issues and comments are logged. GitHub is a great asset to go back and review why x was y.
Read full review
Atlassian
  • It is definitely cheaper than Salesforce
  • It allows the IT service desk to be more organized and respond more quickly to tickets, which can save time for both agent and requester.
  • Some things are "not quite there" developmentally, so this means that internal IT will need to spend more time developing and testing the product.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Jira Service Management Screenshots

Screenshot of Drive IT best practices with ITIL-ready templates. Get everything your IT teams need out of the box for service request, incident, problem, and change management.Screenshot of Get an ITIL certified service desk. Everything your IT teams need out-of-the-box for service request, incident, problem, and change management. Jira Service Desk is PinkVERIFY™ certified.Screenshot of Deliver a better service experience. Customers or employees can submit requests with an easy-to-use help center and add Confluence to Jira Service Desk to get an integrated knowledge base. Machine learning intelligently recommends the right service and learns from every interaction, so answers are easy to find.Screenshot of Stay in the loop with developers. y linking Jira Service Desk with Jira Software, IT and developer teams can collaborate on one platform to fix incidents faster and push changes with confidence.Screenshot of Deliver on SLA's. Nail your Service Level Agreements, every time. Your agents get a simple queue so they get the important things done first. Configure and get going in minutes.Screenshot of Automate those repetitive tasks. Is your team stuck in gear with repetitive tasks or missing priority requests? Setup automations so your agents can focus on solving the important stuff and help lighten the workload.