Jama Analyze (Discontinued) vs. Kepion Planning

The integration with JIRA is quite a handy tool to have. It allows for team progress to be easily tracked and visualized using the software while key metrics are brought to the forefront through the software's business intelligence. It makes presenting data and milestones achieved to non-technical management quite simple and can be extremely useful.

Incentivized

The solution works extremely well for companies in complicated operations or with the ambition to forecast their operations on a driver based way or wanting to have the ability to create different scenarios based on external or internal drivers. It is a perfect piece of an existing analytical infrastructure (DWH/BI) lacking a planning solution on top.

• This allows us to keep track of our team's work by integrating with our product boards on JIRA.
• It allows us to create visualized reports for our team's progress.
• It allows us to gain insights about things that are going well in our product pipeline as well as potential areas of concern based on the data that is collected.

Incentivized

• Budgeting and Forecasting: Kepion provides all budgeting, forecasting and actuals information in one, collaborative environment.
• Analysis: It is easy to traverse across your entire budgeting and forecasting spectrum in Kepion, unearthing insights that would be hidden from you in other tools.
• Workflow: Kepion's workflow management is simple and clear.

• The service tends to be slow at times and working offline can be a pain.
• It has a bit of a learning curve when you start out.
• The price is quite high for the features it offers.

Incentivized

• Silverlight functionality is outdated which makes the front end solution a little bit old compared to latest UI. They will be tackling it in Q2 2018, but it leaves users wanting for more.
• Reporting functionalities: Are not state of the art, we recommend users creating official reports within Kepion, but focusing on Tableau or PowerBI for reporting purposes as this is not and will never be Kepion strengths compared to the likes of Tableau.
• Being customizable is great, however, the solution is not an out-of-the-box solution and does require a little integration to work. For smaller companies (under 5M USD) I would still recommend Excel.

Jama Analyze, as well as Asana, connect with JIRA to visualize milestone tracking and team progress. While Asana is cheaper, Jama Analyze provides better reports and visual data. Google Data Studio, through a bit of tinkering from your software development team, can achieve similar results, however, the charts and graphs leave a bit to be desired in terms of design. In all, Jama Analyze is great if you have few users and don't need to go for the licensing option. Otherwise, there are definitely cheaper options available but you may have to sacrifice on performance and look-and-feel.

Incentivized

Kepion is in a unique position in that it has all of the enterprise-grade functionality and scalability of a tool like Cognos, but it is available at a lower price point, with much more engaged support.