Jama Connect vs. Jira Software

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Jama Connect
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Jama Connect® is a Requirements Management software and Requirements Traceability solution. Jama Software enables teams to manage product requirements and enable Live Traceability™ across the development process, in order to reduce cycle times and improve product quality.N/A
Jira Software
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Jira Software is a project management tool from Atlassian, featuring an interactive timeline for mapping work items, dependencies, and releases, Scrum boards for agile teams, and out-of-the-box reports and dashboards.
$81.85
per month 10 users
Pricing
Jama ConnectJira Software
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$8.15
per month per user (minimum 10)
Premium
$16
per month per user (minimum 10)
Data Center
$44,000
per year 500 users
Enterprise
Contact Sales
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Jama ConnectJira Software
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Jama ConnectJira Software
Considered Both Products
Jama Connect
Chose Jama Connect
JIRA is way more costly than Jama. Plus, Jama is more user friendly
Chose Jama Connect
I have mostly worked with ALM and JIRA Software. they are good enough to gather the requirements but not much like Jama software. JIRA doesn't provide approval mechanism and ALM doesn't provide traceability and reuse or reviews functionalities so in all of them Jama is better …
Chose Jama Connect
I haven't used the other tools in some time, but I know I prefer Jama over Jira and MS Project. Again, this is skewed based on the fact that I haven't used the other 2 tools in years. Jama is used more by clients whom I work with so it seems to be more of a market leader than …
Chose Jama Connect
easier to use with better UI and versioning etc.
Chose Jama Connect
Jama Connect was the perfect balance between cost, usability and scalability that our company desired. Helix was definitely cheaper but didn't offer the usability or scalability perks. Codebeamer missed the mark on cost and was designed more for a software centric requirement …
Chose Jama Connect
Cannot give an answer as since I have taken over this application and I don't know how we did it before.
Chose Jama Connect
Functionlity is there and ease of use
Chose Jama Connect
Jama Connect is more straightforward than these systems but not quite as versatile or comprehensive. I would choose those other systems if I were at a very large company working on very complex systems (which I am not).
Chose Jama Connect
Jama suited our need for collaboration and communication plus a difficult stakeholder's approval roadblock. Jama provides a very easy to use interface and communication system that brought in the buy-in from all stakeholders based on the communication problems we needed to …
Chose Jama Connect
Better online access, risk traceability, and impact analysis
Chose Jama Connect
I really liked Cradle as it seemed to be very full-featured. BUT, my liking for it was predicated on my being a daily user of the tool; it took me a while to get familiar with the tool. What was certainly true of Cradle in my experience was that it was VERY challenging to get …
Chose Jama Connect
Polarion did not have the outside sales support that Jama Connect has. Polarion seems better suited for an Agile development lifecycle rather than an evergreen repository of requirements, design features, and verifications.

Excel is the low-cost/low-feature requirements …
Chose Jama Connect
From a technical point of view, DOORS is much more customizable than Jama Connect, and this is more useful when talking about SW related requirements; when talking about system related requirements, Jama Connect is well suited with respect to DOORS, in the sense that …
Chose Jama Connect
Jama brings requirements engineering to the 21st century and sets up the bar to measure other tools. DOORS and DNG never managed to make this jump and stayed in the past.
Chose Jama Connect
We originally looked at Connect (Contour) and Doors as we wanted to move away from Word documents. Contour was much easier to use and had a better collaboration environment. The was many years ago; I haven't done any comparison in the last 5+ years.
Chose Jama Connect
Ease of access.

TBH, polarian looks so weird for me and am not a big fan of that tool. I even don't like it's UI
Chose Jama Connect
Alternatives to Jama for us is Google Sheets. I have spent significant amount of time getting the team away from sheets as a source of truth. The added features of Jama has helped the team transition to Jama for the source of truth for requirements.
Chose Jama Connect
We tried to do with Requirements management with Confluence and other Atlassian marketplace tools. The Jama traceability is still the overriding decider for staying with Jama. FYI, we paid for Jama/tasktop for several years without doing the integration - you would think that …
Chose Jama Connect
Jama does the requirements management piece better than anyone else, which is why we chose it. The cost was hard to swallow, given the limitations of the other areas of the product (test management, risk management). Products like Helix are better for testing, but are pretty …
Chose Jama Connect
Jama Connect suites better our needs for System of Systems management. The user interface is more friendly and easy to understand.
Chose Jama Connect
It is better suited for our uses.
Chose Jama Connect
I have used MS SharePoint and Confluence before and feel that as a requirement solution, Jama is more intuitive and easier to maintain requirements and have traceability. It is easier to maintain upstream and downstream relationships in Jama which I feel is a very good feature …
Jira Software
Chose Jira Software
Each application comes with their advantages. Jira Software is one for the tools famous among our Post Market Surveillance and Engineering teams due to its simple application structure. Provide easy tracking and navigation through the tool which helps with monitoring more …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Jama ConnectJira Software
Small Businesses
Polarion ALM
Polarion ALM
Score 9.3 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Polarion ALM
Polarion ALM
Score 9.3 out of 10
SAP Ruum
SAP Ruum
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Polarion ALM
Polarion ALM
Score 9.3 out of 10
Quickbase
Quickbase
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Jama ConnectJira Software
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(73 ratings)
8.7
(187 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.3
(2 ratings)
9.0
(35 ratings)
Usability
5.5
(1 ratings)
7.1
(28 ratings)
Availability
7.3
(1 ratings)
5.3
(3 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(4 ratings)
8.8
(23 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Configurability
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.2
(1 ratings)
7.7
(8 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Jama ConnectJira Software
Likelihood to Recommend
Jama Software
Jama is an excellent tool for requirements management, development, and traceability throughout the development lifecycle. Jama aids in peer reviews of generated artifacts with time-boxed review cycles. Jama provides a robust ecosystem which is highly tailorable to the demands of the particular organization in which it is used
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Atlassian
The Jira software works well for managing scrum boards and allocating resources to a task. When your Epics and Issues are set up properly, it can give you a good idea of where your team stands and the trajectory of your project. It is not the ideal solution if you need to provide documentation and support to people outside of your product teams or organization. It would benefit from having a public documentation or repository feature.
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Pros
Jama Software
  • Requirements Management in general
  • Focus in the content without loosing the track of the evolution of the items by maintaining the exchange of information between the users inside the Tool.
  • The possibilities to integrate this tool within our IT-landcape and with our other engineering tools is for us a leverage to success.
Read full review
Atlassian
  • Running sprints and tracking progress of roadmap, epics, story, task and subtask
  • The user interface is great. It allows tables inside details, have common shortcuts and clean design.
  • Can create custom dashboards and can view data in multiple ways
  • Advanced access rights based on role
Read full review
Cons
Jama Software
  • The 'filtering' capabilities in Jama are not as good as they could be. In particular, the ability to "nest" filters is quite limited. I have certain seen much better capabilities in other tools. ('Cradle' is an example of a tool with excellent "nested filters" capabilities.)
  • From an administrative point of view, the 'License' admin view is pretty disappointing. The particular thing that I'd like to be able to find out from it is the peak number of 'Float Creator' licenses in concurrent use on each day. If there's a way to get to that information, I haven't found it yet.
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Atlassian
  • Management of the software is very difficult at times, although has improved.
  • Ability to manage resources is really non-existent, there are some plugins but they are ALL buggy (I've tested them all).
  • Better integration with Trello, would love to see this happen. Right now it's very clumsy.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Jama Software
Jama is really easy to use and operate compared to other tools. This allows a process owner to get easier buy-in from the organization to see value early. My experience with this tool was very positive and we were able to see value early in its introduction
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Atlassian
This is because Jira Software generates a huge profit for an affordable price. Having a tool that makes team management transparent and effective is very valuable.
In addition, the renewal of Jira Software and all Atlassian tools is predictable and clear, as the prices are published on the Atlassian website and there is no pyramid of intermediaries.
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Usability
Jama Software
Jama is mostly designed for requirement gathering, but that can be possible using JIRA if we add only approval type of plugin for special requirement types. Jama's performance and features do not improve on a periodic basis i.e. with each release. Even bug fixes take a lot of time and they don't care about customer impact.
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Atlassian
JIRA Software is a pretty complex tool. We have a project manager for JIRA who onboarded us, created our board, and taught us the basics. I think it would have been pretty overwhelming to learn without her. JIRA offers so much functionality that I'm not aware of -- I constantly need to Google or ask others about existing features. Also, although they are all under the Atlassian umbrella, I find it difficult to switch between JIRA Software and Confluence.
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Reliability and Availability
Jama Software
Jama is available most of the time if it is used within the application's boundary. Jama has very good availability if we use very high hardware servers. Sometimes we face issues if there are batch operations running.
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Atlassian
No answers on this topic
Performance
Jama Software
With performance compared to JIRA, I do recommend Jama in this case. Jama provides very good performance, it loads immediately for any of the items and searches any item immediately. Performance is really good in all of the operations including creating stories, epics, item types or other support operations or report generation.
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Atlassian
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Jama Software
They typically answer within minutes of posting a ticket, and then you have a clear expectation of what the issue is, how to diagnose it, how long will it take to get resolved, and in which version a given problem is resolved, or if there is a patch for hosted services. They have a number of support people, and all of them are top-notch.
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Atlassian
Our JIRA support is handled internally by members of our Product Support team. It is not supported by a 3rd party. Our internal support will always sent out notifications for downtime which is usually done on the weekend unless it is required to fix a bug/issue that is affecting the entire company. Downtime is typically 3-4 hours and then once the maintenance is complete, another broadcast email is sent out informing the user community that the system is now available for use.
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Online Training
Jama Software
No answers on this topic
Atlassian
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.
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Implementation Rating
Jama Software
Jama 2015.5 implementation is very smooth and no need for much manual work. Jama 8 has many challenges and we can not install it as smoothly as Jama 2015.5. Initially, Jama didn't provide the Jama 8's installer files or zip files and they were just providing docker files to everyone (which was really strange). It is the worst that they don't provide all the files at a time. Why should they tell us where we should deploy, and why only a dockerfile? I am not very satisfied with Jama implementation.
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Atlassian
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Jama Software
The major sellingpoints of Jama were the review-system for internal and external reviewers and the inclusion of (Use Case) modelling tools, while keeping the core requirements-centric. Ability to synchronise with currently in use test-tooling and the low learning curve were additional selling points. Availablity of support in our local language was much appreciated as well.
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Atlassian
Jira Software has more integrations and has more features than many of its competitors. While some of its competitors do have better UI/UX than Jira Software, they have improved this greatly over time. Atlassian also acquired Trello years ago, so that adds better user interfaces to the system. They do also offer a pretty in-depth library of how to customize the platform that others don't.
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Scalability
Jama Software
There is no horizontal scalability available in Jama, we have only one choice to scale it vertically. But vertical scalable applications always have limitations to grow. In this case, Jama doesn't support horizontal scalability functions like multi-node architectures with a shared drive for the home directory.
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Atlassian
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Jama Software
  • Made it easier to know what I'm responsible for, from a work task perspective.
  • Allowed leads/managers to assign work in a more educated manner by seeing workload, etc.
  • Allows clear deliverables and more accurate work estimates, since we can look back at previous examples (assuming there are some).
Read full review
Atlassian
  • Jira has positively made our company's daily activities much better organized
  • With Jira we can track progress and follow up on tasks
  • Jira has great reporting tools which aggregate various data and give us a good overview of our teams capacity
Read full review
ScreenShots

Jama Connect Screenshots

Screenshot of Jama Connect - Live TraceabilityScreenshot of Jama Connect - Project Dashboard ViewScreenshot of Jama Connect - Requirements Management