Jira Align vs. LiquidPlanner vs. Smartsheet

The Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools help keep our scrum teams moving in the right direction. It gives Sr. Executives visibility into the progress of our digital transformation efforts. It provides information to our program manager to create the necessary artifacts to justify continued funding of our initiatives. It also supports the SAFe framework, along with some others. And the Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools provide integration to other tools that we use in our portfolio.

Incentivized

LiquidPlanner is amazing for any time of project management scenario where you have to manage several teams and details. Running a project through LiquidPlanner is so easy because it lets you break down the project into sections and folders and small tasks that you can assign to specific people. With a small to medium size team-- LiquidPlanner is amazing for organizing and tracking details. If you have a huge team or not a ton of details to track LiquidPlanner might not be right for you because it is a software that requires some good training to learn and has tons of functions that can be utilized so it seems better suited to be used by a smaller group looking to coordinate or for people who have lots of details that can be difficult to track.

Incentivized

Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior

Incentivized

• Effective Sprint planning : Sprint planning can be done using Planning Poker in AgileCraft by clicking Team > Manage > Other > Estimation Games very effectively for distributed teams.
• Team Capacity Allocation Report: After tasks are created at team or program level, the report from AgileCraft cab be pulled and can be verified that no team member is under or over allocated. A report can be generated by navigating to Team > Manage > Assign Tasks.
• Effective Requirement trace-ability: To maintain requirements trace-ability follow the steps below:
• Upload test cases against the story/requirement. once uploaded test cases will be visible under that story
• Execute Test cases in AgileCraft and mark them as Pass/Fail based on the actual outcome
• Based on test results, The acceptance criterion's can be marked as “Pass” or “Fail” & if marked failed corresponding defect can be logged & can be attached with the story
• So against each story we can easily see whether all test cases been executed or not & which acceptance criterion's are failed & how many defects are in open or close state.
• Daily Scrum: In AgileCraft, the option to run a daily stand-up is available from Team > Manage > Daily Standups. Selecting the sprint number opens the daily stand-up meeting window in which each team member's tasks are visible and hours can be burned against them. Conduct Scrum meetings in AgileCraft, and burn each associate hour against the tasks created during the meeting. The burn-down chart can be generated & viewed during the stand-up to check whether the team is on track.

Incentivized

• Priority based planning. Every other planning software we've used relies on dates and therefore needs constant attention. Priority based planning means that the plan is always up to date.
• Ease of use. LiquidPlanner has a very short learning curve. This is critical to getting team members to use it.
• Forecasting. LiquidPlanner makes it very easy to run scenarios by simply dragging and dropping projects and reassigning resources.
• Awesome Support. I get personal responses very fast. Usually within a couple hours. And, they listen and ask for more information.

Incentivized

• Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
• Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
• For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc

Incentivized

• The initial ticket creation screen lacks some important features, such as assigning "point values" (a measure of effort needed for the ticket).
• The browser needs to be manually refreshed to see new tickets, which can make things confusing when several people in a meeting are simultaneously creating tickets.
• The interface on some smaller portions of the software are sometimes difficult to understand.

Incentivized

• The interface is messy and cluttered. The best way to find things and see what you actually want to see is the main Projects view which is also the most cluttered and hardest to maneuver in.
• Clicking an external link someone posted in a comment or task description doesn't open in a new window by default, so we are constantly having to go back to get to LiquidPlanner again.
• The way that the interface saves your state globally (rather than per tab instance) means that if you click a link from someone else to a task that's not yours, then it adjusts your filters on the Projects page. Then if you refresh another LiquidPlanner window where you were on the Projects tab, suddenly all of its filters are updated and what you were looking at may no longer be there.
• It might just be the way that we use the system, but the Home and My Work tabs are fairly useless for us. They typically don't show the tasks we're actually looking for.

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

There is nothing that can be better than Jira but it needs to keep improving certain areas especially the attachment size area.

Incentivized

We may not renew LiquidPlanner's contract, but only because my company has recently been acquired and we'll be adopting some of the software that they're using to standardize process. LiquidPlanner's development team releases new features pretty often, so it seems like the gaps and inefficiencies are slowly getting smaller/less frequent

Incentivized

It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned, some older, less tech savvy, team members have not found it as intuitive. I found it the same when I started using it although it quickly made sense. I think this is because there are lots of features we do not use so this can get in the way of what we do use

Incentivized

Easy to learn and utilize. Can export charts and reports for sharing with colleagues.

Incentivized

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

Overall support from Jira team is good. It comes at an additional price but it is very efficient. There are no long wait times, you get a dedicated team to look into your issues. The support is available throughout the year and they keep a record of your issues. Overall we are very satisfied with the support they have provided us over the years, it has been very effective for the price that we pay.

Incentivized

They have been great in trying to come up with creative solutions to help us do what we want to do with the platform. I would say their support has been exceptional because we have hit them with some complex requests.

Incentivized

I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.

Incentivized

It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.

Microsoft Azure Devops won't have the major functionality of software management like Jira. The customization provided by Jira is having a cutting edge over any project management tool. Adds-on and Plugins feature in the Jira Tool make it as perfect as desired task management tool for any company. One of the best Agile based Project Management Tools.

Incentivized

Miro is a more versatile tool, but not quite made for planning and organizing. LiquidPlanner is very intuitive, fast to learn and easy to communicate. The added value of prioritizing tasks, personalized boards and gantt charts are really important during the planning and design thinking in the business. LiquidPlanner is simplified yet more helpful.

Incentivized

Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!

Incentivized

• It has positively impacted our tech teams, allowing them to better organize the tasks and items they are working on and has greatly improved their ability to communicate & review these tasks with other teams.
• I believe it negatively impacted other departments as lengthy training was required by many associates to attempt using the tool, only to find out it didn't meet our needs, therefore much time was wasted.

Incentivized

• LiquidPlanner really forces you to map out your workflow. For me, honing into a template that I can later adjust as needed has been huge, as there is less time at the beginning of a project trying to assign and figure out what needs to happen when usually it never changes.
• Communication between employees, especially ones not immediately available in the office has been very welcomed. It helps having conversations documented in a public, logical place that is easy to find and refer to as the project continues.
• Our productivity has definitely skyrocketed as we've really gotten a feel and committed to using LiquidPlanner daily. As we move forward, we continually try to add more and more ways for us to use the service.

Incentivized

• This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos.
• It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months.

Incentivized