JIRA Software is an application lifecycle management solution for software development teams. It allows users to create, prioritize and track the progress of tasks across multiple team members, and offers a wide range of integrations. It is offered via the cloud and local servers.
$10
per month
MindMeister
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool that lets users share maps with an unlimited number of users and collaborate with them in real-time. The vendor says more than 11 million people around the world use MindMeister to brainstorm ideas, plan projects, take meeting minutes, develop business strategies, create stunning presentations and much more. It is designed to be intuitive. MindMeister runs in any standard web-browser as well as on iOS and Android devices, so users can access,…
$5.49
per month
Pricing
Jira Software
MindMeister
Editions & Modules
Standard
$7
Per User Per Month
Premium
$14
Per User Per Month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Personal
$4.99
per user per month
Pro
$8.25
per user per month
Business
$12.49
per user per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Jira Software
MindMeister
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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MindMeister offers 6-monthly and yearly subscriptions. Discounts for educational users and non-profit organizations are also available.
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.
MindMeister is ideally suited for building mind maps, site maps, or similar types of data maps in the cloud without needing to install extra software. I find that it isn't quite as ideal for other types of diagrams (ERDs, flowcharts, etc) as some other tools, though it definitely can handle those things as well.
The UI is well laid out and easy to use. The workflow makes perfect sense and makes creating tasks a breeze.
The collaboration features make brainstorming not only easy but fun! Everyone enjoys using the tool, which was not the case with other collaboration software we used.
I love being able to get all of my thoughts and ideas on the screen to see them and then be able to connect them in a logical way.
While there are no fundamental problems with JIRA, I'm unsure that I will be working myself very closely with users of Atlassian Confluence. The client base I am concerned with tend to be more integrated with Amazon, IBM BlueMix / Watson, open source LAMP/PHP (WordPress, MediaWiki) & those that rely on more proprietary CMS would tend to use Sharepoint not Confluence. JIRA seems to me to stand or fall with the rest of the Atlassian silo or suite, as it is not closely integrated with Sharepoint or mediawiki based reporting or knowledge management. Data interchange standards in this area are weak so Microsoft, open source LAMP projects using Phabricator, and Atlassian JIRA seem to be three distinct silos, with Amazon, Google & IBM offering their own tools for similar needs.
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.
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.
Never had an issue with customer support, though we never really needed anything major as far as technical help. I do not believe they offer 24 hour customer support but we don't need it as MindMeister is not the type of tool we need need 24 hour a day support for. Overall, very happy with the level of support.
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.
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.
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.
I have also used LucidChart and Google Draw to create mind maps and concept maps in the past. I think that MindMeister is by far the cleanest and most user friendly of the three. Google Draw does not have anywhere near the same functionality. LucidChart tends to be clunky and the options to create your map are not always clear and intuitive.
