Jira Software vs. Pivotal Tracker

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Pivotal Tracker
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.” The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.N/A
Pricing
Jira SoftwarePivotal Tracker
Editions & Modules
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Jira SoftwarePivotal Tracker
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Jira SoftwarePivotal Tracker
Considered Both Products
Jira Software
Chose Jira Software
Jira [Software] [has] lot of [similar features to Pivotal Tracker].
Many apps are easily integrated with Jira [Software].
Jira [Software] is highly customizable and one can easily attach any other api in it.
Chose Jira Software
Pivotal Tracker is a really great product that takes a different approach to project management and display. But Jira just wins out with the customization and more modern look. If you need something a little less flashy then Pivotal Tracker might be for you. But if you want a …
Chose Jira Software
Redmine was used at the very beginning when we were a really small team.
Pivotal Tracker was next, and although it has a better UX features, it lacks the ability to manage big projects in parallel (at least back in the days).
Jira is far more flexible for adjustments to our …
Chose Jira Software
Jira is the "default" do-everything software project management platform. It literally does everything, but consequently does nothing particularly well. That said, it is robust enough to compete with enterprise heavyweights like Rally, and (usually) easy and light enough to …
Chose Jira Software
Integration with 3rd party plugins works really well and improves the feature set of JIRA itself. We combine JIRA together with BigBrassBand's git module and bug reports from Usersnap, which help greatly, because of the attached screenshot.
Team Foundation Server was very hard …
Pivotal Tracker
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is the easiest to use of all of these tools. We embraced the simplicity and ease of this tool over all of the others.

Rally Software Development looks old but is very powerful. VersionOne looks incredibly good and is very powerful. Both are extremely expensive. …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I have also used JIRA. I found Pivotal Tracker easy to use and it provided a quick snapshot of all that was happening in a particular project like what was being worked on, backlog etc. The status appearing right next to the story is a very nice feature. The ability to set …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
For teams less than a dozen or so, JIRA is total overkill. PT is just the right amount of complexity for our company.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
JIRA is very complex, while tracker is more straightforward to use. Tracker requires less micromanagement and upkeep.
Asana is pretty but not useful for product and engineering build. It is more geared towards design projects.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I have also used Trello and JIRA. A small company with only a couple of projects may be best suited with Trello due to its cost and simplicity, whereas JIRA may be better suited for a large company that can afford a dedicated JIRA manager, due to its complex configurations and …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I used to be a huge JIRA fan, until I realized how much time I was spending fixing complicated custom workflows and statuses. I spend almost no time administering Pivotal Tracking. And it turns out, those complicated, custom workflows weren't helping us anyway.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Compared to other task management tools, Pivotal Tracker has the best blend of functionality and cost. When you need something simpler than JIRA, and not solely focused on code or UI related tasks like BugHerd, and have a more direct approach to completing tasks than Trello - I …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
We were using JIRA and found it lacking in their UI and some of their services, especially communication. PT communicates much easier with simple links to tasks for execution and QA review.

Basecamp is just really a super note taking and asset depot. I would not consider true …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I've used JIRA ages ago, and it was still a young product in its initial iterations. The UI was a clunky and was missing a lot of ease with drag and drop for individual stories, uploads, etc. Management of users was useable, but not as ideal as it could be.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker, Asana and Trello all have free versions making them ideal for smaller companies to try out. All of them blast Kannan boards and issue tracking capabilities. While Trello and Asana are great products in themselves, Pivotal Tracker edges them out with its wealth …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
JIRA allows teams to tailor the application workflow to meet their needs, while "opinionated" Pivotal Tracker enforces a consistent workflow approach on all team members. While I, personally, may prefer to have a system configured to my particular habits and desires as a …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
It's not necessarily a matter of better vs. worse when it comes to all of these different tools. They all serve a different purpose to different sized teams. I found Pivotal Tracker and monday.com to be a matter of preference while serving a similar purpose. Good for smaller …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Jira is very user friendly. It's ideal for people new to the software development lifecycle and the tracking of the work. They have simply nailed the intuitiveness. Pivotal Tracker might be the better long-term tool because of the flexibility that comes with it. But as …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker keeps users 'close' to the software project(s) by allowing users to understand, in plain words, the tasks and expectations of each software release, whereas other tools are either way too close to the source code or require an extensive amount of maintenance. …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
We selected Pivotal Tracker because it is highly opinionated about the process. It worked quite well for what we were expecting from it. Other software we tried were much more flexible, so we could implement our own process there.
Chose Pivotal Tracker

We selected Pivotal Tracker because of its simple, elegant workflow. This is the ideal; it's where we want to be. So we continue to improve, and as we get better, we get more out of the software.

The other software products we evaluated were too complex, and we found that …

Chose Pivotal Tracker
Overall I have found that I prefer using Pivotal over all the competitors I've tried. There are certain aspects of the other products which I do like but as a whole Pivotal does a better job. My one request is that I feel it is very much a web app and the other products have …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Rally is too complicated - there are far too many fields that all have the same meaning. It's a better agile tool in my opinion since it it was designed purely as an agile tool, but since the CA technologies acquisition, the tool has become more complicated and there are far …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a one page dashboard where Rally, one has to go to different pages to see everything in more detail or makes edits. In Rally I feel everything is stored away and the dashboard is not as easy to find to figure out the acceleration of group. Rally is used at my …
Top Pros
Top Cons
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Jira SoftwarePivotal Tracker
Small Businesses
Stackby
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Score 9.8 out of 10
Craft
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Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP Ruum
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Score 9.0 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Quickbase
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All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Jira SoftwarePivotal Tracker
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(187 ratings)
8.0
(32 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(35 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.1
(28 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
5.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(23 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.7
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Jira SoftwarePivotal Tracker
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
Read full review
Pros
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
VMware by Broadcom
  • It's great for tracking milestones and reporting team velocity per sprint.
  • Maintaining a prioritized backlog that is sharable with different members of your team is relatively simple.
  • There's a free version of the product for up to 3 collaborators working on 2 projects and the starting price for larger packages is relatively low.
Read full review
Cons
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
VMware by Broadcom
  • In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
  • Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
  • Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
I love the simplicity, non-configurability, and price/performance of this tool. Hands down my favorite project management tool for agile.
Read full review
Usability
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
It works good enough. I didn't have many problems with that. The user interface is a bit confusing though. The team took some time to understand where some configurations were.
Read full review
Support Rating
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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VMware by Broadcom
We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.
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Online Training
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.
Read full review
Return on Investment
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
VMware by Broadcom
  • Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
  • The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.
Read full review
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