Azure DevOps vs Jira – aligning teams, projects and systems

Overview of Azure DevOps and Jira

Jira and Azure DevOps are among the most popular DevOps tools, currently used by millions of developers. They are both wonderful for dev teams to manage, track and organize their projects, and they both help developers to plan and collaborate better.

Azure DevOps and Jira are important tools that help organizations put order in their development processes in the most modern ways.

Azure DevOps vs. Jira  which should you go for?

In this comparison article we will explore the similarities and differences between them, as well as try to help you out when choosing the best tool for your needs.

Jira

Jira is a project management software widely trusted from developers, as it is really easy to use and at the same time has powerful capabilities and agile functionalities

Jira is developed by Atlassian and was initially designed as a bug and issue tracker. It has later evolved to the solid project management tool that it is today, supporting all kinds of use cases. Jira is highly flexible and allows configurations for diverse environments and processes. It supports any agile methodology.

Main features of Jira:

Easy project configuration  project workflows can easily be customized

• Built-in roadmaps  clear view on projects progress
• Custom dashboards  all the info you need for a given project in one place
• Agile reporting  real-time, actionable insights for team performance
• Advanced search capabilities  detailed views on teamwork
• Native mobile support  Jira for iPhone and Android
• 1,000+ plug-and-play add-ons  add-ons available in the Atlassian Marketplace enhance Jira to fit any scenario
• Enterprise-ready  high availability, performance at scale and advanced security features

With Jira you can plan, track, and manage all your software development projects with agile boards, roadmaps, backlogs, integrations and add-ons. You can easily scale and tailor the Jira workflows for complex scenarios.

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps helps developers improve the way they plan, create and deliver software. It provides a solid platform for turning ideas into apps, using agile tools and helps in managing tests, versioning code, and deploying projects to cross-platform systems.

Azure DevOps is a Microsoft product and was formerly known as Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS). Currently it consists of 5 different services that can be used together or separately:

• Azure Boards  agile tools to plan, track, and discuss work across teams
• Azure Repos  unlimited free repositories to build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud
• Azure Pipelines  better code with pull requests and advanced file management
  
• Azure Test Plans  manual and exploratory testing tools.
• Azure Artifacts  a tool to create, host, and share packages within teams, and add artifacts to CI/CD pipelines

The above set of services integrate and fit perfectly together, but can also be used separately, depending on the needs of your team and organization.

Main Azure DevOps features:

• Plan and track work  several types of work items that can be used to track features, requirements, user stories, tasks, bugs, and issues
• Dashboards  access to user-configurable dashboards that allow agile planning, work item tracking, visualization, and reporting
• Source control  allows tracking changes made to the code base, checking in files, and organizing files within folders, branches, and repositories
• Advanced testing  integrated planned and exploratory testing
• Package management  support for Maven, npm, Python and NuGet package feeds from public or private sources
• 1,000+ extensions in the Visual Studio marketplace
• Repositories  unlimited free repositories
• CI/CD for any platform  language, platform and cloud agnostic with support for containers or Kubernetes

Azure DevOps is perfect for building your software product from beginning to end. It can help every developer to plan projects using agile tools, manage code using Git, test the application, and deploy code using a CI/CD system.

Azure DevOps vs Jira: Similarities

Similarities

Azure DevOps isa set of development tools for software teams that can work independently or integrate and work together, depending on the needs. Jira is a tool that helps teams of all types manage work. It provides issue and bug tracking, and various management processes.

Both Azure DevOps and Jira are the leading Application Lifecycle Management tools that help DevOps teams organize their projects and collaborate better.

Both Azure DevOps and Jira are enterprise-ready and widely used among organizations. Very often both tools are used within one organization in different departments.

Jira and Azure both support basic, agile, scrum, and CMMI project setup and management with the ability to switch between methodologies.

Azure DevOps vs Jira: Differences

Differences

Jira is well-suited for development teams that use agile methodologies. The software allows workflow iterations and the progressive adding of more features on the go, while this is not natively available with Azure DevOps.

With Azure DevOps you have traceability from start to deployment, and the other way around, while with Jira you do not have direct visibility on each work items connections to specific deployments or releases.

Jira has enhanced search capabilities and you can easily find issues, bugs of a particular project, or a specific term or phrase. You can even save searches or have Jira send them to your email. With Azure DevOps the search options are much more limited.

Jira is primarily an issue tracking and project management system, while Azure DevOps covers the entire software development lifecycle.

Azure DevOps has a free basic level, and the price is according to usage of the different tools in the set, number of users, etc. It is quite flexible, and the price can be quite low if you use it smartly. Jira has a limited free license for up to 10 users. There are several options that are paid per user if you want to use its full capabilities or have enterprise needs.

Azure DevOps vs Jira at a Glance

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If Using Both Jira and Azure DevOps

Using both Jira and Azure DevOps is very common in big organizations where different teams need to collaborate better and plan their work to avoid silos.

Another common scenario is when your organization uses one tool, but your client uses the other one.

In such cases it would be difficult to make a switch and align everything in just Jira or just Azure DevOps, as the different teams are familiar with different tools and transferring their work would be a cumbersome and stressful task.

A much better solution would be to do an integration of Jira and Azure DevOps and have them automatically transfer data between each other. This way each team can continue working with the tools they are familiar with, and no one wont need to do any manual work.

With the ZigiOps no-code integration platform, you can setup your integration in a matter of minutes. This is the easiest way to solve the problems that come from misalignment of teams due to the different tools they are using. This is also a perfect solution when working with clients that use tools different from the ones your own organization is using. When there is no need to manually transfer information from one tool to another, you will avoid mistakes or duplicate work, speed up processes and responses, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Summary: Azure DevOps vs Jira

Both Jira and Azure DevOps are wonderful tools for DevOps project management. They both have pluses and minuses and choosing one of them is mostly a question of personal preference and familiarity.

However, it is not necessary to choose only one of the solutions in case your teams prefer different ones. Just integrate them and have them work together seamlessly, allowing your teams to use the tool they are mostly familiar with and avoid learning curves and glitches from switching from one tool to another. ZigiOps no-code integration platform can help you do that in a matter of minutes.