We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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Throughout our article below, we'll use the words overwhelming and overly complex a lot.
Many of the most popular project management tools are designed for large teams and organizations, and they can be overwhelming and complex to set up and use for smaller teams. Here's what to keep in mind:
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An all-in-one project management tool and suite of products for teams.
Monday started off as a project management software, but in order to gain more market share, continued to build tools and expand their offering. They went from being a project management software, to an "all-in-one" tool. They now offer products such as Monday "Work Management" (aka project management), Monday sales CRM and Monday dev (for agile workflows).
When comparing Asana vs Monday Asana wins in the category of project management. Why? Because Monday is trying to be "all-in-one" tool, meaning they are trying to do everything rather than doing one thing super well. Asana is a project management software, through and through. They aren't trying to be anything more.
One area where Monday stands out is it's vibrant interface and bold colors that adds a sprinkle of fun when managing projects. They have different ways to visualize data, like using a 5 star rating system (for priority for example) or timeline views to see project progress. Dragging and dropping tasks in is relatively easy and intuitive. That said, users have reported Monday to be quite buggy in terms of functionality, so when comparing Monday vs Asana in terms of stability, Asana wins this category also.
While Monday offers tiers for small teams, we'd think there are better tools for teams with under 300 employees (like Asana or Motion). That's not to say that smaller teams don't use Monday (they do), it's just going to take quite a bit of work to set it up for success.
Here are the categories, we'd specifically recommend Monday for project management. You may fit into one or all of the below categories:
The main difficulty with Monday is actually getting it setup for success. Many folks create an account, invite their team, pop in some projects and then it sits there as an abandoned tool, with no one on the team actually feeling like its reliable. This comes from not doing a proper Monday implementation (often means working with a consultant). Mapping your processes to Monday and creating team documentation will lead to higher chances of success.
If the above sounds overkill for your business, consider something like Motion as that's more so a project management tool that you can get set up out of the gate and have your team using it fairly quickly (read full Motion review).
Jira is a suite of agile work management solutions developed by Atlassian. It is designed to facilitate collaboration across teams, from concept to customer, and is used by software, IT, business, and operations teams among others.
Jira Software started off focusing on helping software teams to manage project development—think sprints, agile and scrum methodologies. But in 2021, Jira launched what they call "Work Management" to help greater business teams like marketing, HR, finance, and design.
This meant that they introduced other features that tools like Asana and Monday have, like different views (task list view, timeline view, kanban board view) and forms.
What does this all mean? Well first and foremost, Jira is designed for highly technical teams and the other "work management" features were created in an effort to compete with Monday and Asana and gain more market share.
With that, don't expect Jira to be a project management tool with a friendly user experience. It has a steep learning curve with a ton of features, with many of them that will never be used an average business.
With that, while Jira has been previously known as one of the best agile project management tools, there are newer tools on the market that are much more modern and simple to use. Keep reading to find out what they are ⤵
Jira is for enterprise engineering teams (1000 employees +) who work with traditional project management methodologies like scrum and agile. Jira calls itself a customizable workflow engine that allows users to track issues, bugs, tasks and other work items through pre-defined workflows.
If your team is already using the likes of behemoth software solutions like Salesforce and NetSuite, then Jira is probably a solution that will fit into your software stack as an enterprise team. When configured correctly, Jira can be useful in the software development space.
A Scrum Master is a professional who leads a team using Agile project management through the course of a project. Teams who have the most success with Jira have a full-time salaried employee (aka Scrum Master) whose job is to mange the project and spend most of their day in Jira.
When speaking with employees of enterprise companies using Jira, they've mentioned that when they first implemented Jira, they also hired multiple Scrum Master's to manage a handful of projects each. But with budget cuts overtime, Scrum Masters were let go, and the job of "Scrum Master" fell on the shoulders of the Business Analysts on the team. This resulted in employees needing to do numerous jobs, burn out and team members leaving the company altogether.
That said, if you're thinking of implementing Jira, make sure you also have the budget to hire employees (often numerous) to work exclusively within Jira to keep things on track. If you don't, skip implementing Jira altogether and opt for something more simple like Linear for software development.
If you have less than 1000 employees on your team and you are considering using Jira Work Management, we're here to say that it's not a good idea. There are MUCH better tools on the market — Asana if you're a larger team, or Motion if you have 100 employees or under. These project management tools are friendly, have beautiful interfaces and your team will actually want to use the tools.
If you're looking for a project management tool that works "out of the box", Jira is not for you.
There are newer, better tools for managing software development sprints.
We're seeing modern software development teams prefer the likes of Linear for issue tracking, as Linear is much more beautifully designed (while teams typically find Jira cluttered and complex). Linear is also much easier to set up than Jira.
Another newer solution for project management is Motion. Motion is ready to use out of the box and teams love that tasks appear right on their calendar in time blocks. Read our full Motion review.
If you are looking for a project management tool for anything other than software development, we don't recommend Jira. Look—sure they offer features built for marketing and design, but we can guarantee your marketing and design team will hate using Jira (they likey won't adopt it either). Why? Because they are marketing and design teams 😄 They want to use user friendly software with an intuitive interface that is easy to use—not a tool initially built for engineers. Same goes for construction teams, financial planners, HR teams, and onwards.
Jira is highly customizable, making it too complicated for the average person. Expect a steep learning curve for every the most simple of features, as many folks who use Jira end up overwhelmed. If you're looking for an intuitive, easy to set up tool, Jira is not for you.
Jira Roadmaps enables cross collaboration among different departments, making projects visible company wide. This helps teams stay on track with the bigger picture and track progress and dependencies based on team availability.
Once Jira is configured correctly, assigning tasks and stories to team members is easy so you can easily see who is working on what task.
To implement Jira, you must have deep IT and technical experience due to it's steep learning curve and customization requirements. Expect to work with a Jira Solutions Partner which can cost over six-figures for a larger organization. Your team will need to be onboarded slowly and keep in mind that regular trainings will be required.
For instance, simple things like writing Jira descriptions require you to use markdown for bolding, italics, and bullet points. Busy team members have expressed being deeply frustrated with the time it takes formatting text to write updates to the team. Our take? This isn't a good use to of time for anyone 😅
Employees who have used Jira have reported it being slow at times. For instance, they said that while the search functionality was useful, it could sometimes be very slow.
A project management tool is only useful if it's being regularly updated by team members. Because of Jira's overly complicated nature, employees often don't share updates in Jira during each sprint, waiting to only update Jira at the very end. When we asked why, they mentioned it's because "they dislike Jira, try to avoid it, and they are too busy doing actual work than spending time updating the project management tool."
Jira has over 3000+ integrations with other tools. That said, for enterprise tools like Salesforce or Zendesk you're very likely looking at a custom integration that will need to be managed by a third party.
Unless you're a super large enterprise with thousands of employees doing agile project management, Jira is not worth considering as a project management tool. It will be highly complex to set up and user adoption will require a lot of training due to the overwhelming features.
Instead, we recommend that engineering teams consider Linear for issue tracking and all other teams (marketing, design, HR, and onwards), or consider Motion that is much more user friendly for the average person (and your team will actually enjoy using it).
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