Jira is a project management tool that enables project managers to plan, assign, track and review projects in real-time. All projects are not created equal; the needs of a software development project would differ significantly from a human resources (HR) or operations project. To provide the necessary tools and templates for different types of projects for businesses of all sizes, the Jira platform offers these four products:

• Jira Software: for planning, tracking, fixing and shipping world-class software
• Jira Service Management: helps your customer care desk track and fix customer issues quickly and effectively
• Jira Work Management: allows you to manage projects for any department within your organization, from marketing and recruitment to legal and operations
• Jira Align: built for enterprises, it connects all the teams so that they can be on the same page and get real-time visibility into all the projects.

In addition to software development, the Jira platform supports projects of these types:

Jira Plans and Pricing

Jira has a forever free plan for 10 users, which is ideal for single teams with fundamental project management requirements. These are the paid plans for Jira:

• Standard: $7.50 per user, per month
• Premium: $14.50 per user, per month
• Enterprise: contact sales team for pricing

In free and standard plans you can create single projects with basic road maps and dependency management. With premium and enterprise plans, you can create multiple projects with advanced roadmaps and dependency management. When the number of seats exceeds 800, opt for the Enterprise plan to unlock advanced features and functionality.

Core Features

Let’s now dive into the core features offered by the Jira platform.

• Issue management: Jira is built to track a single item of any type, called an issue, from start to finish. A project is a collection of issues to be tracked, and issues are further broken down into stories and tasks.
• Agile development: Jira is built for agile development. The software ships with scrum, Kanban and bug tracking boards so that development teams can choose a project depending upon their requirement. Managing sprints for fixing issues is very easy. Issues themselves can be tracked and logged using multiple project views like user stories and story points.
• Bug tracking: Jira was originally developed to track bugs in the software development process. The software comes with a template dedicated to bug tracking, which makes it very simple to track, record and fix them. As all the issues can be viewed in a single board, which bug needs to be fixed first can be prioritized in a single click.
• Excellent reporting: 15-plus reports can be created at every stage from planning and tracking issues to final delivery. These reports, such as sprint report, control chart, resolution time report and time tracking report, help project managers gain actionable real-time insights into their team’s progress and share them with their clients.
• Fully customizable: Jira templates for the different types of projects are fully customizable. You can customize them even after you have started populating them with data.
• Robust safety and security: Jira allows you to create and customize user roles and permissions. It allows people from trusted networks only to access your software instance. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest using AES–256. Jira is fully compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), SOC 2 & 3, PCI/DSS, ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27018.

Hosting Options

Jira is available in two hosting options: cloud and self-managed.

• Jira Software Cloud is perfect for small businesses who want to get started quickly, without the challenges of hosting on data centers.
• Jira Software Data Center can be hosted on on-premises data servers or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors like Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is best suited for large enterprises that need performance at scale.