Jira vs Smore

You can decide how you are working as a team first and then let the software work around you.

- Jeannice Angela PRODUCT MANAGER, RENT THE RUNWAY

I'm Jake, a Senior Manager at an events company, and I gave Jira four out of five stars. Before we decided to go with Jira we tried a few other options for our development team. We dabbled with spreadsheets and tried to do the low costs, easiest solution of what we already have. We attempted to use Asana and Trello, but none of them were really built for developers. And so, being able to track all the specific features and from epics and sprints and everything else that we needed for our development team, we only found with Jira. One of the biggest reasons why we ended up going with Jira is because it's made for developers by developers. There's a lot of features that don't seem to make a lot of sense or seem superfluous until you get into it. And there's specific workflows for how you build software, how you cure a software. And being able to rely on those, as we've been building and developing our applications, has really been a key component of our success. Integrating Jira into our development workflow was actually pretty easy. We didn't have a huge hurdle to overcome. Everybody on the team bought into it pretty quickly. And there've been a few stumbling blocks, here or there, with new feature releases. But overall it's been a pretty seamless process. There's a lot of really good documentation that Jira has for onboarding teams and getting different people within the team up to speed. And they have really good release notes for any changes or updates that they make as the software continues to evolve. One of the biggest pieces of advice I would give if you're onboarding a team for Jira is setting proper expectations. It's not a lot to look at, but it does the job really well. It's kind of similar to that truck that you have on the farm where it's rusted out and it doesn't look that great, but it does a really good job, and you know it's reliable and consistent. In a similar way, Jira's a very plain and basic looking piece of software, but it does a really good job. And it's been developed specifically to help you develop software and to move things forward with all of your development teams. And it does a really good job of that, if you can get past the little bit of an eyesore that it is.

- Jakob B.

I would give Jira a four out of five rating. We evaluated Trello, Microsoft Project, and World Zone when we were trying to identify a product that we wanted to use at our firm. We decided to choose Jira for a bunch of reasons, and one of the primary reasons that I would stay here is if we were able to not only undertake agile or scrum based project, but even Kanban style products. That was very fundamental because each of our teams within our firm chooses to work in a different fashion. That was the primary reason. Apart from that, the flexibility, the UI, the ease of integration with other SAS providers like Slack, or just in general, the availability, all the functionality or the things that you could customize and white label based on our firm's needs. I think that was something that really caught my eye. On top of that, obviously the support model that they had or the price point was very well suited to what we really want it to be. So for us, I would say the integration was very easy, relative terms, because what we did was we took a phased approach. So the first part of that was making everyone understand the benefits of it, the different features that were available and how those features would help ease the relative working or the day-to-day productivity of their force. Once everyone was on board, we made sure that the delivery managers were the drivers of this major integration. So they were the one who started providing initial training, obviously along with a tremendous amount of help from the support from Jira's [inaudible 00:02:18]. I think we were very grateful that they provided us those support. I think along with that, what we did was we created learning modules and people could take the training at their own time. We gave them a bandwidth that you got to complete it in about a month's time, so that everyone is on board for the next phase of our rollout. So we started off with one team and then we rolled off into the other areas within the firm as well. So I think overall, I would say the experience was quite pleasant and the support just made it sweeter. So anyone out there who is crying or looking out for any product management or public management software, I would say that a few factors that you do need to consider and the primary one being, what is your use case, and how simple or complex it is and where you think it is growing in terms of growth? If it is relatively straightforward, if you're using simple agile processes, then I would say Jira is a little bit too much for you guys, but if you do think that it's going to get complex, or there are a bunch of nuances to it, then I would definitely consider some of those features that Jira offers that is going to be beneficial to you. Another thing that you need to factor in is the skill set. Although Jira is relatively straightforward to learn and understand, there is that learning curve that's associated with it. So if you're looking for something that even a simple business analyst can use and work with, you can customize Jira to make it that way. But like I said, you need to set up certain things within it beforehand and make it vary for them to use. There is that pre-planning that that requires. If probably are a startup or if you are not really heavily involved in it, then that's an area that you need to consider, whether you are looking to buy Jira or there are a bunch of other options out there. Another area is whether you want to implement this on-prem within your own data centers, or whether you want to use some sort of a SAS model. Now they offer both. I would say that is also something that you need to consider, and along with that comes to the cost factor. Do you want to enable it at an enterprise level or do you want to take it slow, and then grow? So there are a bunch of other options out there which provides you per user, per subscriptions, per [inaudible 00:05:06], per core. You really got to choose what is really the purpose or the need that you have that you're trying to solve.

- Tapan P.

My overall experience has been great. I am having a fun time exploring new features. I feel like I am putting a personal touch on communicating with my students and parents. I feel very creative and I like the sense of community that having a class newsletter brings to virtual learning. You can see your analytics to track engagement. I am enjoying sending out updates in a way that is organized, creative and personal!

- Brenda K. Teacher

While I know of others who continue to use SMORE, for my purposes it was not as effective as others. It was, overall, very easy to use and send to others. It offers a great way to share information, links, and updates with many people in a single place.

- Mollie C. Teacher

I tried my best and just couldn't find anything that I did not like about smore. It's easy to use and most people can be expert users in a matter of minutes. The product also gives you the ability to view analytics which tell you how many views you have had. They also have a great support area built into the site and you really can't beat the annual pricing.

- Chris S.