monday.com vs. Jira Software: How to Choose Your Project Management Software

Introduction

Effective project management software is essential for teams to coordinate workflows, collaborate, and ultimately achieve organizational goals. With so many options on the market, choosing the right platform can be challenging. Two popular solutions—monday.com and Atlassian Jira Software—are feature-rich tools tailored to varying team needs.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll compare monday.com and Jira capabilites for project and work management to help you determine the best choice for your team.

monday.com Overview

monday.com is an intuitive, visually stunning work OS used by over 180,000 organizations worldwide. The cloud-based platform needs no coding knowledge to customize workflows and build apps utilizing pre-built templates.

Key features include:

• Customizable dashboards and reports
• Team communication and collaboration
• Time tracking
• Mobile compatibility
• 200+ app integrations

With monday.com, remote teams can manage projects, operations, and everyday work in one place for transparency and organization. Both simple and complex teams leverage monday for workflow automation, analytics, and scalability.

The software boasts excellent ease-of-use—users can get started instantly with the free plan before upgrading for more advanced needs.

What is monday.com Best Suited For?

With customizable boards, views, and reports, monday.com fosters teamwork for:

Work and Task Management: Handle day-to-day tasks and long-term projects for individuals, teams, and large organizations alike.

Marketing Teams: Streamline campaign coordination and creative requests between teams and clients.

Sales Teams: Visualize sales cycles from lead to close.

Project Management: Enable project transparency between managers and teams with timelines, statuses, and updates.

Product Teams: Ideate, experiment, gather feedback and drive product roadmaps.

HR Teams: Manage recruiting workflows, employee self-service, training, and more.

Essentially, monday.com’s flexibility allows any team to create workflows aligning to specific business needs. While adaptable, monday.com excels for small and medium-sized businesses rather than larger enterprises managing intricate projects.

Jira Software Overview

Created by leading software company Atlassian, Jira Software is built for enterprise agile planning, tracking, reporting, and shipping. Trusted by 83% of Fortune 500 companies, Jira Flexible Project Management (FPM) methodology underpins workflows for hybrid teams.

With 35+ native app integrations, Jira centralizes work across tools for alignment. Roadmap planning, backlog management, sprint building, and scoping come together in one hub. Additional features include:

• Customizable scrum and kanban boards
• Issue tracking
• Product planning
• Reporting
• Workload management

Jira Software provides real-time visibility into teamwork with configurable workflows so organizations can ship faster. As a highly scalable platform, Jira Software can expand from teams of 10 to over 20,000 users.

What Teams Use Jira Software?

Jira Software is built for every team involved in the software delivery lifecycle including:

Software Engineering Teams: Streamline development processes from project inception to launch. Custom workflows align software teams and stakeholders.

IT Ops Teams: Seamlessly collaborate with dev teams to accelerate delivery cycles. Automate release processes and monitor for performance issues.

Project Management Teams: Oversee complex projects end-to-end. Custom scrum boards,roadmaps, reporting, help managers mitigate risks and optimize resources.

Product Managers: Map strategic vision, gather user feedback, and clearly communicate priorities to inform development.

Quality Assurance Teams: Log bugs with tracking, prioritization, assignment, and resolution management in one platform.

While Jira Software excels as an engineering-focused project management solution, its breadth of functionality extends beyond tech teams. For example, marketing, creative, and business service teams leverage Jira Software for intake processes, resource planning, and productivity optimization.

monday.com vs. Jira Software Feature Comparison

Now that we’ve covered the key strengths of monday.com and Jira Software, how do they stack up across common project management capabilities?

Boards and Workflow Customization monday.com Simple board customization Kanban boards Basic scrum boards Jira Software Advanced scrum and kanban boards Customizable workflows Configurable board columns	Integration Capabilities monday.com 200+ app integrations Zapier and API connections CSV import/export Jira Software 3,000+ app integrations Scalable API Lightweight development integration
Roadmaps and Planning monday.com Views and dashboards Reporting Project map web widget Third-party roadmapping tools Jira Software Interactive roadmaps Strategic planning Scoping and estimation Progress forecasting	Analytics and Reporting monday.com Real-time dashboards Customizable reports Project progress tracking Jira Software Advanced search Customizable databases 400+ power tools and reports Success metrics
UX and Ease of Use monday.com Intuitive drag-and-drop UX Pre-built templates Clean and visual interface Quick setup Jira Software Steep learning curve Clunky UX Targeted at technical users Dedicated onboarding	Security Compliance monday.com ISO 27001 SOC 2 GDPR HIPAA compliance Jira ISO 27001 SOC 2 GDPR Customizable security policies

Final Takeaways

• For fast onboarding and intuitive UX, monday.com is the winner. Jira has more customization but subsequently sees a steeper learning curve.
• Jira offers unparalled functionality for complex software projects. From deep code integration to strategic roadmapping, Jira gives full visibility.
• Both integrate extensively with everyday software. Choose the tool that complements your existing stack.
• Security standards are similarly robust. Large regulated enterprises can comfortably use either platform.

Now let‘s compare pricing.

monday.com vs. Jira: Pricing Comparison

monday.com and Jira Software both offer free tiers allowing small teams to get started at no cost. From there, pricing scales based on desired features and number of users.

monday.com Pricing Free Plan Unlimited boards and items Up to 2 users Standard Plan $10 per month/user All essential features Guest access More admin controls Pro Plan $14 per month/user Automations with 50 monthly actions File storage add-on Enterprise Quote Customized quote Unlimited automations Premium support and onboarding

Jira Software Pricing Free Plan Unlimited users Basic functionality Up to 10 users Standard Plan $7 per month/user Additional workflows Advanced search and filtering Premium Plan $14 per month/user More automation Machine learning features Premium support Enterprise Quote Custom pricing

Key pricing takeaways:

• monday.com has a more generous free plan for smaller teams
• Jira’s pricing stays steady in the mid-range while monday.com costs scale
• Enterprise quotes are available from both platforms

Calculate total cost of ownership taking into account integrations, storage, security needs, and support requirements.

The Final Verdict: monday.com vs Jira

When to Choose monday.com

monday.com is ideal for:

• Small and midsize businesses seeking robust PM without heavy customization
• Non-technical teams benefitting from simple UX
• Organizations wanting fast and intuitive onboarding
• Teams needing top-tier ease-of-use for occasional project coordination
• Businesses requiring adaptability across departments

When to Choose Jira Software

We recommend Jira Software for:

• Enterprise software organizations that are deeply technical
• Teams with complex project requirements
• Companies centralizing multiple software systems who need deep integrations
• Stakeholders seeking interactive roadmap visualizations
• Heavily regulated industries needing advanced security and compliance

Both monday.com and Jira present excellent solutions to manage anything from simple tasks to complex software projects. Define your team’s size, industry-specific needs and technical capabilities. Then utilize this guide to determine whether user-friendly monday.com or robust Jira Software best aligns to set up your organization for project success.