Jira Vs TFS: Everything You Want to Know is Here

With hundreds of project management tools available out there in the global market, finding the one that fits your team’s needs has never been easy.

And when talking about project management tools, one surely can’t forget to mention Jira and TFS, the most well-reputed PM tools.

Where Jira offers a flexible and easy-to-use interface, TFS provides an agile manager and tracker.

Are you also stuck between Jira vs. TFS: which is the better project management tool to opt for? Then cheer up, fellow, as here comes sound information about the two software tools, followed by a detailed comparison and a section based on Jira vs. TFS pros and cons.

Now, let’s break through the article!

What is Jira?

A bug tracking and project management tool, Jira, was founded in 2002 by Atlassian. It serves as management as well as a cloud-based SaaS tool that assists the users in

• Tracking and recording software bugs
• Organizing project tasks as tickets
• Managing scrum teams, and helping collaborate easily

Key Features:

1. Agile Views

The most powerful feature of Jira is its interface or views. It has two types of boards to organize data:

• Scum board 

In the Scrum board, all the information about a particular task is consolidated on a single page, helping organize the workload. It is handy for engineering projects as you get a time-to-time report of how things are moving.

• KanBan Board

In KanBan, the information is laid out in a bird’s eye view, helping you identify “To Do”, “In Progress”, and “Completed Task”.

2. Project Roadmap

Moreover, Jira also provides a roadmap that allows you to give a macro-level structure to your project and segment it into milestones to track the progress of different users and their workload. It is a bridge that helps create a timeline, list of “To Do” tasks and goals, etc., to get a clear picture of the project and connect all team members.

3. Detailed Reporting

Jira delivers detailed reports on all the projects to help you gain visibility of the progress and crucial insights of your project, along with the points where your team is struggling.

Some of the famous reports are:

• User workload report that helps understand how much work is allocated to a single person
• Resolution time report that tells the rate at each bug and issues are being resolved
• Average age report, which shows the average time taken to solve an unresolved task in the backlog

4. Time Tracker

It contains a time tracker that uses three colors to give detailed insights into the time taken by the user to solve a problem. There are three different colors in the tracker:

• Blue shows the average time needed to resolve an issue
• Green denotes the average time spent by a user on an issue
• Orange indicates the time left to fix an issue

5. Security

It offers a high level of security to keep sensitive information safe. For example, you can control limited access of users to bugs, allowing only selected members to work on it. Similarly, it has a permission scheme where you can set your own rules and permissions for a given task. Moreover, it has password protection and two-factor authentication too.

Pros:

1. It offers the great feature of a road map to help you share your idea with the team members in an aligned manner.
2. Jira allows integration with more than 3000 3rd party software to help you solve the bugs.
3. It offers a high degree of customization to make a user-friendly interface according to different projects.
4. You can write a JQL query and thus create your own work items.
5. It provides burndown charts and detailed reports to analyze workload and track the progress of each member.

Cons:

1. You can’t filter subtasks
2. It had a maximum file upload size of only 10 Mb
3. You can’t download the reports

Platforms Supported:

Jira is made on JAVA and hence runs on platforms like

• Microsoft Windows
• Mac OS
• Microsoft Azure
• Linux
• Android 4.0
• Amazon Web services

What is TFS?

Team Foundation Server (TFS), now known as Azure DevOps Server, is an on-premises, open code software managing tool developed by Microsoft in 2005. It helps teams orchestrate and organize their efforts to solve problems and finish their projects. The main services that TFS offers are

• Perform different types of tests to solve an issue
• Provide agile tools for project management

Key Features:

1. Product and Sprint Backlogs

The most distinguishable features of TFS are its backlogs that help manage the workloads by adding a configurable hierarchy. It provides detailed information about the project, deadline, and progress, thus helping you prioritize the important work. Moreover, you can also add custom work types and items to the web interface.

2. Charts Assistance

To help you gain a clear insight of progress made on a project, how tasks are being done, and related information, TFS provides chart assistance. In this way, you can sort and interpret the data easily.

Moreover, the chart also displays progress made by different team members ( how many tasks they have completed and how many still are on hold).

3. Homepage

It has a very easy-to-use homepage, where you can pin all the essential information you want. For example, work item queries, charts, to-do tasks, finished tasks, etc., all can be pinned to the homepage.

4. Git Version Control

One of the key features of TFS that has made it a popular choice among developers is its version control system. It has both TF version control as well as Git version control to choose between. Moreover, Microsoft has supported TFS GIT to IDEs like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Code Studio, Eclipse, Android Studio, etc.

Pros:

1. It offers bug tracking and test case writing.
2. TFS can easily help create technical components and specifications for engineers, quality assurance teams, etc.
3. It integrates with all the Microsoft products, merchandise, etc., to exchange data easily.
4. You can reuse your test plans and queries.

Cons:

1. It doesn’t work without a visual studio.
2. Slow performance
3. The interface is very confusing and difficult to use.

Platforms Supported:

TFS is supported on:

• Linux
• Android Studio 3.4
• Mac OS X
• Windows
• IntelliJ IDEA Community

TFS Vs. Jira: Price

Now that we are well up with the power features of Jira and TFS, along with their ins and outs, let’s compare their plans and pricing.

Jira offers a four-tier plan for its users:

• A free plan for up to 10 users, particularly suitable for new, small companies.
• A standard plan that costs $7.5 per user per month. It provides 25 GB of cloud storage with a user limit of 35000, making it suitable for growing teams.
• A premium plan for up to 35000 users per month that provides unlimited storage, guaranteed uptime, and many other features for just $14.5 per user per month.
• Last comes the Enterprise plan that the users can customize according to their requirements.

In comparison, TFS offers the following plans:

• A free or basic plan for the first five users and later costs $6 if there are more users. It includes pipelines, boards, artifacts, and Git repos.
• A paid plan starts from $52 per user per month with a 30-day free trial. It includes services like browser-based tests, test planning, tracking, etc., in addition to all features of the basic plan.

Microsoft TFS Vs. Jira: Customer Rating

Customer Rating has always been of prime importance, as it helps us learn whether the users and teams found a particular tool useful or not. So, here is a head-on-head comparison of Microsoft TFS Vs. Jira customer rating.

TFS Vs. Jira Comparison Table

Now that we are up with the nitty-gritty of the two management tools, let’s have a head-on head TFS vs. Jira comparison.

Final Words

Both Jira and TFS are good ALM and PM tools that help us in project planning, tracking, and monitoring. But when comparing Jira vs. TFS, Jira gets an edge over TFS due to its better support, integration, more third-party plugins, and many other features!

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