Jira vs YouTrack: Which is a better fit?

Jake D.: My name is Jake, my company is Uni. We are one to 10 people, and my score for Jira was a four. Before we were using Trello and we didn't like it as much as Jira, because it really only was good for task management, but the tickets and organizing complex projects weren't as strong on it. We also really liked the documentation and the ability to do other things in Jira that Trello didn't offer. So in general just as we grew and had more engineers to manage and more complex software projects to manage, Jira became a better fit for our company. I chose Jira first and foremost, because the devs at my company really liked it and had experience working on it. It also allowed us to manage a front-end and backend team more easily and collaborate with ease compared to the other products we were looking at. It was affordable for startups and also supported us scaling all the way up if we were to grow our org to be much larger. As I had used it in previous companies that were bigger enterprises and saw it used for everything from documentation to ticket management to product management and development, so it just made the most sense for our org as we grew and was very affordable. Getting started with Jira was pretty easy, it took us about a week. We had a designated project manager who went about kind of setting up every user and getting the board set up the way we needed. We had engineering leads trained in how to do ticketing and how to move tickets from beginning to end pretty quickly. I think a lot of people use Jira and have experience with it coming out of school or bootcamp, so it was a pretty easy switch for us. Coming over from Trello, we found it was pretty fast to recreate the tickets and our processes from that. I think my biggest recommendation is just making sure that the engineers really want it. I think that project managers, it really caters to and has a great amount of tools for documenting, doing product recs, doing task management, QA, all of that. But I think if the devs aren't comfortable using it for pointing, using it for work management, it kind of gets out of line or doesn't get set up in a proper way. So, asking your developers to make sure that that's the tool they want and making sure it's set up in a way that's optimal for them I think makes it a much smoother transition, and easier for the business leads and product leads to engage with as well.

Speaker 1: My name is Andrew. I'm a CEO and I'm rating YouTrack four out five stars. And for more reviews like this, click below. Prior to using YouTrack we had used a number of different products, but also because we have a number of different requirements. YouTrack, like many others, has multiple applications. Trouble ticketing is, obviously, one of the things that were initially designed for, but also sprint tracking, agile and so forth is what they now also have out the box. So Jira is the industry standard. We'd use that and, actually, those sort of things don't sit well with us because our clients, if we're using it for trouble ticketing, find it a bit complicated and some less technically able members of staff tend to struggle with it as well. So, we were looking for something that was simpler, cleaner, more lightweight, and frankly cheaper as well. So, that was how we came across YouTrack. We chose YouTrack because we're familiar with other JetBrains products and they're quite high quality and for a good price, and they're also quite lean in terms of development. Again, as I mentioned previously, we found that Jira is a little bit bloated for the sort of things that we would do and complicated. YouTrack just gives us a nice simple interface. It also allows people to drive it quite quickly once they get their heads around it. And it's just very easy to integrate, very easy to install. We run it on premise. So, there were a lot of reasons why it was good for us and continues to be, actually. Getting YouTrack up and running was very straightforward. It's pretty much just kicking off a JAR file and then it does the rest itself. You need to have a database to connect it to, but then it, pretty much, just moves over. We didn't have any data to migrate over, but it does have tools that do allow you to import from other platforms like Jira or even spreadsheets or whatever. But for us, it was a pretty painless process, and it was not complicated at all. I think it's about people keeping an open mind because people tend to sleepwalk into industry standards, and again, not wanting to dis Atlassian, but Jira is, and I've been using it for more than 15 years. It's a very capable product and that sort of thing, but people just tend to make arbitrary choice and say, "We need trouble ticket." Or "We need the sprint management. Let's just go for Jira." But it's not the only horse in town. And so, I think people who just judge on its own merits, look at the user interface, the integration, and just general day-to-day working, I think they'd be pleasantly surprised by looking at some alternatives. And there are some open source systems as well, but again, they're a little bit clunky, so it's just making sure you know what you're looking for and not being afraid to go off piece, basically.