IntelliJ IDEA vs Jira: Which is a better fit?

Philip T.: My name is Phil. I'm a writer and I give IntelliJ IDEA 5-stars. I decided to try and learn how to write code for Android applications, so I used IntelliJ IDEA as the environment to do that work. It has absolutely everything on it. It's all in one place. Easy to navigate as well and nice clean interface. It was easy to use. I picked it up really quickly. The Help files could probably be improved for IntelliJ IDEA because it offers so much that you can do. There's a lot that you need to learn. So if you're new to the platform, there's a very steep learning curve.

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.