Jira or Trello - which project management service should you choose?

Jira and Trello are two project management services that offer some compelling features to efficiently manage workflow. Here, we take a close look at what the two workflow management tools offer you, so you can decide which would be ideal for your purposes.

Jira

It’s impossible to talk about Jira without mentioning its Sprints feature. As is rightly being said of our current century, almost every business is a software business now. Even if a business is not directly involved in producing software, it is bound to rely on software generation to support its main line of business.

Car-makers are a good example. When certain features crucial to customer satisfaction like GPS and Smart Assist are heavily software-reliant, they just cannot ignore the value of good software development.

Almost every software development process involves sprints. Which makes the Sprints feature in Jira valuable for companies across industries. Team members and indeed different teams could collaborate efficiently during sprints using Jira’s feature that is dedicated to the same.

However, even as the inclusion of so useful a feature makes Jira a smart workflow management tool, there are certain fundamental areas in which it falls short. Not least of which is the interface.

It would have been great if Jira’s interface was more intuitive than it is. While it’s understandable that one might need guidance to figure out how to use certain functions, it shouldn’t be the case with many functions that you would frequently need to use. Unfortunately, that’s the case with Jira.

Having said that, if you are willing to put up with the first few times when you feel a little lost as you learn the ropes, Jira is a useful product management service, especially with features like a roadmap included in it.

Trello

In Trello, you get a gamut of features to help with your project management requirements. In this tool, tasks are represented as cards and each card could be moved around with a click from one column of tasks to another. To give you an example, you could move a card for a task in progress to the column for completed tasks after it has been successfully executed.

This simplicity of representation is in stark contrast to Jira where the interface can tend to get head-spinning at times.

It’s also straightforward in Trello to assign cards to relevant users. The users could also be granted different levels of permission, depending on which they could comment on a card. This helps smoothen team collaboration. Also, for efficient task completion, you can add dependencies to cards.

You can also attach files that need to be accessed for the completion of a task. The files can be attached from your computer or the world wide web. You can set deadlines for the tasks and also create and maintain to-do lists to ensure no important tasks are left unfinished.

Other features in Trello let you create and manage content calendars and also development roadmaps.

But the standout feature in Trello is Butler. With this, you could automate your workflow easily, designing a set of actions to be done against a condition- for instance, a card could be moved from development to optimization column when someone is tagged to it.

Such automation not only makes it easy to manage the workflow but also reduces process durations.

Should you choose Trello or Jira?

Trello offers a rather decent set of functionalities coupled with a clean and intuitive interface. Add to that the presence of a feature like Butler and it is hard not to make a case for it. But as was mentioned before, if a project is heavily reliant on sprints for efficient completion, then, Jira could be a better fit for you.

Do these services lack in anything?

You cannot argue with the fact that both Jira and Trello offer some carefully constructed features for project management. However, one crucial element missing in both these workflow management services is a tool to accurately measure the time someone spends doing a task. This is important as, without this metric, your prediction for project delivery will be wide of the mark.

I’m producing project management software that incorporates just such a feature. Not just that, it also comes loaded with a powerful AI that helps you predict the project delivery date with high accuracy, with a click! To learn more, check out their website.