Jira

It is an outstanding platform easy to use, with a great UI design, and wide range of customization and con configuration.

It has standard templates to manage projects according to current approach and new trends (Agile/scrum/PMI). It service desk offer everything you may need to control all of the process internal and external.

It has a large number of app to aggregate, as well as REST full API, Webhooks, and the likes to extract data or make interfaces with company's systems.

About the cloud service, is a litther pricy, and most of the time you need to contract (monthly fee) some apps to do basic things.

On the other hand, support service has its opportunities. Response time is quite slow, and in some occasions -simply- not attended.

*Functionality

The best feature of Jira is a huge number of integrations, massive amount of possibilities, statistics and tricks that you can you inside the platform.
There is an integrated tracking, kanbans, lists, sorting direct contact with chat (stride) and feature to work with git right from every task or issue.

* New UI

Recently Jira got an update, a new chat (Stride, instead of Hipchat) and a new UI for the tasks. I can see that company goes in the right direction to adopt all of it's powers.

*Customization

Jira, being confusing at first hides a lot of it's features inside most of which you can change and adjust to your business needs. It is a great solution for a big corporation with dozens of departments, hundreds of employees and thousands of issues and tasks daily. However, in all other cases Jira can be a nightmare at this point.

*Slow

Out off all CRM platforms and tools to handle tasks and issues Jira is the slowest by far. Is it initial problem or has it appeared after adopting so many technologies under one roof - I can't be sure. But one thing is clear - Jira is awfully slow.

*To many features

Yes, it is a disadvantage when it comes to Jira. When a new customer comes to Jira I believe, he is most definitely confused. Especially, if he/she tried ANYTHING else before. Of course, I see that company does a lot to make it easier and more comfortable, but as it is now, Jira is a terrible solution for fast adoption, scary for a small or middle sized team and most definitely not a great choice for personal use.

Jira is Huge. If you are huge - great features, customizing, different apps and plugins will help you solve a lot with Jira. If you are just starting or don't have that many tasks and issues and people in your company - you should probable check other options.

This software is so great, that you really don't need to train people on how to use it. Project managers will be familiar within a day, and users will understand it quickly because Atlassian put a lot of work into an intuitive user interface.

This is the best option on the market if you want something that scales across your company without draining your energy. Not only will you run projects through here, but you can also setup all your standard business processes to run through here.

Using the marketplace, there are some great extensions for Jira. We built our entire accounting team into Jira, and used it to know we were following through with our key daily, weekly, monthly processes. Using a scheduler plugin, we were able to create tasks, with subtasks, delegate them, follow up with progress, and print a custom summary report at month end outlining completion, completion date, user, and notes.

You will likely want confluence or google sheets to keep overall big picture notes.

The Kanban board, export features and workflows are all features which stand out to me from my experience with JIRA.

There can be some confusion on finding settings within the admin section. So a bit of a learning curve to the software in my opinion.