Need an alternative to Jira Align?
Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution aligns strategy to delivery to help you transform on your terms and timeline.
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Jira Alternative

Jira Align vs. Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning Solution

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Plan and manage any combination of Agile, Lean and traditional portfolios with powerful financial and cost management, robust capacity planning, and the flexibility to support teams no matter how they work. Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution is a powerful alternative to Jira Align.

5 reasons to consider Planview as an alternative to Jira Align

  • Planview enables organizations to embrace different ways of working – Agile, traditional, or a blend of both

    We’re pragmatists, not purists. So, our solutions are designed to support the different styles of work that exist in a large enterprise while providing a single line of sight across the entire organization. Unlike platforms that only support a single type of portfolio or work methodology, we empower organizations to manage transformation, on their own terms and at their own pace.

  • We help you integrate disparate Agile team tools and coordinate work without forcing process change

    Planview won’t force workflow changes or data hierarchy standardization. With our solution, you can easily integrate and consolidate the work of disparate Agile teams without disrupting the way your teams work. All of this helps you visualize work across your teams regardless of their Agile execution tool choice or the methodology they apply.

  • We help you plan, fund and deliver the value that matters most

    Our solutions support funding and capacity planning for value streams based on strategic objectives, so that you understand value contributions and financials from the team to the highest reaches of your organization. Leverage robust scenario planning capabilities to model trade-offs and analyze risks associated with changes to costs, capacity and funding. Confidently fund the highest priorities for the business.

  • Enterprise Kanban “power” boards make your work visible and connected to strategy

    With our easy-to-use, highly configurable enterprise Kanban boards, we make it easy to visualize and coordinate work across teams for better insight into risks, dependencies and delivery delays. Spanning all levels of an organization, our approach to Kanban provides quick time-to-value with the enterprise-wide visibility needed to enable better strategic, financial and capacity planning.

  • Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio and Work Management solutions enable the transformation journey

    Transform your business, from strategy to delivery, with Planview. We have rewired our own organization and know the importance of having a partner who understands where you have been and where you want to go on your transformation journey. As a leader in Project Portfolio Management and Enterprise Agile Planning, and with in-house implementation and service experts, we will shape a solution to fit your transformation needs, not the other way around. We’ll help you evolve today and evolve with you over time.

Why choose Planview over Jira Align?

  • Planview
  • Jira

    • Integrations

      Seamless event-based integration with numerous team tools.

    • Planview offers: Jira Software, Jira Core, and Jira Service Desk, as well as, Azure DevOps, Rally Software, Digital.ai, and more.

    • Jira Align offers: Jira Software, Jira Core, Azure DevOps, and Trello.

    • Data mapping

      Integrate third-party Agile tool data or work without forcing process change.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: none

    • Automated Agile costing and capitalization

      Automate calculation of Agile costs based on team activity and progress.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: none

    • Ease of use and configurability

      Rapid time to value with highly configurable Kanban boards.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Portfolio management

      Support for Lean Portfolio Management, traditional Project Portfolio Management, or a combination of both.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Financial management

      Track and manage time-phased budgets and forecasts with configurable metrics including ROI, NPV, IRR, etc.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Capacity planning and management

      Manage both individual and team-level capacity.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Scenario modeling

      Model trade-offs, compare what-if scenarios and understand impacts.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Work delivery

      Support for traditional, Agile, or a blend of both work types.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Dashboard, analytics, and reporting

      Share status with pre-built and customizable resources and connect your data to Power BI out-of-the-box.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 50%

    • Work intake and prioritization

      Rank epics manually or automatically based on WSJF, financials, and risk

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 100%

    • Dependency visualization and management

      Visually identify and map interrelated work across and between teams.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 100%

    • Support for Agile methodologies

      Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid use cases like Scrumban, and more.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 100%

    • Support for Enterprise Agile Frameworks

      Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Disciplined Agile (DA), Spotify, and more.

    • Planview offers: 100%
    • Jira Align offers: 100%

Planview Enterprise Agile Planning Solution

Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution enables planning, funding and value delivery from the strategic portfolio to the Agile team, supporting organizations throughout their transformation journey.

Learn more • Planview Portfolios Agile Planning

Lean Portfolio Management

Achieve enterprise agility by planning, funding, and delivering products and solutions faster, improving business outcomes, and supporting strategic objectives.

Learn more • Planview Lean Portfolio Management

Agile Program Management

Visualize, plan, coordinate, and deliver your organization’s biggest initiatives quickly, effectively, and with clear visibility into the value delivered.

Learn more • Planview Agile Program Management

Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning Capabilities

  • Visualize Agile and traditional portfolios in a single view

    Manage multiple portfolio types

    Plan, manage, fund and govern Agile and traditional portfolios in a single solution. Ensure your organization delivers the value that matters most.

  • Create and configure financial plans and forecasts

    Budget, forecast, and track actuals

    Build the best financial plan by budgeting and forecasting costs and benefits across different time periods. Gain insight into returns with configurable metrics for ROI, NPV and IRR.

  • Track and manage outcomes in real-time

    Analyze outcomes and performance

    Understand the flow of value from the portfolio to the teams. See progress against targets and analyze trends over time. Gain the insights needed to pause or pivot for better business results.

  • Automate agile costing and capitalization

    Accurately capture Agile team costs

    Automatically capture and categorize software development costs in real time, track work in progress at the story, feature, and epic level to reflect actual time spent on product and/or software creation.

  • Seamlessly integrate and connect disparate Agile teams

    Make work visible and connected 

    Connect and coordinate the work of Agile teams, without forcing standardization, and better understand the flow of work, risks, roadblocks and dependencies across all teams.

  • Analyze and model trade-offs with scenario planning

    Create what-if scenarios to gauge risk and reward

    Anticipate the potential opportunities, risks and impacts of a plan by modeling different scenarios based on configurable dimensions such as capacity, cost, value, epics or initiatives.

“While transformation is largely dependent on culture and behavior, it also requires the right people, process, and tools. Planview enables RBS to maintain a controlled environment and provide transparency of delivery across our Agile teams. At the same time, we are able to track the main-level financial data, outcomes, and business cases, and ultimately the delivery of value throughout our business domains (value streams). You don’t go from one end of the Agile journey in one go. It’s a transition, step by step, and Planview is helping us get there.”

RBS

Steve Marjot

Head of Change Centre of Excellence, Royal Bank of Scotland

“The entire team can focus on the work at hand and how the work is being planned and distributed. Using Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution makes the work a lot more efficient.”

Patricia

Service Manager at a large European insurance company

Read case study • a large European insurance company

What is the difference between a comprehensive Enterprise Agile Planning solution and an Agile project management tool like Jira Software?

Agile Project Management tools, like Jira Software, provide a means for developers and project managers to plan, track, and manage many aspects of Agile software development projects. Mostly geared toward bug tracking, ticketing and code check-in and check-outs, they support teams using Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid approaches like Scrumban, in their development of products and services.

Enterprise Agile Planning tools represent an evolution from project-centric, bug tracking and ticketing Agile tools. They support a product-centric approach, focused on customers and the delivery of value. Enterprise Agile Planning tools connect business strategy to delivery by supporting both Agile and traditional portfolios while enabling team, program, and portfolio-level planning. While many businesses use enterprise Agile frameworks like SAFe to guide their pursuit of enterprise-wide agility, these tools are built to complement their use.

Enterprise Agile Planning solutions further the drive to agility by enabling organizations to operationalize not only how they plan, but also fund and deliver, value. They often provide robust financial management modeling functionality to access different funding, cost and capacity scenarios while helping an organization stay focused on the outcomes and objectives that are most important. Enterprise Agile Planning solutions also help organizations align to value streams, grouping areas of capabilities or persistent demand into functional groups (or products) for streamlined funding to areas with high value opportunity.

What are some of the key capabilities to look for in an Enterprise Agile Planning solution?

  • Support for team, program, and portfolio-level planning
  • Support for a combination of traditional and Agile portfolios
  • Support for businesses making the project to product shift
  • Support for distributed Agile teams in the planning, coordination, and delivery of business value
  • Support for disparate Agile team tools and their integrations
  • Support for financial management and scenario planning of costs, funding and capacity
  • Support for capacity planning and management
  • Support for dependency management
  • Support for Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid uses cases such as Scrumban, and more
  • Support for the use of enterprise Agile frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, DA and more

What is the difference between Jira Software and Jira Align?

Jira Software was first launched in 2002 as a bug tracking tool for software developers. As this product and the Agile development space evolved, Jira Software rose in popularity as an Agile project management tool primarily amongst Scrum teams for its flexibility, ease of customization, and low cost. It is most used by teams looking to effectively manage a project that does not need cross-project, cross-team coordination or organizational level planning and visibility.

Although Jira Software leverages a data hierarchy with nomenclature commonly used in portfolio-level planning (“epics”), it does not support this level of planning. In addition, it does not natively support customization of its issue hierarchy. These points, coupled with the fact that Jira Software cannot support cross-project and cross-team coordination involving things like the management of dependencies, as well as other scaled Agile use-cases, does not make it a good fit for teams interested in applying the use of enterprise Agile frameworks like SAFe.

In 2019, Atlassian acquired Agile management platform provider, AgileCraft, and rebranded its solution as Jira Align. Jira Align is Atlassian’s answer to scaled agility. This tool complements the use of Jira Software by providing a means of conducting portfolio-level planning leveraging select data mapped from execution teams whose work is tracked primarily in Jira Software.

We have teams that use Jira Software. Can we integrate Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution with Jira and other Agile project management tools?

Yes, Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution gives teams the flexibility to continue to use the Agile execution tools they are familiar with or that are already tailored to support their processes. Whether teams use Atlassian’s Jira Software, Jira Core, or Jira Service Desk, or other tools like Broadcom’s Rally Software, Microsoft Azure DevOps, or Digital.ai (formerly CollabNet VersionOne), Planview allows Agile teams to connect their tool of choice into a program or teams-of-teams board with ease – enabling them to continue delivering value without disruption.