JIRA vs. TFS
As of February 2019, JIRA is ranked 1st in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 24 reviews vs TFS which is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 28 reviews. The top reviewer of JIRA writes "Helps us work in Agile and Scrum formats across multiple locations and time zones". The top reviewer of TFS writes "Can Provide A Centralized Place To Store All Source Code And Build Information For Entire Organization". JIRA is most compared with TFS, Microsoft Azure DevOps and ALM Octane. TFS is most compared with JIRA, Micro Focus ALM and CA Agile Central. See our JIRA vs. TFS report.
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Most Helpful Review | |||||
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 Find out what your peers are saying about JIRA vs. TFS and other solutions. Updated: January 2019. 316,268 professionals have used our research since 2012. | |||||
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros | |
It has an easy UI that can easily plug-in to every level. Some of the features that are most important to me of JIRA Agile are the sprint planning, being able to write user stories and being able to use task management. Reporting: It gives a nice report of my backlog and what my team has currently spent its efforts on. It benefits us because we have globally located teams. Our team members work in different geographies, so the product is a better way to manage progress and see the status of different tasks We can cope with processes easily without adapting the tool, but adapting the tool to processes. The ability to change and rewrite tasks is valuable. You can add a lot of columns, change the owners and the change the components. JQL, JIRA Query Language enables me to filter all the issues, display the items as I want. It's very flexible. I can define workflows and custom fields and dependencies between issues and projects. And every project can have a custom configuration with my fields, my names for fields, my validations, and my workflows. It's very customizable. | It's an integrated system that includes all the information that we need to deliver our products smoothly and to track the progress of each piece of code. From the project management perspective, the tool is efficiently managing teams by giving management information, such as reports, graphs, velocity, capacity, etc. The biggest value-add is the solution integrates well with most Microsoft products. Build definitions and releases within the product. allow us to put our latest applications in the field. It has great functionality: work items, backlogs, source code, build releases, and it's easy to use. Complete integration with VS IDE and Office tools: This give us a possibility of high-level automation, thus minimizing human error. Version Control: TFS offers both the centralized “TFVC” version control technology as well as the distributed “Git” version control technology. I like its MTM (Microsoft Test Manager) section which gives us options to create various test plans and add test cases into it. |
Cons | |
The CACD solutions on JIRA has some plugins, but they are not easily understandable or workable. I have had problems with performance and unresponsiveness. All of a sudden, the performance slowed down, and I had a number of users that could not use the tool. JIRA still has their own backtracking tools. It should have a better visibility into HPE UFT. Most people use functional testing tools, like QTP. They need to improve their integration to make it seamless. There is a difficulty viewing all the attachments because they are shown in one place. I would like attachments to be shown at the comment level. Sometimes, it is slow and hangs. We faced some stability issues where JIRA was down for a day. Also, we have lost some of our comments made in the JIRA because of downtime. There are no fields to search or to filter by, mainly the ones which use a data around a date and time when something changes. I would like to see it connecting to Git. That could be useful. We use it for Stash, but I think there is one for Git also. I don't know if it's a plug-in that exists already, but that could be nice. The following definitely need improvement: UI, speed, and mobile app functionality. | The dashboard needs more enhancements. More options could be provided from the perspective of requirements management, which would help product owners to use the tool effectively. Since it is Microsoft, it is technology agnostic, thus it does not really fit into various different technologies in the organization. We are also using Microsoft Teams. The two products function separately. There is not enough collaboration between Microsoft Teams and TFS. TFS on-premise does not support integration with SharePoint Online. Not all of the functionality, which is exposed by the command line interface (tf.exe) is available in the Visual Studio GUI. TFS and MTM have their own style of working and they are different from other tools like Jira or TestRail, which are simpler and easy to use. Sometimes we feel that it need more CPU, and RAMs on TFS server, either we implemented the hardware with the product minimum requirements. |
Pricing and Cost Advice | |
I understand JIRA is quite expensive. It does not cost that much. Almost everybody uses JIRA nowadays because it is the most cost-effective solution. The licensing model is annoying. They nickel and dime you. It is very cheap if you forego the local instance and stick to the cloud. | It is pretty expensive compared to other project management tools. If running TFS on-premise is expensive, maybe you could consider moving to the Cloud and use the Visual Studio Team Services. Use the Microsoft recommended “seat-based” licensing model. This allows a single developer with multiple machines to consume only one client license. TFS is on the higher side, but if you intend to use the tool as a complete ALM tool, it will reduce your costs in the long run. It's just as expensive as HPE ALM, without many of the features, best used for development tool only to avoid higher costs. |
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Answers from the Community | |||
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Ranking  | |||
Views 83,601 Comparisons 45,116 Reviews 22 Followers 1,813 Avg. Rating 7.9 | Views 38,298 Comparisons 22,168 Reviews 28 Followers 1,339 Avg. Rating 8.4 | ||
Top Comparisons | |||
 Compared 31% of the time. Compared 11% of the time.  Compared 8% of the time. |  Compared 64% of the time. Compared 6% of the time.  Compared 4% of the time. | ||
Also Known As | |||
| JIRA Software | Team Foundation Server | ||
Learn | |||
| Atlassian | Microsoft | ||
Overview | |||
JIRA has multiple deployment options to provide the flexibility your organization needs. Cloud is a fully hosted service for customers who want to iterate quickly and have us take care of managing the infrastructure. For customers who need to run our applications behind their firewall, we have Server and Data Center options. Server delivers greater capacity for a larger user base and gives you more control, allowing you to remain compliant with your enterprise IT, security, IP and privacy policies. For our largest customers, Data Center provides all the capability of our Server option, along with high availability, instant scalability and performance at scale. Atlassian also offers premium support and strategic services for enterprise customers. Technical Account Managers are cross-functional technical advisors providing proactive planning and strategic guidance across your organization. Premier Support goes above and beyond our standard offerings to give you account-wide support from a team of senior support engineers. | Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the collaboration platform at the core of Microsoft's application lifecycle management (ALM) solution. TFS supports agile development practices, multiple IDEs and platforms locally or in the cloud and gives you the tools you need to effectively manage software development projects throughout the IT lifecycle. | ||
Offer | |||
Learn more about JIRA | Learn more about TFS | ||
Sample Customers | |||
| Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi. | Vendex KBB IT Services, Info Support, Fujitsu Consulting, TCSC, Airways New Zealand, HP | ||
Top Industries | |||
Insurance Company14% Software R&D Company14% Healthcare Company14% Financial Services Firm14% Financial Services Firm23% Manufacturing Company18% Comms Service Provider11% Healthcare Company8% | Financial Services Firm43% Manufacturing Company14% Software R&D Company10% Retailer10% Manufacturing Company19% Financial Services Firm18% Insurance Company8% Healthcare Company7% | ||
Company Size | |||
Small Business31% Midsize Enterprise17% Large Enterprise52% Small Business16% Midsize Enterprise15% Large Enterprise69% | Small Business14% Midsize Enterprise23% Large Enterprise63% Small Business7% Midsize Enterprise13% Large Enterprise80% | ||
Find out what your peers are saying about JIRA vs. TFS and other solutions. Updated: January 2019.
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We use both. It depends on your application and your budget.
For us, the Atlassian suite of tools required to do end-to-end ALM processing is very expensive (currency conversions also does not help). We, therefore, only use JIRA as an incident/support/planning tool.
We are a Microsoft partner and hence the VSTS/TFS tool suite is much more affordable to us. The visibility of this tool from backlog item to code, build test and released into production is amazing, but it lacks some of the basic admin capabilities that are well automated in JIRA e.g. as tasks are moved, the status of parent items/stories/epics are not automatically updated in VSTS. This adds a lot of admin overhead for product owners, scrum masters and team members.
If it weren’t for budget, the Atlassian suite will be my first choice. If you combine, JIRA, Bitbucket, and Bamboo you would get the same visibility.
We also use Confluence extensively as all our documentation are done Wiki style. We found SharePoint just becomes a repository and not a knowledge share platform.
Hope this helps!
Shout if you have questions.
Both products share a decent amount of market share. I prefer the use of TFS when conducting .NET development due to the ease of use with the Microsoft IDE. If this is the primary basis of the development effort - perfect. If on the other hand the development is spread across a variety of languages & technologies, or the development landscape is varied and primarily open, JIRA becomes the platform of choice. TFS seems great in small team settings, while JIRA seems more easily applied to large, distributed development teams.
The best comparison would be Atlassian toolset Vs TFS. What is covered in TFS can be covered with the different Atlassian tool sets. The integration between the different Atlassian tools is quite seamless but you are not bound. Most tool sets provide an integration with Jira. For great automation I appreciate the Jira (Atlassian) ecosystem. There are several plugins that cover most needs. However other issues such as your current needs,skills, budget, company size and tools should be taken into consideration. And the best ROI is to get the free versions and try them out both can do the Job and even Microsoft shops developing with Visual Studio can easily integrate with Atlassian tools.
Both are good, it depends on your operation and requirements.
1. Are you looking for flexibility interface? If so, JIRA is easier to use than TFS.
2. Are you looking for Reports Analytics? Again, JIRA is better than TFS.
Jira is a "great to integrate" part(!) of an ALM solution. VSTS (cloud) and TFS (on-prem) are much more complete because they already provide version control, work item management, reporting, continuous integration, continuous delivery, wiki, manual and automated test, ...
I would always prefer to use VSTS over TFS over Jira because VSTS does always include the newest features from VSTS/TFS, but both provide a much more complete solution than Jira and I don't want to spend my time to configure integration between different systems.
In the past (when working as a consultant), I migrated a Java-only-team to TFS and the only complaint was that the build system did not provide a way to see the output of maven in real-time ... this has been fixed some years ago.
One important aspect is the know how that is available on the team. If you have great know-how with using Jira and how to integrate it with other ALM parts, it might be a better solution to go that way. If you are new to both, I would recommend TFS/VSTS because you will have a more complete solution with seamless integration of all parts in a shorter time.