Compare JIRA vs. TFS

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.

First of all Jira is not an ALM solution. Yes it is part of it, but his main task is issue mgt.

The corresponding TFS feature are TFS workitems.

For real ALM you need to start from requirements, dev environment , versioning, build, quality assurance and finally production.

If you are a pure Microsoft shop go for TFS, if not Jira might be a better choice (for issue tracking..)

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.

Jira alone does not provide all the capabilities of an ALM; typically it will integrate with an ALM solution such as Zephyr or Micro Focus ALM in order to provide ALM-type capabilities, such as end-to-end governance and traceability of development/test assets.

Likewise, TFS (Team Foundation Server) also requires another component which is client-based called VSTS/Visual Studio Team Services to provide full ALM capabilities.

Usually, a choice for TFS is made when the development technology stack is based mainly on Microsoft, such as .NET. The Microsoft suite comprising .NET, TFS, and VSTS is an entire ecosystem that serves that technology stack very well. It is a licensed solution.

If the development technology stack is more diverse, e.g., includes Java, Python or other similar technologies, then a solution that includes Jira (which is open source) plus Micro Focus ALM or Zephyr (which are licensed) tends to be more popular. The integration of all the diverse technologies tends to be better with Jira.

Let me know if this helps, or requires more explanation.

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.

For complete ALM, I would consider MicroFocus ALM Octane? I have worked at a shop where I used and was an administrator of JIRA. As Rene stated, it's not an ALM solution. Take a look at this Octane demo - https://www.goconsensus.com/app/view/p/q33mf86w?autoplay=false