| Functionality | 9 <p>Jira delivers nearly all the functionality that SMBs—and even enterprises—will need.</p><p>Its task and project management capabilities are incredibly powerful and flexible. You can customize Jira to fit virtually any project, even those with complex structures like five layers of sub-tasks, each with their own custom fields.</p><p>That said, Jira does have some gaps. It doesn’t natively offer features like invoicing, billing, or expense tracking, which other tools sometimes include. Plus, for built-in docs or wikis, you’ll need to use its sister product, Confluence.</p> | 6 <p>Teamwork offer most functionalities that SMBs will require but lacks some more sophistic customisation features useful to larger businesses.</p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 245, 0.5); color: rgb(55, 65, 81);">Teamwork has rich functionality natively. Most notably, strong automation, customizable forms, time-tracking (with approval capabilities), excellent reporting and analytics, and even invoice creation. These features mean teams do not have to reply much on external integrations to reduce friction and enhance productivity.</span></p><p><br></p><p>However, some key features are missing. Chief amongst these are the lack of document creation features and missing project view options. Documents can only be imported for your device - so no customisation and no document templates. All of this work must be done externally, which is particularly painful when it comes to editing documents and sending them back to others. Only 4 project views are available - a timeline view would be useful to view task deadlines concurrently.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 4 <p>Compared to other project management tools, we find Jira complex to navigate. The interface is packed with features and options, which can make it overwhelming and unintuitive—especially for new users. The learning curve is steep, and it can take weeks for team members to get fully comfortable.</p><p>For example, even for simple projects, there are multiple configuration pages to manage: settings for the entire project, specific project views, built-in fields, custom fields—you name it. It’s powerful, but all these layers can quickly become confusing.</p> | 7 <p>Teamwork is generally easy to use. Some more complex features (e.g. creating an invoice) are harder to find but these are minimal and the demo videos and self service materials are supplement your learning very well.</p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We estimate that an average start-up employee would require around 1 day and some guidance to proficiently use all key features of the product. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It is easy to locate key info and processes are generally intuitive (especially given that so much of the UI works with drag and drop). Some views and features are often hidden in 'more' tabs which could be displayed more effectively. e.g. The Gantt view of task management.</span></p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>While Jira has made strides in design and usability with recent updates, it still feels a bit dated compared to more modern Project Management tools like Linear. Customizing the UI is pretty limited, so you’re mostly stuck with the default look and feel.</p><p>Our main gripe, though, is page load times. At 2–3+ seconds per page, things can feel sluggish—and this gets gets compounded as your projects and teams grow. It's a frustration that can niggle you every day.</p> | 6 <p>Teamwork is visually acceptable and geared more towards functionality. The lack of colour makes the UI plain and feel monotone. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>The loading times are generally fast (~1 second), however some functions (like generating dashboards take slightly longer (~2.5 seconds).</p> |
| Customisability | 10 <p>We find Jira to be impressively, and overwhelmingly, customisable.</p><p>You can customise almost anything you can think of - custom task types, workflows, specialized screens, validation rules, and more. For ultimate flexibility, there’s even Jira’s own query language (JQL), which lets you search and filter issues with incredible precision.</p> | 6 <p>Where Teamwork offers customisation, it is generally strong. However, it lacks some key customisations useful to businesses of all sizes.</p><p>Teamwork offers great workflow automation customisations. 'If then' logic and a large range of trigger and action functions mean that a vast array of automations are available to increase your team's efficiency. Custom reporting is also very strong with filtering options by custom tag allowing for very specific insights to be gained.</p><p><br></p><p>However, the lack of document customisation (as you cannot create documents) and only having for 4 task management views available will increase the friction and time spent on bureaucratic tasks like formatting documents or prioritizing between tasks.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 4 <p>Jira offers a self-serve free trial and lets you purchase without dealing with sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks or subtasks takes about 30–40 minutes, which can feel a bit more confusing compared to other tools. That said, its rich library of templates helps streamline the process.</p><p>Be prepared, though—a full setup will likely take at least a few days, especially if you’re customizing it for more complex workflows.</p> | 9 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, because it has a very rich library of templates, especially for marketing. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> |
| Customer Support | 4 <p>We find that Jira's support leaves a lot to be desired. Atlassian (the maker of Jira) nudge users toward self-service options like documentation and community forums, which can be frustrating when you need quick, direct help. Even when you reach out for support, the experience can be hit-or-miss—especially if you’re a smaller customer without a premium support plan.</p> | 8 <p>Personalised Q&A is available over email only. But agents are helpful and reply fast (<2 hours).</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>Excellent self-serve materials with strong depth and quality. Their demo videos and help section (available in app and online) are excellent if you trouble using or finding any key or advanced workflows.</p> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>Jira, powered by Atlassian, has a thriving app marketplace with thousands of plugins. If there’s a feature you need that Jira doesn’t offer natively, chances are there’s a third-party app for it. Plus, Jira provides an API, giving you the flexibility to build custom integrations when needed.</p> | 8 <p>Teamwork's integrations are not exhaustive but still cover most integrations any SMB will need. These include some automation integrations through slack, Hubspot and others. Here you can set up automatic messages within these integrated software once and trigger has been completed within Teamwork.</p><p><br></p><p>Teamwork also has an API allowing teams to built their own custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Migrating away from Jira can be a bit of a headache. Exporting data isn’t exactly seamless, and you’ll likely need to spend time cleaning and reformatting it before it’s usable in another tool. Custom fields, workflows, and issue types often don’t have direct equivalents elsewhere, which can lead to data loss or tricky mapping processes. It’s definitely something to plan for if you’re considering switching.</p> | 8 <p>Teamwork offers a large number of pre-built and custom reports which are all available for exporting mostly to pdf or CSV files. The number of reports available is extensive and the level of granularity retained when exporting is also impressive. This is in part due to Teamwork's excellent reporting of budgeting and profitability. Data visualisation tools (e.g. bar graphs and pie charts) can also all be exported.</p><p><br></p><p>Migrating to and from Teamwork from other project management tools is not possible.</p> |
