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JIRA vs Pivotal Tracker
March 06, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
82★
JIRA provides issue tracking and project tracking for software development teams to improve code quality and the speed of development. Combining a clean, fast interface for capturing and organising issues with customisable workflows, OpenSocial dashboards and a pluggable integration framework, JIRA is the perfect fit at the centre of your development team.
1★
Collaborative, lightweight alternative project management tool, brought to you by the experts in agile software development. Supercharges agile project teams with focused, real time collaboration. Accelerate agile adoption with a simple, proven process.
See also:
Top 10 Issue-tracking systems
Top 10 Issue-tracking systems
JIRA and Pivotal Tracker are both tools designed to help software teams stay organized, which is ironic because software teams are usually in a constant state of barely contained chaos. Both allow for scrum and kanban workflows, meaning you can push little digital cards around until everything looks neat, at least on the screen. They integrate with things like GitHub and Slack, so your team can pretend to be communicating while actually ignoring messages in multiple places at once. And, of course, both let you create backlogs, which is a polite way of saying "a growing list of things we’ll totally get to someday."
JIRA, hailing from the distant land of Australia and born in 2002, started its life as a bug tracker and has since evolved into a sprawling beast capable of managing not just software projects but entire corporate bureaucracies. It allows for endless customization, meaning you can configure it to the point where no one actually understands how it works anymore. It’s available both in the cloud and on-premises, so you can either let Atlassian manage it for you or take on the thrilling responsibility of maintaining it yourself. JIRA also has incredibly detailed permissions settings, ensuring that no one in your organization can actually change anything important without first consulting at least three other people.
Pivotal Tracker, on the other hand, was born in the USA in 2006 and takes a more opinionated approach, enforcing agile principles with the kind of strict discipline usually reserved for boot camps and overly enthusiastic personal trainers. It focuses on small, nimble teams and a story-based workflow that prioritizes tasks automatically, meaning you spend less time arguing over what to do next and more time panicking about deadlines. Unlike JIRA, it doesn’t let you customize much, which some people call a limitation and others call "saving you from yourself." If JIRA is the Swiss Army knife of project management, Pivotal Tracker is more like a really good spork—limited, but surprisingly effective at what it does.
See also: Top 10 Issue Trackers
JIRA, hailing from the distant land of Australia and born in 2002, started its life as a bug tracker and has since evolved into a sprawling beast capable of managing not just software projects but entire corporate bureaucracies. It allows for endless customization, meaning you can configure it to the point where no one actually understands how it works anymore. It’s available both in the cloud and on-premises, so you can either let Atlassian manage it for you or take on the thrilling responsibility of maintaining it yourself. JIRA also has incredibly detailed permissions settings, ensuring that no one in your organization can actually change anything important without first consulting at least three other people.
Pivotal Tracker, on the other hand, was born in the USA in 2006 and takes a more opinionated approach, enforcing agile principles with the kind of strict discipline usually reserved for boot camps and overly enthusiastic personal trainers. It focuses on small, nimble teams and a story-based workflow that prioritizes tasks automatically, meaning you spend less time arguing over what to do next and more time panicking about deadlines. Unlike JIRA, it doesn’t let you customize much, which some people call a limitation and others call "saving you from yourself." If JIRA is the Swiss Army knife of project management, Pivotal Tracker is more like a really good spork—limited, but surprisingly effective at what it does.
See also: Top 10 Issue Trackers
