Why pay for JIRA when I can use Bugzilla for free?

Question

We've always used Bugzilla for issue/bug/enhancement tracking, but I keep thinking about switching to JIRA. However I would need to convince the boss that it's worth paying for something when a seemingly equivalent product is free of charge.

So sell me! What about JIRA makes it worth paying for, compared to a free system like Bugzilla? If you're an employee of Atlassian, please disclose that fact! :-)

Answer 1

Because JIRA is much, much more powerful.

Bugzilla is bug tracking. That is the beginning and the end. Bugzilla has a very primitive UI. Bugzilla has very primitive reporting. Bugzilla has no extensibility.

JIRA is bug, issue, feature, task tracking, and project management. Very nice, highly usable UI. Rich and extensive reporting. Highly extensible. Easily integrated with other applications (including the powerful Atlassian suite).

I am in the midst of my 3rd JIRA migration. My current company was on Bugzilla when we started. The change has been a night and day difference. My boss loves it.

And you can try it out for free. Atlassian has an extremely liberal trial usage policy. You can use it until you are convinced you want to buy.

So, download JIRA, install it, start playing with it. Showing it to your boss. Do a trial migration from Bugzilla.

Answer 2

It looks nicer :)

Well, ask yourself, why do you want to move to Jira in the first place?

And, then, ask again: Why do you want to pay for Jira, when Trac is free?

Answer 3

Beware! jordan above answered correctly, but there's a "gothca". Jira really begins to be useful only after you customize it, in my recent experience. My colleague at work (next cubicle, in fact) has put in hundreds of hours customizing Jira to our needs. It has become a critical tool in our development infrastructure, and I think it has been worth it, but the cash cost of the product was only the beginning of the overall investment. (Of course, Bugzilla is customizable too, and if you go down that path, you'll pay for it as well...)

YMMV...

Answer 4

If you are using Subversion, JIRA has a nifty feature wherein commits made to the subversion repository are reflected in the related JIRA item just as long as you specify the JIRA issue number in the commit log comment.

Answer 5

I think Trac is just as great. And it's free and opensource.

Answer 6

My $WORKPLACE just switched from Bugzilla to JIRA (after many years of use; we had to migrate ~12000 bugzilla issues). My initial impression with JIRA:

• lots of features and options
• has a more "professional" look than Bugzilla
• it is harder to find your way around
• it is not as simple to use as Bugzilla
• it was hard to find my old bugs (we used a "custom field" to store our old bugzilla ids, which were used all over the place; in JIRA, custom fields aren't searchable in the "quick search" or the firefox search-plugin; looks like the issue has been open for years)

I hope/expect that JIRA becomes easier to use with more experience on my side.

Answer 7

Customization available on Jira is Ace.

The main selling point I made to the business was the visibility of the Life Cycle.

Tickets for Features, Requirements and the software tasks combined in one easy to use web based system.

With the SVN integration mentioned above, visibility/traceability is from the feature request down to the code changes (However, this requires discipline or good hook scripts to ensure commits have the Jira ticket id in the comments).

The Fisheye and Crucible plug-ins are another strength of Jira. To see features, requirements, tasks, code checkins and code reviews all in one place is great.

IDE integration is something that Eclipse users can take advantage of, Mylin works brilliantly. .NET VS users, on the other hand, don't have good tools available, yet, problems with ALMs TrackLink tool which is the closest I have found has stopped me integrating Jira into Visual Studio.

Answer 8

Jira pros

• per project administration possible
• archiving of historical releases (which reduces the pick lists when creating new issues)
• easy extend able customer fields (overall or per project)
• creation of issue filters (private or shared for group / all users)
• creation of dashboards (private or shared for group / all users)
• overall very flexible / extend able

Overall: Jira can be shaped to your organizations needs. Which it can out of the box, by configuring it. Where BugZilla presumably can also do that, but it would require (cgi ?) programming.

Extra

• extendable through plug-ins
• extendable through portlets

General note

BugZilla probably was one of the first web application around, which for current times has its drawbacks in programming language and setup etc.etc. Also the flexibility in integration with other products and configuring it into each different organizations needs, was not taken into account.

But it certainly is a good tool! As large groups, like eclipse.org are also using it! It would be nice to have a little glimpse, if they modified BugZilla and in which directions, etc. etc.

Answer 9

@mfx: use the Bugzilla ID Search Gadget.

Jira is much better. I think the only Bugzilla feature better than Jira is the very nice issue discussion (threaded comments) that can be done by email.

Answer 10

Save yourself the trouble and don't use JIRA. When @Kevin Little said it took hundreds of hours to customize he wasn't kidding. JIRA has the small basic feature set and leaves you to develop all of the other features you want. Yes, there are some plugins freely available but most are proprietary.

What not to use JIRA:

1. Doesn't support auto assignment
2. Can't modify email notifications
3. When you upgrade JIRA versions you have to setup a new instance and migrate all data instead of an in place upgrade
4. Can't copy projects
5. Has a limit on users unless you pay $8000
6. When migrating data (using Jelly scripts) it is missing LOTS of basic functionality such as specifying dates for events. It is recommended on their site that you do a "custom build" of JIRA just for the upgrade to add this functionality.
7. Want a report? You have to write a plugin
8. -Insert all the basic functionality you would expect- requires you to develop a plugin

JIRA is short for Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla so be forewarned about this monster