Jira Work Management vs. Jira Software: What's the difference and which should you use?
You’ve heard of Jira, but did you know there are different Jira products?
Of course! They’re all part of Jira Software, right?
Well, not exactly.
Jira products are all designed to help teams collaborate, align, and deliver work in one place. They're part of the Atlassian family and built on Jira, which means they all connect to bring your entire organization together. But different products support different teams and their preferred ways of working.
Take Jira Software and Jira Work Management. These powerful Jira products support collaboration between your software and business teams. Think of it like Jira for software teams and Jira for business teams.
So what’s the difference between these two products and how do you choose the right one for your project? We’ll explain how to use these products separately and together to connect your teams and turbocharge your project management at scale. Here’s what we’ll cover:
How does Jira Work Management differ from Jira Software?
The comparison chart below shows the shared and unique features of Jira Work Management and Jira Software. Let’s break down these differences from project and task creation to collecting information, moving work forward, and reporting.
Setting up projects
With Jira Work Management, projects can be populated quickly and easily using one of 20+ business templates with pre-configured workflows. These workflows support common processes for different business teams, from employee onboarding for HR, to GTM for Marketing, and procurement for finance. The steps in the workflow are customizable, so teams have the flexibility to build out their exact process.
Creating and viewing tasks
Within Jira Work Management projects, users create issues, or items of work. There are different views, so teams can visualize tasks more easily and match their preferred way of working.
- Searching for a clear visualization of all the tasks on your plate? The board is a great place to start.
- Organizing tasks and deals to make your monthly sales quota? Try the month-by-month calendar view.
- Used to tracking and ordering office inventory in a spreadsheet? Check out the familiar list view.
- Want to see how your team is making progress on a project? Look at the summary page first.
- Need clarity on all the dependencies in your website launch? The timeline view shows this.
Jira Work Management supports business teams tackling projects together. With collaboration mode, team members can see each other’s activity in the project in real time. This makes creating tasks, assigning ownership, aligning on due dates, and building dependencies much more efficient.
Jira Software projects, on the other hand, are centered around sprints and users view tasks in either a board or timeline.
- Teams that practice scrum use the backlog to house all the team's issues for a project and use the board as a visual display of the team’s work process during a single sprint.
- Teams that practice kanban use the board to visualize, track, and manage a continuous delivery of work.
Gathering information for tasks
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
Moving work forward
With Jira Software, teams can move in an agile way using Jira Software’s key features. Components and code repositories help teams stay organized by grouping and tracking dev work. Releases make it easy to check that issues in the version are complete before turning all the hard work into a software release.
Embedded smart links are available in both products, so teams can embed files from tools like Figma, Google Drive, and Miro directly into their tasks. Everyone can see real-time progress and leave feedback in the same space. Need to create more documentation? Both products include Confluence Pages, which allow you to add more context to the project without making anyone leave the workspace to read it.
Jira Work Management and Jira Software also share a powerful automations library that helps teams eliminate tedious manual actions. Automations, like closing out tasks and sending project updates through Slack, make everyone’s life easier, no matter what team they sit on.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
Reporting
The Summary page in Jira Work Management gives a helpful overview of task completion, upcoming deadlines, and team activity. This helps individuals manage their own workload, while managers can quickly see their team’s progress and bandwidth.
Both Jira Work Management and Jira Software offer a range of reports to analyze issues, track time, and understand workloads within individual projects. Jira Software includes agile reporting, such as sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity charts, and control charts, to optimize sprints.
Advanced Roadmaps will also be available on both products to give users a clear visualization of boards, projects, and filters across multiple teams for more insights. Users can see all the dependencies and due dates that exist to report on progress, plan capacity, and test variations of the critical path.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
Reporting
The Summary page in Jira Work Management gives a helpful overview of task completion, upcoming deadlines, and team activity. This helps individuals manage their own workload, while managers can quickly see their team’s progress and bandwidth.
Both Jira Work Management and Jira Software offer a range of reports to analyze issues, track time, and understand workloads within individual projects. Jira Software includes agile reporting, such as sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity charts, and control charts, to optimize sprints.
Advanced Roadmaps will also be available on both products to give users a clear visualization of boards, projects, and filters across multiple teams for more insights. Users can see all the dependencies and due dates that exist to report on progress, plan capacity, and test variations of the critical path.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
Reporting
The Summary page in Jira Work Management gives a helpful overview of task completion, upcoming deadlines, and team activity. This helps individuals manage their own workload, while managers can quickly see their team’s progress and bandwidth.
Both Jira Work Management and Jira Software offer a range of reports to analyze issues, track time, and understand workloads within individual projects. Jira Software includes agile reporting, such as sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity charts, and control charts, to optimize sprints.
Advanced Roadmaps will also be available on both products to give users a clear visualization of boards, projects, and filters across multiple teams for more insights. Users can see all the dependencies and due dates that exist to report on progress, plan capacity, and test variations of the critical path.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
Reporting
The Summary page in Jira Work Management gives a helpful overview of task completion, upcoming deadlines, and team activity. This helps individuals manage their own workload, while managers can quickly see their team’s progress and bandwidth.
Both Jira Work Management and Jira Software offer a range of reports to analyze issues, track time, and understand workloads within individual projects. Jira Software includes agile reporting, such as sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity charts, and control charts, to optimize sprints.
Advanced Roadmaps will also be available on both products to give users a clear visualization of boards, projects, and filters across multiple teams for more insights. Users can see all the dependencies and due dates that exist to report on progress, plan capacity, and test variations of the critical path.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
When a project is in flight, stay in sync on each task by adding comments and changing task statuses. Jira's automation library simplifies the process of creating automations to send updates through email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or any other platform that the team finds convenient.
Collaborating with developer teams? Jira Work Management’s shared release dates feature enables your team to coordinate and align your work by adding release dates from Jira Software directly to your Jira Work Management calendars. Business and software projects can also be connected with Advanced Roadmaps for cross-functional visibility and dependency mapping (available with Jira Software Premium and Enterprise plans).
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
Reporting
The Summary page in Jira Work Management gives a helpful overview of task completion, upcoming deadlines, and team activity. This helps individuals manage their own workload, while managers can quickly see their team’s progress and bandwidth.
Both Jira Work Management and Jira Software offer a range of reports to analyze issues, track time, and understand workloads within individual projects. Jira Software includes agile reporting, such as sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity charts, and control charts, to optimize sprints.
Advanced Roadmaps will also be available on both products to give users a clear visualization of boards, projects, and filters across multiple teams for more insights. Users can see all the dependencies and due dates that exist to report on progress, plan capacity, and test variations of the critical path.
If teams need to collect information from other departments to do their work, they could be wasting time searching through emails and waiting on all the critical details to get started.
Forms in Jira Work Management help teams collect everything from sales enablement to creative requests. Information is tracked and stored in one place and teams create a repeatable process for future requests.
To create and view fully custom reports, you can use Jira Dashboards to create a personal dashboard and add gadgets to keep track of assignments and issues you're working on. Dashboards are designed to display gadgets that help you organize your projects, assignments, and achievements in different charts.
If you have a Jira Work Management Premium plan and want to see work across multiple projects at the same time, the Overviews feature is a great way to see an aggregated Summary, Calendar, and Timeline view of work spanning multiple projects.
Reporting
The Summary page in Jira Work Management gives a helpful overview of task completion, upcoming deadlines, and team activity. This helps individuals manage their own workload, while managers can quickly see their team’s progress and bandwidth.
Both Jira Work Management and Jira Software offer a range of reports to analyze issues, track time, and understand workloads within individual projects. Jira Software includes agile reporting, such as sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity charts, and control charts, to optimize sprints.
Advanced Roadmaps will also be available on both products to give users a clear visualization of boards, projects, and filters across multiple teams for more insights. Users can see all the dependencies and due dates that exist to report on progress, plan capacity, and test variations of the critical path.