Jira Work Management vs. Jira Software: What's the difference and which should you use?

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.

On Jira Work Management Premium, you can also see a summary, calendar, and timeline of multiple business projects in one place — with an overview.

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.

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.

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.

Overviews in Jira Work Management let you generate lightweight reports that span across business projects. Have multiple cross-team initiatives laddering up to one goal? Use an overview to report on progress, manage deadlines, and track cross-functional dependencies.

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.