SpiraTeam vs. Jira: Updated 2025 Product Comparison

Key Takeaways of SpiraTeam vs. Jira:

• Scalability: Jira's flexibility and plugin ecosystem make it the go-to for large enterprises and teams of all kinds that require deep customization and complexity. SpiraTeam is leaner and more suited for mid-sized projects that center around software development.

• Simplicity vs. Complexity: SpiraTeam offers an out-of-the-box ALM experience with everything tightly integrated. Jira is immensely powerful and customizable, but leans heavily on add-ons and third-party apps to fill out its capabilities.

• Cost Efficiency: User reviews rate SpiraTeam higher on value-for-money and support satisfaction (e.g. Software Advice: SpiraTeam’s Value=4.6/5 and Support=4.6/5 vs. Jira’s 4.3/5 and 4.2/5, respectively).

• Built-In Capabilities: SpiraTeam offers industry-leading built‑in test management for seamless traceability without needing external plugins. Jira requires add-ons and integrations for development-specific functionality like test case management, requirements management, and more.

• AWS Convenience: SpiraTeam is available via AWS Marketplace, making provisioning straightforward for cloud-first teams. Jira is not offered on AWS Marketplace as of August 2025.

SpiraTeam vs. Jira Summary

In-Depth Comparison of SpiraTeam vs. Jira for ALM: 10 Key Factors

Do you find that requirements management, test management, and program management with Atlassian Jira is needlessly complex? Did you start using Jira for your issue and bug tracking because it was affordable and easy to configure, but now you find that it doesn’t keep pace with your needs, and that every feature requires an expensive add-on from their marketplace?

When looking for a more seamless and easier-to-maintain alternative to the Atlassian ecosystem (bonus — it’s also more affordable), SpiraTeam and the Inflectra ecosystem should be your top choice. Here are the top ten differences between the platforms and how they stack up:

1. Supports All Aspects of a Project Lifecycle

SpiraTeam was designed from the start to address all of the key disciplines and groups involved in software development projects. It provides robust functionality across all phases of a typical software development lifecycle (plan, develop, test, implement, maintain):

SpiraTeam provides a complete set of planning tools that let you design and plan the project from inception to completion. You can write the requirements and plan the development tasks and tests necessary to complete the project:

SpiraTeam integrates the testing activities fully into the development lifecycle, with integrated world-class test management and test execution capabilities:

SpiraTeam integrates DevOps and software development activities out-of-the-box with its source code management system compatible with GitHub, GitLab, Git, AWS Code Commit, and Subversion, as well as continuous integration connectors for tools such as Azure DevOps Pipelines, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and TeamCity:

SpiraTeam fosters collaboration between the developers, testers, and other members of an agile team with its integrated code viewing and different visualization screens that let the team members see exactly what has been changed in each CI build:

In contrast, Jira started life as a highly-configurable issue tracker that is focused primarily on tracking individual objects (such user stories or software bugs). Jira is therefore focused on the development side of the application lifecycle, with add-on tools available to support testing and other phases of your development workflows.

With its ecosystem of add-ons, you can extend Jira to meet specific needs such as testing, requirements management or software development. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Atlassian gives you the flexibility to choose the exact test management tool you like — the downside is that the plugins don’t have seamless traceability and ease of use across the various modules.

Test Management using SpiraTest or a Jira Add-On

With Jira, you need to either use (1) a third-party add-on for test management from the Atlassian marketplace:

Or you can use (2) a third-party test management solution that connects to Jira, such as SpiraTest, TestRail, etc.:

Using an add-on basically incorporates extra issue and task types to Jira to simulate the necessary testing artifacts. Since Jira is reliant on add-ons developed by other vendors, the integration between the modules is not very tight, which restricts functionalities and reporting across the separate modules.

Requirements Management using the Confluence Wiki

In keeping with their marketplace approach, Jira itself does not provide a requirements management capability, because it’s focused on User Stories management. If you need more than the limited nesting provided by issues and sub-tasks, you may need to get an add-on such as Confluence:

Atlassian’s companion product (Confluence) is a customizable Wiki that can be used to write freeform requirement documentation that links to Jira issues. This again highlights the different approaches between Inflectra and Atlassian. What makes sense for a customer will depend on whether they want to customize and build their platform from the start, or a turnkey solution that allows configuration when needed.

2. Turnkey Solution that Works Out of the Box

One of the driving philosophies at Inflectra has been to provide a seamless, turnkey solution that doesn’t require a multitude of add-ons or third-party products for customers to manage their software projects. This means that SpiraTeam is more “opinionated,” designed for software and systems engineering organizations as well as larger project management needs, rather than just general team management.

When you first sign up for a trial of SpiraTeam, you will have all the core modules (requirements, test cases, tasks, source code, defects, and releases/iterations) ready to go. All you need to do is create your first project, add some users, and away you go:

By contrast, Atlassian’s approach is to provide the core Jira platform that can be used by organizations of all types (marketing, sales, development) and let other companies provide the more specific functionality needed for different organizations and industries (like software development).

When you sign up for Jira, you will need to choose which product you need (Jira Software, Jira Core, Jira Service Desk) and choose the necessary add-on types (e.g. requirements, testing, issue hierarchies, program tracking), then the specific add-ons to buy in each category. You’ll then have to spend time configuring the different plugins to work together, and set up all the various workflows, schemes, issue types, and fields in Jira:

Once again, there are pros and cons to both approaches. With Jira, you have the flexibility to create your desired business rules, process flows, and customizations without any constraints. SpiraTeam has a more turnkey experience for software development projects, and one where you don’t have to (but can) customize fields, workflows. and settings. According to users familiar with both, setting up SpiraTeam is at least six times faster than Jira.

We’ve spent considerable time choosing sensible defaults for SpiraTeam that include best practices from leading industry research, as well as from working with our customers in a wide range of sectors. Because of this, SpiraTeam has good software development practices baked in.

3. Best Practices for ALM Baked In

Any tool is only going to be as productive and effective as the people who configure and use it. If you set up a project management tool poorly, it will impair productivity and reduce usability. We’ve all heard horror stories of the 200-page issue tracking workflow manual.

In fact, we heard from a real customer (name withheld to avoid embarrassment) that they had created a Jira workflow with approximately 80 types and 500 statuses with multiple transitions between each, plus a lot of Boolean logic along the way. Image the headaches!

One of the advantages of SpiraTeam’s more “opinionated” design is that it includes industry best practices for application lifecycle management configured by default to reduce the likelihood of project failure:

• Software Testing and QA are Not Optional: SpiraTeam intentionally makes it difficult to avoid the important activity of testing. The system promotes use of test cases, exploratory testing, manual testing, and automated testing. We believe that software cannot be released unless it’s truly tested, so SpiraTeam promotes and enforces that approach.

• Projects should be Requirement-Driven: Unlike Jira, which is largely issue-driven in design, SpiraTeam has requirements as its core. It has the ability to group, nest, and version them, as well as dashboards and graphs that prompt you to take requirements traceability and coverage seriously.

• Artifacts Are Unique and Have Specific Interactions: In Jira, most artifacts (requirements, releases, test cases, tasks, incidents, etc.) are stored as different types of issues, with the attributes and connections set up by the project administrator. While Jira gives you the flexibility to configure any way you want, SpiraTeam has the artifacts and associations setup based on the experiences and expertise of our partners, our customers, and our team of industry experts.

In addition, we believe that projects are not solitary “islands,” so by eliminating extra add-ons or extensions, all users of SpiraTeam can easily manage any project or program.

4. Built-In Support for Portfolios, Programs, and Projects

As mentioned above, part of our platform philosophy is that we believe that projects rarely live in isolation. Organizations need to be able to see the progress across their different projects and be able to have visibility into the key risks and issues that each project is facing:

Projects in SpiraTeam are organized into Programs by default (we even create a Default program for you). This lets you report on all of the projects for a specific organization, customer, or division. You can see the aggregate status of the group as a whole and, in addition, compare the relative health of the different projects in the group.

For those customers who need to manage an entire enterprise, Inflectra offers SpiraPlan. This extends the functionality of SpiraTeam to include portfolio management, with the ability to organize programs into portfolios and have a top-down enterprise view of all the work going on in an organization.

SpiraPlan lets you see executive dashboards of key portfolio and program indicators:

In addition, SpiraPlan comes with a special version of agile planning boards that work at the program and portfolio level, out of the box:

For the Atlassian approach, Jira does not come with a program management module out-of-the-box. However, you can purchase Jira Portfolio as an add-on that provides a cross-project program management capability:

5. Works with All Methodologies

We have customers working in many different industries, using a variety of methodologies (Agile, Scaled Agile, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Waterfall, Hybrid) on different projects. SpiraTeam was designed so it doesn’t impose a specific methodology on you — instead, it lets you work your way. For customers using an Agile methodology such as XP, Scrum, or Kanban, it puts project task boards right at your fingertips:

For more traditional projects, using Waterfall, V-Model, RAD, or a hybrid approach, SpiraTeam has full support for these frameworks’ project requirements and project phases:

Jira, on the other hand, is primarily designed for pure Agile projects, where its project management module provides lots of different project tracking views tailored to Agile which you can configure:

If you want to use Jira for projects that use a combination of methodologies or require a more structured requirements approach, you’ll need to use a third-party tool (such as Jama) or an add-on from the Atlassian marketplace:

For those who are happy to plan solely with user stories, Jira is probably sufficient for your needs. If you need more options for capturing and managing requirements, SpiraTeam is likely a better fit.

6. Powerful Reporting, Including Traceability Analysis

One of the most important features in an ALM system is the ability to generate the documents and reports that you need to run your business operations. Many projects have shared reporting needs, but different organizations and projects will often have a variety of bespoke reporting needs.

SpiraTeam provides a robust set of standard reports, graphs, and charts that are available out of the box, with zero configuration or customization:

These reports include important documents such as requirements traceability reports, which are needed to prove that you truly tested all of your requirements.

SpiraTeam also integrates with tools like Microsoft Project to output your project plans and milestones in Microsoft Project format documents:

Recognizing that you will also need an ALM tool to generate your company’s metrics and reports in the format that your users already expect, SpiraTeam includes a custom report writer:

In addition, SpiraTeam includes a custom graphing engine so that you can generate compelling charts using the rich power of the ESQL query language built into SpiraTeam:

Jira offers standard reporting functionality; however, as a result of the Atlassian add-ons approach, the thoroughness and versatility of exporting reports from third-party plugins (e.g. time tracking) can often be limited.

If you want more advanced reports than those available in Jira, you have to either purchase the reporting add-ons from the Atlassian marketplace or develop them in-house using software development resources. In both cases, reporting across the different add-ons is non-trivial.

7. Integrated Resource Management & Time Tracking

Managing and tracking your personnel is an important part of a project. When you have to bill a client for the work performed, features such as effort variance tracking and time tracking are a must. SpiraTeam provides out of the box functionality for managing and planning people on a project:

For time tracking, you can enable built-in time-tracking for a project and use this data straight away in reporting. Users can enter the time worked for their assigned tasks and issues:

Jira includes basic effort tracking as part of the core solution, with the option to purchase an add-on for more powerful resource and time tracking functionality:

8. Integrated Document and Deliverable Management

During a project, there is often a need to share documents with members of the team and have them linked between multiple requirements, issues, tasks, and other artifacts. On top of this, key milestones will prompt teams to post and version their final deliverables that will be delivered to the end user/customer. SpiraTeam includes an integrated document and deliverable management system:

The SpiraTeam document management repository supports versioning of documents, tagging, and linking documents to different project artifacts and work items:

SpiraTeam can be used to formally manage document deliverables using a combination of its task and document management functions.

By contrast, Jira doesn’t have an integrated document management feature. However, if you’re already using Confluence from Atlassian, you can customize it to provide a limited document management solution. Alternatively, (in keeping with the Atlassian philosophy) you can add a third-party component to provide document management capabilities:

9. Support for Regulated Processes and Electronic Signatures

SpiraTeam is used by hundreds of companies that have demanding business process needs, with complex workflows, regulatory oversight and need audit trails and electronic signatures. SpiraTeam includes support for regulated processes and workflows out of the box, with a built-in option to enable electronic signatures on a per-transition basis:

Jira has out-of-the-box support for issue workflows, but support for audit trails and electronic signatures requires yet another third-party add-on.

10. Licensing that is Sensible and “Fair”

There are two main licensing modules in use in the software industry — named user licensing and concurrent user licensing. Jira uses a named user licensing approach. The advantage of this approach is that it’s simple to understand: Every user who needs to login to the system will need their own license. However, there is a wrinkle — every add-on or app you add to Jira requires that every Jira user be licensed for each plugin.

That means if you need to add another plugin that only a few users will need (document management, testing, program management), you will need to license all of your users, regardless of how often they use the system. Similarly, if you add more core Jira licenses, you need to add more licenses for every add-on that you use.

In addition, named user licensing means that you will need a license for every occasional user, even if they only login periodically to run a report, or view the status of a project. You will quickly start needing more and more licenses, likely far beyond what you originally planned for.

By contrast, SpiraTeam uses a concurrent licensing approach, with all editions of SpiraTeam supporting unlimited named users and unlimited projects.

The concurrent user approach means that you will typically need a fraction of the number of licenses that user licensing requires. In addition to the simple difference in number of licenses, the concurrent licensing model offers you more flexibility:

• If you change the staffing of a project, nothing needs to be done to purchase extra licenses.

• You don’t need to purchase additional licenses if the size of the team remains the same, but the names change.

• If you have teams working globally in different time zones, you can use the same concurrent licenses in different time zones (for example, Team 2 can use the same licenses as Team 1 if they don’t work at the same time).

• Executives and other occasional users generally won’t impact your licensing costs.

The Inflectra Difference

We believe that quality software should be affordable for organizations of all sizes, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise. We also believe that it should be easy and transparent to find out what the pricing is.

One of the challenges when pricing out the Atlassian option is that, at first, it seems to be a very affordable option. Suddenly, it becomes very complicated and expensive when you start calculating all the necessary add-ons and extensions to get a complete solution.

To compare the two options, we took a sample project that needs the following features:

• Project Management

• Issue Management

• Test Case Management

• Resource Management & Time Tracking

• Requirements Management

• Program Management

• Software Configuration Management (source code management)

• Instant Messaging

We took this scenario and priced out what it would cost for:

• 25 named users (Jira, because each user needs their own account and license)

• 10 concurrent users (SpiraTeam, because these can be shared among more than 10 people)

In other words, switching to SpiraTeam cuts your software costs by over $200 every month and drastically simplifies your workflows. Plus, you won’t need to pay a Jira consultant to install, configure, and maintain your library of add-ons and extensions.

Interested in Giving SpiraTeam a Try?

We hope this comparison guide was useful for you! To sign up for your free 30-day trial of SpiraTeam (no credit card required), just click here.

DISCLAIMER: All information regarding the compared products have been made on the basis of information available on the product websites, from former customers and analysis of trial installations of the product. The analysis and views expressed in this section and the information made available are purely those of Inflectra Corporation. It is possible that the compared products have additional features not mentioned in this whitepaper.