I have to say that i really dislike JIRA. It's overblown in features and the UX is a total disaster. I am currently in the process of recommending to my Boss to switch to GitHub Enterprise, because it feels streamlined, light and focused.<p>Now i wonder why these 5 points are mentioned on the Atlassian page. Are these known issues/weak points of Github? Or is this just marketing blah-blah?
IMO jira is quite clunky actually. It's interesting to contrast Atlassian's new product (Stash) with its excellent UI to the older products (confluence/jira) which feel slow, awkward, and clunky in comparison.<p>Youtrack destroys Jira btw. Way lower friction to use, much more intuitive.
My first experience with JIRA/Confluence was in 2007, I couldn't remotely get them to install on a Linux box.<p>After giving them eye daggers for 6 years I tried again in 2013 and I've decided the whole Atlassian offering is one of the most under-marketed tool suites out there for software startups.<p>Under 10 users you get JIRA and Confluence self-hosted for $10 a year or cloud hosted for $10 a month each. Up to 5 users on BitBucket is free (3 invites increases that to 8).<p>OK, their prices revert at 11 users, but you'd hope your startup has some growth by that point.<p>My only downside is there are some features that should be core features that are left to pay-for plugins to implement.
Atlassian also has BitBucket, which compares pretty nicely with GitHub in terms of ease of use and features, price.<p>GitHub's issue tracker is also a bare bones, minimal feature. They could really make it a lot better. There's no way to assign a group of people to a ticket. There's no way to get any kind of input confirmation for pull requests. Issue organization options are pretty poor. More states than just "Open" and "Closed" would be nice. There are labels which are basically tags so that's nice, and embedding content into issue comments is really nice too.<p>My favorite issue tracker though is unfuddle. Unfuddle has a really great API.
I really wanted to like JIRA, but agree with other people here that it feels very clunky. Figuring out a workflow for a issue and state was incredibly unintuitive.<p>It was the price and company behind the product that attracted me, but in the end we've mostly resorted to just using Trello.
This isn't really a "vs", but if anyone needs to move issue data from GitHub Issues to JIRA, read on. I needed to do this a couple of years ago, and found there were numerous tools which tried to do it, but failed in various (sometimes awful) ways. I finally made my own solution. It is written in Clojure, but should be runnable by anyone with a general familiarity with command line tools and programming. Free, open source.<p><a href="http://kylecordes.com/2012/github-issues-export-jira" rel="nofollow">http://kylecordes.com/2012/github-issues-export-jira</a>
From my personal experience, JIRA is like the Swiss Army Knife. It does everything, but you only need the wine cork or screw driver. I've also never ever in my life seen it configured correctly which has led me to have poor experiences every time. It seems more like a tool for very large organizations who can have people dedicated to proper installation and configuration rather than tool for smaller companies. A better comparison would be BitBucket vs GitHub.
Having done many ALM integrations in the last year, Atlassian has been the most pleasant to work with in the enterprise space. They are young and modern compared to the other dinosaurs. Github poses a very different kind of challenge to Atlassian with their better developer mindshare. Really interesting battle on the cards.