Is there any reason to use a business project over a software project anymore? Why?

[Joerg]

Hey.

Just wanted to confirm this with other knowledgeable people:

There seems to be little reason to use business/work management projects anymore. With the new navigation Software projects now offer all the same views and toggleable features, with more flexibility and the same licensing.

Using business projects seems like a trap at this point as you lock yourself out of features like having multiple boards etc.

I think Business projects should just be templates, not a separate project type. Actually I would imagine Atlassian is working towards this.

Do you agree or am I overlooking something?

Edit: I found something that Business Projects have that Software don't: The category system field, but I don't know why it is limited to only those? Seems like something that could be useful for Software projects as well, but you can't. It seems to behave like the Component field which is available in both project types.

[Liam - DevSamurai]

Hi @Joerg

You’re right that there’s not much reason to choose a Business project over a Software project now (but for some specific reason, like marketing or sales, people still choose it over a software project).

Software projects have caught up to include almost all the same views and features, plus more flexibility like supporting multiple boards.

The only thing Business projects still have is the Category field, which is useful for organizing but quite niche and missing from Software projects. Other than that, Business projects feel limiting, and Atlassian seems to be moving toward making them just templates rather than separate project types.

So, if you want flexibility and features, Software projects are generally the better choice.

[Nikola Perisic]

Hello @Joerg 

Business projects are being used by people who do not want to follow the Agile methodology, rather software ones that either use kanban or scrum. They almost look like team-managed software projects, but they are not. I see finance, legal and sales teams using these types of projects.Other than that, I don't see the other use case.

[Joerg]

With the new navigation I don't see a visual difference at all. 

We have had teams that wanted to try working in sprints or wanted to use multiple boards or have more configuration options for swimlanes for their board all of which wasn't possible and we had to migrate to a software project, which seems completely unnecessary when under the hood they are the same (and now pretty much the same even above it).

A modular approach would be much better like with the feature toggles in a software project and using them to reduce a software project to a business project with the option to revert to a software project.

They should merge the project types (now called spaces) and make a business project template just a set of pre-configured options that you could recreate yourself manually as well. I could understand the separation maybe a little bit if they separated the licenses but they use the same one afaik. If they wanted to gate features behind a more expensive license, just grey out those feature toggles imo.