JIRA vs. Rally

[Chris K.]

We've been using JIRA as a bug database for a few years. Our team is rapidly expanding and we're trying to adopt some of the agile workflows and project planning. A few team members have used Rally in past companies and say it's a great utility...much better than JIRA Agile. In some basic evaluation, it seems that one of the biggest differences is Rally allows you to nest stories as deep as you want (and report on each level) while JIRA only really allows for 2 levels of nesting: epics and stories.

Surprisingly in googling the two, there aren't that many comparisons – which is odd considering these two tools seems to make up the majority of agile project tracking/management. I'm curious if anyone there has experience with both and what their thoughts are on the differences. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Most of my experience with Rally is based on people saying "it's a great tool" and then coming to us later to say "but it doesn't work the way we need, how do we import it all into JIRA".  The general feeling I get is that it is very good as an Agile tool (better than JIRA Software), as long as you are going to do Agile the Rally way and not try to use it for anything else. 

It also tends not to scale for larger teams from what I can tell, and I've seen a number of projects make too much use of many levels of nesting and go horribly wrong because the layers make it too complex (that last one is not a criticism of Rally, which does handle it better than most, but a criticism of having too many levels in general.  JIRA Software could use one more layer in my opinion, which you can get from some add-ons, but any more nesting is simply a sign of a broken project, and certainly one that is not Agile in any way)

[Chris K.]

Thanks for the answer, Nic. I tend to agree that Rally seems to allow for "too much nesting" to the point where projects can get too confusing. The counter argument from one of my co-workers who has used it is that Rally allows you to see the status of a project at "any" level and the finer-grained stories allow for more accurate estimating. Sounds like it truly is two different schools of thought.