Why do most users prefer JQL filters to Jira Plans ?

[Andrei Eleodor Sirbu]

Hi, 

I've been noticing in my current and previous work experiences how people prefer using JQL filters instead of Jira Plans. 

And in all honesty we've put effort in our Jira instance to create custom plans for each team with different views so all they have to do is hop in, click the right view and have a good insight on their backlog. We've been doing tutorials, video tutorials, team calls to show how it works and whatnot. 

And yet, the number of users for Plans (at least in my experiences) is not as high as it should be. People still prefer to create a filter for each use case even if it makes them create 125 filters so they can later use them in Jira dashboards or making a side dashboard in an excel file which lists all their filters by category and use case... 

And as an admin, I only require for them to leave the filters public or shared with site-admins. I don't want to ban the usage of filters, I can understand their need but I cannot understand where did Plans fail into making more people adopt Plans and leave JQL aside. 

I'm curious to know your practices with filters and how you managed to reduce clutter in this specific area. 

Kind regards

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

Hi @Andrei Eleodor Sirbu,

I am Marlene from the team working on the Atlassian Marketplace app Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards.

One thing we've seen is that users often don't actually want lots of saved filters—they just want different views of the same data. Since native Jira dashboards rely on saved filters, this can quickly lead to filter clutter.

If you use our app, all Quick Gadgets can be configured with JQL directly, so no saved filters are required. Combined with our Quick Controller gadget, users can dynamically switch between different filter values on a single dashboard instead of maintaining lots of saved filters and dashboards.

It doesn't replace Jira Plans, but it can help reduce the amount of filter and dashboard clutter on your instance.

[John Funk]

Hi Andrei,

I think it is just a preference on the part of individuals. Some prefer boards over both the filter or the plans. They are all just views of the same information, so I let people use what they want to use. It's not really clutter to me and they get the view they want.