Hi, I'm exploring options for building a management dashboard and would appreciate your insights on platform suitability—specifically between Jira and Power BI. The dashboard would need to cover: * Manpower productivity: Billable vs non-billable time utilization * Project overview: Internal/external classification, section, status * Project productivity: Profit & loss, progress tracking, risk visibility In our current setup: * We use custom columns to track time spent per epic * Project status and risks are stored within Atlassian tools (primarily Jira) Given this context, would Jira alone be sufficient for building such a dashboard, or would integrating with Power BI offer better flexibility and visualization? I'm particularly interested in how each platform handles cross-project reporting and financial metrics. Thanks in advance!

Hi @Rachel welcome to the Atlassian Community Forums! A Dashboard shows the as-is, actual, real-time situation and has no BI capabilities Power BI gives your historical BI capabilities. If you already have Power BI within your organization, I would suggest to either: * integrate Jira with Power BI * install a connector from the Marketplace * use a custom solution with middleware for your data In the end, Power BI will give you more capabilities to drill down, filter, group, create reports and dashboards than Jira out-of-the-box.

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Recommendations for Management Dashboard: Jira vs Power BI

Rachel

Hi,

I'm exploring options for building a management dashboard and would appreciate your insights on platform suitability—specifically between Jira and Power BI.

The dashboard would need to cover:

Manpower productivity: Billable vs non-billable time utilization
Project overview: Internal/external classification, section, status
Project productivity: Profit & loss, progress tracking, risk visibility

In our current setup:

We use custom columns to track time spent per epic
Project status and risks are stored within Atlassian tools (primarily Jira)

Given this context, would Jira alone be sufficient for building such a dashboard, or would integrating with Power BI offer better flexibility and visualization? I'm particularly interested in how each platform handles cross-project reporting and financial metrics.

Thanks in advance!

Accepted answers

Dave Mathijs

Hi @Rachel welcome to the Atlassian Community Forums!

A Dashboard shows the as-is, actual, real-time situation and has no BI capabilities

Power BI gives your historical BI capabilities.

If you already have Power BI within your organization, I would suggest to either:

integrate Jira with Power BI
install a connector from the Marketplace
use a custom solution with middleware for your data

In the end, Power BI will give you more capabilities to drill down, filter, group, create reports and dashboards than Jira out-of-the-box.

Danut M _StonikByte_

Hi @Rachel,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

A Jira dashboard has the advantage of being easy to create and set-up, no data export outside of Jira is necessary, and the data displayed is in real-time.

Jira does not offer so many dashboard gadgets for such type of stats, but you can add additional gadgets by searching and installing for apps (plugins) on Atlassian Marketplace.

In case you consider the idea of using a Jira app, our Great Gadgets app offers many gadgets that you can use for building a Management Dashboard. Very useful for you can be the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget that allows you to created pivot tables, heat-maps and pivot charts (just like in Excel). Here are some examples:

With the Advanced Issue Filter Formula gadget offered by the same app you can calculate and display counts, sums (of a field), averages, etc or to combine them in complex match formulas to display ratios, percentages, etc

If you have any questions or need help with our gadgets, feel free to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut

All comments

Dave Mathijs

Hi @Rachel welcome to the Atlassian Community Forums!

A Dashboard shows the as-is, actual, real-time situation and has no BI capabilities

Power BI gives your historical BI capabilities.

If you already have Power BI within your organization, I would suggest to either:

integrate Jira with Power BI
install a connector from the Marketplace
use a custom solution with middleware for your data

In the end, Power BI will give you more capabilities to drill down, filter, group, create reports and dashboards than Jira out-of-the-box.

Danut M _StonikByte_

Hi @Rachel,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

A Jira dashboard has the advantage of being easy to create and set-up, no data export outside of Jira is necessary, and the data displayed is in real-time.

Jira does not offer so many dashboard gadgets for such type of stats, but you can add additional gadgets by searching and installing for apps (plugins) on Atlassian Marketplace.

If you have any questions or need help with our gadgets, feel free to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut

Rachel

Dear Donut,

My team will look into it. Thank you for your reply.

Regards,

Rachel

Dear Dave,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, my organization already have Power BI, will look into it.

Regards,

Rachel

quentin.leroy

Hello @Rachel

Hope you had a good weekend! Quentin from Appfire here

To link Jira with Power BI, they are various options. One of the simplest one is to use a connector, which will create a secure link between Jira and Power BI within minutes. As one of the main vendor on the Atlassian marketplace, we offer a solution to do just that: the Power BI Connector.

If you'd like more information or schedule a demo, here is a link to my calendar.

Have an excellent week ahead!

Laura Marin - Millarum

@Rachel I'm a bit late to comment here, but still wanted to give it a chance. We provide Power Bi consulting services to small companies and we identified a similar case where Power Bi might be an overkill if our customers are already using a powerful tool that allows for visualization. Of you're up for a 3rd party solution that works within Jira, we created Millarum Dashboards that brings the concept of a "Slicer widget" that reconfigures the rest of the charts. It's a lightweight solution only for visualization purposes as it doesn't add any functionality, because of the same it might be a better solution for your specific use case instead of another solution that could come with features your organization might not need.

It's free to try on Jira instances of 10 people or less

Rachel

Thanks for your reply.

Mohammed Shakhib

This topic has been locked because the thread has become a bit dated. If you’d like to keep the conversation going or have any more questions, feel free to start a new topic. You can read more about necro posting (“raising threads from the dead”) in our Community Guidelines .

Cheers!

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