Planning and Forecasting in Jira: Part 3

[#1]

Confluence Benefits

Unstructured data
In Confluence, the data is stored in a less structured way. This makes it more flexible; users can order and format information any way they want.

Flexible
The price of flexibility however, is less robust reporting and charting capabilities.

Document management
One thing Confluence does better than Jira is document management and versioning. Confluence also has lots of great macros and collaboration features. You can see content changes in real-time as team members make them.

Confluence Query Language (CQL)
Confluence has robust search capabilities too, but instead of querying specific fields in Jira, you’re mostly querying for keywords, in the page body, using CQL.

And more
Confluence doesn’t natively include workflow capabilities, but you can add them with an app from the Atlassian Marketplace.

Roadmap Planner

The screenshot shows a low-tech roadmap similar to the previous example from Jira. The big difference is that this information in Confluence is static. It’s not tied to Jira issue data or automatically updated. If project dates change, for example, the Confluence macro must be updated manually.

Trello Benefits

Finally, there’s Trello, a lightweight and highly visual planning tool. There’s a simple user interface and the learning curve is low in this application.

All the data is displayed as cards on a board, which is visually similar to Jira’s board functionality. Like in Jira, you can assign, label, and categorize the cards. There’s even some automation capabilities and apps to extend functionality.

Trello doesn’t include Jira’s robust reporting, charting, or workflow capabilities, however. Sometimes I think of Trello as “Jira lite”.

Part 4: Jira Planning Features

[Yatish Madhav]

Love and agree on the "Jira lite" wording :D We have moved from Trello on to Jira for task management and believe that we have taken many steps forward and have leaps yet to do to sharpen our team task management.