When it comes to maximising the effectiveness of teamwork, businesses need to select the right collaboration software. Both Jira and Jira Service Management (JSM) are powerful tools that offer numerous benefits to organisations looking to streamline their service delivery and communications. However, sometimes, there is a slight overlap between the functions of the tools that isn’t always obvious. This makes it difficult for non-experts to decide which is best for their unique needs.
In this blog post, we’ll highlight the main capabilities, use cases, and differences between Jira and Jira Service Management to help you understand which fits your team best.
Explained: Jira and Jira Service Management
What is Jira?
Jira enables teams such as software development, project, and marketing teams to monitor projects and track bugs and issues together. It includes various features for conducting scrum and agile project management. With its Roadmap and Plans feature, teams can efficiently visualise workflows and track complex projects in real-time.
With its integration capabilities across teams, Jira has extended the platform's functionality, allowing its users to plan and organise tasks using Kanban boards. It also aligns goals across teams and provides a birds-eye view of your team's performance across projects using Plans.
Jira is licensed based on total users; every user who interacts directly with Jira in any way will need a licence.
What is Jira Service Management?
Jira Service Management (formerly known as Jira Service Desk) is service desk software built for teams who receive incoming issues and requests from other teams or internal/ external customers.
The tool offers an intuitive self-service customer portal that allows users to create requests and check their status. With several features—such as workflow automation, customisable SLAs, dynamic forms, rules-driven alerts and notifications, and dynamic work queues—Jira Service Management can easily support the varied needs of any service-driven organisation.
Jira Service Management is licensed based only on your support team; customers who only raise requests, view their own or their organisations, browse knowledge base articles do not require a license.
Key differences between Jira and Jira Service Management
Here is a table that summarises the key differences between the two products:
Can you use both Jira and JSM?
Absolutely, but whether it's necessary to have both really depends on your specific business needs.
In some cases, using both tools can optimise different aspects of your business. For instance, you could handle your projects in Jira using boards and plans. Once they are released to the customer, you can offer them a portal from Jira Service Management to submit issues or new requests.
Also, since both products are built on a common platform, you can seamlessly integrate them for effective collaboration between your development, operations, support, and IT teams. Service teams can address customer problems and requests by linking Jira Service Management tickets to issues in Jira, if or when an issue needs developer attention. Development teams can also jump in to view and comment on issues in your service desk.
Summing up
Reading this blog, you should understand how Jira differs from Jira Service Management. While both tools provide robust project management solutions, the correct answer for you will always depend on the unique needs of your team and the goals they want to accomplish.
If you need support choosing the best software solution, contact our expert team.
