Before we dig down on to consider migration from Jira to Redmine, let’s start with the basics, for business positions, who might be new to this.
We’ll briefly introduce you to Jira, it’s the most popular alternative — Redmine, and then touch the base on the most common reasons, why businesses decided to move from Jira to Redmine.
What is Jira?
JIRA is one of the most popular project management tools for software development teams developed by Attlasian Inc. It boasts over 30 million customers worldwide. It’s designed to support Agile teams to plan, build, track progress, log issues, and release software early and often.
However, Jira is build to create a powerful collaboration environment, it’s sometimes confusing to use its full set of functions. Not to mention the businesses who keep strengthening their IT and development departments, often struggle with JIRA’s plans, which can cost $7,000/ year for a team of just 50 users.
Its name comes from “Gojira”, the Japanese name for Godzilla, which somehow reflects the nature of this issue tracker. No wonder why non-software development teams after initial phase start searching for the Jira alternative.
Apart from JIRA’s core features, it’s supported by add-ons developed by the community and third-party developers. In the Atlassian Marketplace, there are hundreds of available plugins that extend the JIRA possibilities. In addition to that, the JIRA API allows developers to integrate third-party applications into the system.
When it’s time to find Jira alternative?
- Your monthly budget is continually increasing,
- You don’t use most of the features,
- Your team face too many problems with receiving support,
- The account’s performance is decreasing,
- You need to pay extra fees for each added integration.
What is Redmine?
You probably heard something about Redmine already. It is one of the most popular flexible open-source project management systems. It is a software written in the Ruby on Rails framework, making it cross-platform and cross-database. Redmine is distributed under the GPL license and is one of the most popular software among software development teams.
A cloud-based Jira alternative
Before you consider Redmine as an open-sourced Jira alternative, let’s talk about how it’s hosted. Similarly to Jira, you can install Redmine on your server, or go with the cloud-based version.
The problem of every self-hosted and every open-source software is the support and maintenance. Who’s going to solve problems with updates, fix the bugs? Who will monitor the system and scale its performance?
That’s why in search of Jira alternative, it only makes sense to compare cloud-based Jira with the same cloud-based Redmine solution, such as RedmineUP Cloud.
There are four critical differences between choosing to host Redmine on-premise vs reaching for a cloud hosting.
The first one is that the cloud solution is ready to use immediately. You only spent time on simple configuration, not from the ground-up. The second one is the SLA and extended security guaranteed by the professional service providers.
The third one is access to a dedicated customer success manager, who works like a mentor, coach and your wing-man. No more posting on forums, and google’ ing for an answer. And finally, the complete set of professional commercial plugins included in the cloud-based platform.
Now, let’s move to the list of crucial reasons to move from Jira Software to RedmineUP Cloud.
What are the reasons to migrate from Jira to Redmine?
Reason 1. To choose a cost-effective solution
Nowadays, amid the fight with COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world switched to remote work. Due to that, there’s a surge in demand for online team collaboration tools like JIRA, Asana, Redmine, Zoom, Microsft Teams and others.
Most of the tools are free to use for a small team (usually up to 5-10 users), but then the pricing list kicks in.
When leaders must navigate through an uncertain market situation, there’s nothing better than steady cash flow. If your business can have the same functionality and quality can in a cheaper product, why to overpay?
That’s why the number one reason is to search for a cost-effective alternative to Jira and other team collaboration software.
Open Sourced Jira alternative doesn’t mean completely free
If you want to move from Jira to Redmine, because it’s free to use, please take a look at a bigger picture. In a bigger picture, you need to think about the Total Costs of Ownership.
Simply put — If your business leaders choose to deploy Redmine on your server, you’d need to consider costs of hardware (infrastructure, bare iron, internet, electricity, etc.) and labour needed to install and configure the system from the ground up.
Longer down the line, costs of maintaining the self-hosted system exceeds benefits of this choice.
If your business can have an all-in-one management platform for the costs of 1h of the DevOps/admin work, what sense does it make to go through all Redmine installation and maintenance by themselves? None. It’s a no-brainer.
That’s why most of the newly migrated clients are software development teams.
We asked recent RedmineUP Cloud clients, who do a migration from self-hosted Redmine to the cloud-based system, and the range of costs saving they achieved with this move. On average, they saved between $600 — $1000 per month. And the main benefit they mentioned is that Cloud alternative gives more transparency to plan the expenditures for the future.
The same applies to Jira. Yet, when people look at the initial costs of this project management tool, they tend to select paid cloud version. But when it comes to charges at the invoice, they are much higher. And then the thought of move from Jira to Redmine strikes back.
Reason 2. Overwhelming Jira functionality
One of the many voices from Jira reviews on Capterra:
I think the product is over-featured for our purposes which can get in the way of its core functionality. We are a small team and use it very simply, and it’s not the most intuitive or straightforward UX for that. I have used other tools that I think are a better fit.
Jira is designed to be used by Enterprise teams, along with other Atlassian products like Confluence. For corporates, if the complete environment is set up correctly, it provides a lot of insight, helping in getting an update on the current development pace, eliminating emails and simplifying some administrative work.
Yet, often Jira is used in small and medium-sized teams, which doesn’t have big budgets nor experience to do correctly. Neither they have the structure or need to use all of its possibilities. In practice, the complexity of the environment often becomes a roadblock.
On the other hand, open-source Jira alternative — Redmine is also “all in one tool” for a small and medium business. Yet, it’s much simpler to configure and use out of the box. Even non-experienced teams can log issues and track the progress of the projects with the basic features.
Opposite to Jira, professional Redmine hosting providers offers help in the configuration of the tool. The leading ones, such as RedmineUP or Plan.io, do free of charge.
Reason 3. Lock-in by Jira
What is a vendor lock-in? Following Wikipedia: “Also referred to as customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.”
When the third-party tool becomes integrated into the business processes, the company becomes dependent on it to function. The longer it lasts, and the more the workflow relies on the system, the harder it gets to migrate to the other software.
The deeper into the single ecosystem your business is the less flexibility it has in terms of the decision.
What are the risks of customer lock-in with Jira?
- The quality of services or performance of the software can decline, and you won’t be able to do anything about it,
- The vendor can change one of the crucial functionality sharply, in the way it interrupts your processes, or doesn’t meet your needs,
- Atlassian followed by add-ons developers can increase their pricing, which would immediately impact your business financial stability.
That’s why many businesses want to avoid such a technical monopoly and decide for migration from Jira to Redmine.
Redmine is an open-sourced platform, which means the code is open. You always will be able to adapt the tool to your need. It’s vendor-agnostic. Even if the new update brings a change in functionality, you can stay with the old one, or update and patch the code.
And last but not least, the costs of managing the Redmine maintenance are lower than Jira’s. Especially, if you consider Redmine hosted in the cloud by a professional vendor, the prices are even 5x smaller. So why to stick to Atlassian product, if you can switch to the solution alternative to Jira?
Reason 4. Poor customer support and lack of a dedicated account manager.
The support is pretty ignorant of their user-base on several issues and refuse to add new features that would benefit hundreds, if not thousands. It can be very tricky to migrate, update, or set up. Plugins can cost money and it can add up, though I haven’t spent too much at all for the value I received.
The fourth reason for moving from Jira to Redmine is close to everyone who has ever worked with Enterprise software products. You know how long it can take to fix small changes or make changes if something’s not working correctly. From Jira through Adobe and Oracle, up to Salesforce.
They all have a common point — overloaded customer support. Even if you’re lucky to have an account manager to contact, they can have up to 50–100 clients underneath their wings. This transfer to prolonged reply and a long time to get things fixed.
To avoid the escalation, smart business leaders start to search for an alternative to Jira as soon as they notice the roadblocks.
For medium-sized teams, cloud-based Redmine offers much friendlier and responsive support. The speed of improvements is higher, and it’s easier to get third-party plugins or services integrated. And for a better price than with Jira.
For example, in RedmineUP, each account received the assistance of a personal account manager. Such Customer Success Manager manages only a few clients, to guarantee a quick response and faster deployment of changes.
With both business and technical support supervised by one person, business is more secured.
Reason 5. Performance and speed of use.
Up till 2017 a decision to move from Jira to Redmine was easier, as both systems have equally unfriendly interfaces. Yet, the Atlassian platform has since changed its greatly improved its inference. Of course, Redmine hasn’t called behind (too much). Ther are many free skins designed to make the work as comfortable as with Jira.
But it’s not the interface that slows down the work of the team as much as the decreasing performance of their Jira account. As one user mentioned in the review:
It is cloud-based so you have to make sure you have enough bandwidth provisions to support this (rather challenging for bigger teams working on the same location at the same time). The usual loading times may take longer with poor connectivity. A rather steep price for small businesses to use. Self-hosting JIRA will also make things more expensive (and risky) as the number of users grow.
That’s not the problem of Jira, but instead of all SaaS applications. That’s why in RedmineUP we’ve taken another approach to the system architecture. Our Cloud hosting uses a hybrid tenant infrastructure, which keeps the level of performance and security despite an increasing number of users and open connection to the database.
If you compare the Jira and its open-sourced alternative — Redmine, and you’ll see the difference shortly. For your reference, we compared the service times in the comparison of the best Redmine hosting providers.
Reason 6. Too high Total Costs of Ownership
Don’t take our words for it. Among 8000 reviews all was already said by the existing users in G2 and Capterra reviews.
People are mentioning incremental pricing, which is a blockade and slowdown for developing teams.
Jira’s pricing represents a slippery slope — you can get started relatively inexpensively, but adding on options here and there rapidly adds up, and can make alternatives more price-effective.
Costs that seems hard to predict at first, but comes the deeper you get involved with the Atlassian product.
They have taken out small pieces of functionality and made them separate products. These products are now paid and for those small pieces of functionality, you have to make extra purchases. e.g. Pages.
And a complimentary word on the Jira’s ecosystem:
Although the product is very mature, feels also like a big giant monolith although its plugin architecture. Also, plugins are too much expensive for just simple features. There should be much control from the Atlassian Marketplace, which should follow more an App Store logic like Apple’s or Google’s one.
Enterprises can accept changes in the pricing, especially that often they’re in the vendor lock-in situation. Hundreds of registered users, thousands projects and tasks, all tied up, even if Atlassian raise the prices by 30% they would have to accept it.
But such continuously incremental price is a killer for growing small and medium teams, especially when there are fewer projects on the boards.
Let’s briefly compare prices for most common user-tiers between Jira and RedmineUP. For 20 users it’s $140/month vs $69/month. Yet, the bigger your teams get, the costlier Jira becomes. For 50 users it’ already a $350/month vs just a $169/month. For 100 users it’s a ridiculous $700/month for Jira. At the same time, RedmineUP still costs less than half of this sum.
Time to move from Jira to Redmine — Conclusion
Jira is certainly a power-packed project management tool. It really seems like a perfect project management solution for any business — until you reach the point to find it too complicated for your team and your projects.
But if you don’t need the 70% of advanced functionality, why should you pay for it? There is plenty of alternatives for project management, that allows planning project, log issues, the track spent time and the progress. If you understand how your workflow benefits from using such a tool, you may find it easy to set up the solution and save up to 60% on your budget.
Of course, moving from Jira to Redmine is not an easy decision. Before you decide it’s the best Jira alternative, you should test it. You can start by putting RedmineUP Cloud to the test drive in the free 15-days trial. The migration of data is free, so you’re one closer to finding a solution.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to share them in comments.
