Are Jira Software and Jira Align two separate products or is Jira Align a plugin?

[Devin Griffin]

---

---

Would a purchase Jira Align to integrate with Jira Software of can Jira Align stand alone and provide all the functionality of Jira Software  

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @Devin Griffin ,

You can use Jira Align as a standalone product.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

You may consider integrating with Jira if your teams are used to Jira and want to continue using it at the team level for planning, backlog grooming, story estimation, board creation, and the like. I use both Jira and Jira Align, and the teams keep using Jira for all the work at the team level, while I rely on Jira Align for program and portfolio management. If you do this, then you can decide where stories and epics get created, if stories get estimated in Jira or Jira Align (e.g., I prefer story estimation in Jira because in Jira Align the only option is Fibonacci), etc.

[Devin Griffin]

I this cost prohibitive? If they are both enterprise solutions, is double the cost?

How does Jira Align compare to Jira Structure, which i believe is just an add-on?

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi Devin, is true that the cost of Jira Align may be high, depending on what you need. For me Jira Align provide a lot of value for the reporting capabilities, and functionalities to manage investments and epics e.g. You can do dependency management and risk management at the investments and epic levels, and if you're a scrum manager you can manage team obstacles and even do scrum meetings within the tool. I recommend a demo if you can get one.

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

Hi, @Devin Griffin. Indeed Jira Align and Jira are separate products that can be used together, or standalone. AFAIK, when used together, they talk to each other and share data, but they are truly separate products.

The answer to your, "Is this cost-prohibitive..." question is impossible to answer without knowing much more about your situation, for example, the size of the organization and the problems you are trying to solve. Only you can just if it's a cost-prohibitive solution when you compare the costs to the benefits.

Jira Align and Structure — I work for the company that makes Structure — are very different solutions. However, it is true that many organizations use Structure to do some of the things they might otherwise do with Jira Align. For example, both products can help organizations scale the Agile approach with SAFe, etc., but they approach things in a different way.

My suggestion would be to contact an Atlassian Solution partner and ALM Works, the company that makes Structure, to discuss your use case. 

Hope this helps,

-dave [ALM Works]

P.S. You can find me on LinkedIn if you want an easy way to get a conversation going with ALM Works and/or find an Atlassian Solution Partner in your area.

[Renato Botto]

@Carlos Garcia Navarro here in my teams (America movil brasil) there are still some confusion about jira align vs jira sw. 

About "jira as a standalone product", I understood it means that with work also with legacy cascade projects, can you please suggest documentation to support this scope and concepts?

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi/Ola @Renato Botto , I recommend to check out the documentation here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-align/

You can probably use Jira alone for most of your tasks at the team and program managements level with stories and epics. Jira Align provides portfolio management, reporting, dependency management, risk management, ability to create roadmaps, and more.