Best Jira Add-ons for the Cloud
Do you know how they say there’s an app for everything nowadays?
Well, I just went through the catalog on the Atlassian Marketplace. While not completely sold on the previous statement, I do find myself believing that there’s definitely an add-on for anything you’d want Jira to do. And for the things you never knew you wanted.
This variety is great for many reasons. For once, the competition for a limited audience forces developers to bring their A-game. And yet, the plethora of choices has its own drawbacks. For example, finding a great solution for your precise need may become quite challenging when there are dozens of choices and - let's be honest here - not all of them are made equal.
Hence I decided to create this little list of add-ons, categorize them by their area of use, and share it with you. Let us dig in.
Project Management
This category holds add-ons that will benefit project managers, decision-makers, and stakeholders in a project.
Smart Checklist for Jira
Getting things done is much simpler with a clearly defined scope and acceptance criteria for every step of the process. The Smart Checklist add-on offers this utility in Jira, but it doesn’t stop there. The ability to tag teammates, change statuses, or set up deadlines for an item in a checklist helps with sub-task management and improves work visibility.
Main features
- Automated templates: You can set up the add-on in a way where certain checklists are automatically created within issues of certain types. This helps with recurring processes and repetitive tasks.
- Markdown formatting: You have a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating a checklist, thanks to the built-in markdown editor.
- Conversion into tickets: Each checklist item can be converted into a ticket with a couple of clicks.
Use Cases
- Create checklist templates for repetitive processes
- View cross-team progress through the ticket
- Make Acceptance Criteria and DoD clearly visible and the steps towards achieving the goal understandable
Price
- Free version
- Pro version with a 30-day trial period: $0.50 per user per month
Review Score: 3.5
“Easy to use checklist, easy to get configured to show on cards on a board. We also have an automation sending emails when checkboxes are marked. Found a bug recently and the support was super quick and fixed it in a few hours.”
Sofia Hedlund
Tempo
Tempo is the market leader time tracking automation add-on for Jira. It is used to help organizations track costs, plan resources, and track CAPEX. The add-on offers dynamic reports that help plan future endeavors based on historical estimates or simply review a team’s timesheets individually or in bulk.
Main features
- Time tracking is quite simple for the team.
- Granular reports and drill-downs: You can learn more about your team’s productivity or parts of the project you invest the most time into with simple and intuitive reports. CAPEX and OPEX forms of reports are included.
Use Cases:
- Track time to know where it goes
- Track billable hours for invoicing
- Track capital expenditures (Capex) for tax credits
Price
- Pro version with a 30-day trial period
- $1,750 per 50 users
Review Score: 3
“I've been working with Thomas B. to navigate Tempo, amazing level of service and help. Tempo itself is useful, but without help not as easy to fully utilize or use its advantages. Great customer service, thanks Thomas!”
Ivana Hećimović
Product Management
The following Jira add-ons were made to enhance your capabilities when it comes to designing the product’s scope, planning the team’s workflow, or enhancing high-level decision-making with data analytics.
Jira Workflow Toolbox
The Workflow Toolbox AKA, WT, is the best-rated automation solution for Jira. The add-on extends the native workflow functionality that’s available in Jira through the introduction of custom conditions, validators, and post functions. In simpler words, WT offers a wide assortment of tools that help reshape workflows in a way you see fit and/or most beneficial to your project.
Main features
- Workflow automation with code and/or scripts
- Conditional logic that helps meet complex requirements by automating certain actions
- Intuitive interface with built-in guides
Use cases
- You can automate repetitive tasks through issue fields with JWT functions
- Create custom workflow transition functions
- Protect fields and expressions against field name updates
Price
Free up to 10 users. Then $1.25 per user per month.
Review score: 4
“Best workflow tool by far but old UI was more useful, opening a popup to review functions available is not handy.”
Emre Yüksel Okur
Aha! Roadmaps for Jira / Category
Aha! is an add-on for product teams and product managers. It is designed to create product roadmaps that are integrated with Jira in a way where changes or status updates that are made are reflected on the roadmap.
The tool is best used when you need to capture product strategy, collaborate with cross-functional or distributed teams, or manage products and processes that are related to one another.
Main features
- Personas and competitor profiles
- Feature prioritization
- Roadmap visualization
Use cases
- Design buyer personas and competitor profiles
- Prioritize features
- Visualize roadmaps
Price
Please contact the vendor to learn the price for your team.
Review Score: 4
“I had a great interaction with Aha support when trying to troubleshoot my Jira and Aha integration after a Jira conversion from on-premise to cloud. Mark helped me double-check my configuration, so we were back up in less than a day. We have been Aha fans for many years, and having our integration continue to work seamlessly after a big migration just reinforces our enjoyment and loyalty to Aha.”
Sherry-Lynn Agcanas-Wolf
EazyBI Reports and Charts for Jira
This add-on helps your data analysts with building and manipulating data from Jira. In addition, the functionality allows creating custom calculations and pulling data from external sources to get a clearer picture of rising trends and upcoming opportunities.
Main Features
- Custom reports, charts, and dashboards
- Interactive reports for analysis and discovery
- Formulas and calculations
Use Cases
- You can create custom calculations to gain more data from Jira than it can offer
- Or you can discover data and trends and then visualize and export them to share with the team or stakeholders
Price
30-day trial period. $10 per user per month.
Review Score: 4
“Great app! With EazyBi, you can create any report you need, almost everything is possible and it works without any issues. I managed to do many things and solve many issues for my company using EazyBi. And another thing, but incredibly important is GREAT EazyBi staff. People from their support are experts, always eager to help, always professional, nice and they respond really quickly to your requests. If you need help with the report, you do not how to achieve the intended result, they will always help you. And it is like they really want to help you, and are not just trying to get rid of you. This is crucial in this kind of app. Not everyone is a BI expert, but that's ok - they are and they will not leave you alone with your issues.”
Karolina Świrydowicz
Development and QA
Let’s face it - developers and QA engineers are the primary audiences of Jira. As such, they already have a lot of the platform’s functionality tailored to their needs. But this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left to simplify and streamline in their daily processes.
XRay Test Management for Jira
The Xray add-on helps manage manual and automated tests in Jira through custom fields, screens, and workflows. It helps QA engineers organize their tests in test sets within Jira rather than in an external application.
The application supports Gherkin-based frameworks like Cucumber and can import tests from CSVs or JSON. It is also integrated with DevOps tools like GitLab and Bamboo.
Main Features
- Tests as Jira issues
- CI tool to report test results using the included REST API
- Reports and Requirement Coverage
Use Cases
- You can use Xray to track progress on test plans
- Write BDD scenarios inside Jira
- Define reusable Preconditions and associate them with Tests
Price
30-day trial period. $10 per user per month.
Review Score: 4
“Xray test is an awesome management tool. We integrated it with Testim, and we are getting all the results of our tests in Jira. Very happy with this tool. I would recommend it to everyone, and the support they offer is great.”
Chino
Git Integration for Jira
This addon is designed to streamline the development process by integrating Git commits, branches, and pull requests into your Jira instance.
Main Features
- A plethora of integrations: GitHub, MS Azure, AWS, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Gerrit
- Jira workflow automation: you can configure custom triggers based on your commits and pull requests to create Jira tickets automatically
- Branches and pull requests from Jira: Inserting a Jira issue key into a branch name and summary helps streamline the development process
Use Cases
- View Git in context with Jira
- Have JQL at your side while searching through Git commits
- Manage branches and pull requests from the issue view
Price
30-day trial period. $10 per user per month.
Review Score: 3.5
“Git Integration for Jira is great! It does exactly what we need: a clean Git integration.”
Boris Steinke
Document Processing
Working for the world of Hitech often has us overlooking the basics such as PDF readers and word processors - all as integral to your workflow as a cup of smoking hot coffee in the morning.
Better Excel Exporter for Jira
Excel is a potent business tool. Better Excel Exporter for Jira allows you to harness its power inside Jira. All of the formulas, charts, and pivots data analysts, HR, operations, and project management teams needed to access are now integrated into the project management software.
Main Features
- Excel reporting
- Native XLS/XLSX support
- Custom spreadsheets
- Scripts
Use Cases
Using and exporting data from Jira in the XLS/XLSX format
Price
30-day trial period. $0.99 per user per month.
Review Score: 4
“Very interesting product, and the support was able to help a novice like me figure it out so it can help our company. Highly recommend!”
Jon
Better PDF Exporter for Jira
Better PDF Exporter for Jira helps you export data such as issues, timesheets, invoices, and release notes into a PDF format.
Main Features
- PDF templates
- Simple export from issue to PDF
- Customizable PDFs
Use Cases
Exporting data from Jira in a format that’s comfortable to work with, share, present, and edit.
Price
30-day trial period. $0.99 per user per month.
Review score: 4
“Great app. We have used it before the migration to the Jira Cloud. Unfortunately a few features are not yet available. It' very easy to create PDFs and fill them with all the information we need. The support is also very helpful and fast.”
Nick Handtke
Did I Miss Something?
Surely there are many other pearls among the dozens of various add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace. Which ones did I miss, and which do you rely on? Please share your picks in the comments below.
