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Jira vs. GitHub

Jira is a ticketing system alternatives that allows a software team to plan, assign, track, report, and manage work using the guidelines of agile software development. Jira also allows the team to provide customer support to clients using tickets for tracking the progress of feature requests/bug reports and communicating directly with the clients. Jira includes a customizable workflow for tickets that allows developers to specify how a ticket moves through the different available statuses. Jira also allows the developers to specify the different priority levels of a ticket as well as its type (i.e., bug, feature, or support request).

GitHub Issues can act as a rudimentary ticketing system for internal use amongst developers. GitHub Issues have labels, assignees, reviewers, milestones, and comments which enable communication between the different developers working on a project. GitHub provides default labels (e.g., bug, documentation, enhancement, help wanted, etc.) in every new repository. These default labels can be used to help create a standard workflow in a repository. Developers can create additional labels if they require more categories for their issues. Milestones can be created to track the progress of a group of issues. For instance, the “beta release” milestone may include several issues pertaining to stability and the basic features that need to be implemented before releasing a public beta version of your application.

Jira, being a specialized ticketing system, offers a much wider feature set GitHub Issues. The main consideration to keep in mind when selecting which ticketing system to use is whether you plan on allowing external users to create tickets. GitHub Issues is mainly aimed at developers and excels as a tool for inter-developer communication. Less tech-savvy users may not have a GitHub or may not have access to your project’s repository, and as such may not be able to create issues regarding your project on GitHub. Hence, if you would like to give your users the option to create tickets, then Jira is undoubtedly the software solution that you should go with. On the other hand, if your team and project are relatively small, you will probably find GitHub issues sufficient for your ticketing needs. External users can directly communicate their concerns to the developers via others means of communication (e.g., email, MS Teams, Slack, etc.) who will in turn create internal GitHub issues detailing the customers’ reports.