Choosing the Best BI Tool for Your Jira Reporting: Comprehensive Comparison

Published: March 29, 2023
Last Updated: September 21, 2023
Chief Strategy Officer at Alpha Serve
Jira reporting is comprehensive. However, many businesses may find it limiting, especially for custom reporting or when working with multiple data sources.

This article will compare the best Business Intelligence (BI) tools for Jira reporting. By the end of the article, you’ll know which BI tool fits your needs.
Choosing the Best BI Tool for Your Jira Reporting: Comprehensive Comparison

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Top BI Tools for Jira Reporting

Top BI Tools for Jira Reporting
Jira reporting for business offers excellent value. For example, you get out-of-the-box reporting. Team members can learn about different project aspects, including scheduling, scope, quality, flow, and predictability. They can also do forecast and issue analysis, further improving project management. Teams also get Jira dashboards that offer an eagle-eye view of the project(s). It gives teams a huge advantage as they don’t have to leave the platform to perform reporting.

However, in-built Jira reporting can be limiting, especially for businesses that rely heavily on custom reporting. Jira does offer add-ons to let teams perform custom reporting, such as Worklogs, Clerk Invoices, etc. However, external BI tools offer a complete package while providing excellent custom reporting capabilities. For instance, Power BI gives access to custom visualization, automatic data refreshes, etc.

That’s why, in this article, we’ll compare the leading BI tools according to Gartner’s report for 2022.
These include:
  • Tableau
  • Power BI
  • BigQuery
  • SAP Analytics Cloud(SAC)
  • Oracle Analytics
  • SQL for Jira Reporting

The criteria we’ll look at include the following:
  • Ease of use
  • Data visualization capabilities
  • Integration
  • Customization options
  • Pricing

Tableau for Jira Reporting

Tableau for Jira Reporting
Tableau is a powerful BI tool. It simplifies data understanding and gives teams access to excellent visualization tools. You can use the Jira data to understand your operations better and uncover hidden insights by connecting Tableau with Jira.

Ease of Use of Tableau for Jira Reporting

Tableau is easy to learn and use. Business owners do not require any programming skills to deploy Tableau.

Out of the box, the Tableau interface is beginner-friendly. However, it does require a basic understanding of the interface elements. Also, you get access to all your data in one place, making it easy to work with multiple data sets from different sources. Furthermore, you can access data querying language, making data handling easy. You can also drag fields around for easy data manipulation.

Overall, Tableau is beginner-friendly. Its interface is simple but does require essential learning. However, once you understand it, creating reports is intuitive. Also, there’re plenty of excellent online resources to use Tableau effectively.

Tableau Data Visualization Capabilities for Jira Reports

Jira Reports offers access to excellent business reporting. For instance, organizations can create reports, average age reports, pie chart reports, the issue created vs. resolved issue reports, scrum reports, and so on. In short, Jira tracks Key Performance Indicators(KPIs), which are critical to learning about your business.

However, Tableau brings better data visualization capabilities for Jira reports. For example, team members can quickly create a visualization for an ongoing project. Moreover, stakeholders and clients can share visualizations and reports for quick understanding and feedback.

The key Tableau data visualization features and capabilities include the following:
  • Drag and drop functionality
  • Tableau dashboard that offers eagle eye view of data
  • Access to advanced visualization charts such as Bar, Pie, Treemap, Boxplot, Grantt, etc.
  • Access to pre-installed maps
  • Trend lines and predictive analytics capability.

Jira Tableau dashboard examples that shows Jira data are:
Tableau for Jira Reporting

Tableau Jira Integration

You can directly connect Tableau with Jira by first connecting Jira with a data warehouse and then the data warehouse to Tableau. However, it requires time investment and technical knowledge to accomplish correctly.

You can use third-party integration tools such as Tableau Connector for Jira to circumvent it. It is a no-code integration option, so you don’t have to write a single code to connect both platforms.

For more details read Tableau Connector for Jira Installation Guide.

Jira Reports Customization Options in Tableau

Tableau offers excellent flexibility when creating Jira reports. You can work with multiple data sources. Once you complete Jira Tableau integration, you’ll have access to all the data simultaneously.

For custom reporting, you get to import custom fields as well. It is not supported by Jira reporting, which can hamper your reporting process.

Let’s look at an example of a custom Jira report using Tableau.
Tableau for Jira Reporting

Tableau Price

Tableau follows a subscription-based model where users need to pay monthly. They offer three pricing plans: Tableau Creator, Explorer, and Viewer. All these plans are hosted by Tableau using Tableau Cloud.

If you want to deploy Tableau on-premise or public cloud, you can also do so. To learn more about their pricing model, check the Tableau pricing page. Also, to know the exact pricing, you need to contact sales.

As for value for money, Tableau is a cost-effective solution. It helps organizations save money. It is valid for both enterprises and small companies. However, Tableau best suits businesses with 1M-10M dollars in revenue and 50-200 employees.

Power BI for Jira Reporting

Power BI for Jira Reporting
Power BI is another popular tool created and managed by Microsoft. It is a cloud-based solution with tons of features. For instance, it offers access to big data support, customizable UI/UX, custom reporting, and real-time analytics.

In this section, we’ll look at how Power BI fairs for Jira reporting.

Ease of Use of Power BI for Jira Reporting

Just like Tableau, Power BI is also beginner-friendly. Power BI uses Microsoft Excel for data analysis and reporting. On top of that, its user interface is intuitive and easy to learn.

To start using Jira reporting, you need to connect Jira to Power BI, which is easy with third-party add-ons(more on later).

Its beginner-friendly features include easy data manipulation with drag-and-drop functionality for data sources connectivity. Also, you don’t need to write any code to use it, making it accessible to users from various technical backgrounds.

In addition, it also offers excellent learning resources, access to a large community, and outstanding visualization options. However, users may need help with Power BI Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), cross-filtering, and data modeling.

Power BI Data Visualization Capabilities for Jira Reports

With Jira generating important KPIs, teams must utilize it to get insights. Power BI lets you overcome Jira reporting challenges and drawbacks such as limited functionality, inability to share Jira reports with outsiders, and permission-based approach for report sharing.

Power BI offers excellent visualization capabilities that let you see the big picture and identify hidden insights. Here, you get plenty of visualization types, including area charts, bar & column charts, cards, combo charts, funnel diagrams, and many more. Lastly, you also get the Power BI dashboard, a powerful storytelling tool.

Furthermore, it also features the ability to show data used for creating particular data visualization or have the ability to drill down to break visualization further.

Lastly, Power BI also lets you access various Jira standard reports. Also, you get access to dashboards and custom gadgets for customized layouts and report creation. All of these mean better reporting, resulting in excellent project management.

Power BI Jira Integration

There are multiple ways you can integrate Power BI Jira. For example, you can use Jira API to connect, but it requires technical expertise.

However, the best way is to use Power BI Connector for Jira. It is an enterprise-grade app that simplifies how you connect these tools. It requires zero coding, and once done, you can start building custom Jira reports and dashboard in Power BI.

Its key features include:
  • No-code data export.
  • Custom data export.
  • Dashboard templates.
  • Scheduled refresh.
  • Ensured data security.
  • Automated data relationships.

Jira Reports Customization Options in Power BI

You get plenty of Jira report customization options in Power BI. You can use various filtering options, such as JQL or basic filters. You also use Power Query on your data, which works with Jira and other data sources. Additionally, you can work with Jira’s custom fields.

Power BI Pricing

Power BI is one of the cheapest BI tools in the market. You can start using Power BI for as low as $10 per user/month (individual license). For teams, the pricing starts at $20 per user/month (Power BI Premium).

For enterprises, the pricing starts at $4,995 per capacity/month. It lacks per-user licenses, allowing your organization to use Power BI to its full potential. To learn more, check out pricing page.

The low starting price makes Power BI an excellent value for money for small businesses. They can use Power BI with Jira to find bottlenecks and improve sales. As for enterprises, Power BI is affordable and helps organizations save costs.

BigQuery for Jira Reporting

BigQuery for Jira Reporting
If your business deals with large data sets, you must rely on Google’s BigQuery. It is a REST-based cloud service that offers businesses a cost-effective serverless data warehouse.

This section will look at BigQuery for Jira reporting.

Ease of Use of BigQuery for Jira Reporting

BigQuery BI Engine is capable of crunching big data without any downtime. However, it is not relatively easy to use. You still need to write complex SQL queries and feed BigQuery with them. Once done, it’ll output results that you can use for visualization.

However, BigQuery is fully managed, so you don’t have to manage servers or provisioning. Also, loading data is seamless, thanks to its support for other cloud storage solutions and products such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

As for the interface, you need to use the Google cloud console to query the public dataset. It offers a Query editor to write and run queries.

Google offers Looker Studio to visualize data. It is a self-service BI platform. Here, you can access multiple visualization tools, including dashboards and reports.

Overall, BigQuery is relatively tricky to use. You must know what you’re doing, and technical knowledge is required to use it. However, if you have the technical expertise, you can get started with BigQuery by reading its excellent documentation.

BigQuery Data Visualization Capabilities for Jira Reports

BigQuery doesn’t offer data visualization but enables teams to run queries for processing Big Data.

That’s why you must use other BI visualization tools to visualize Jira data. For example, Google provides its own Looker Studio BI visualization tool. Its native support means faster execution. Once you create and run a query in BigQuery, you’re presented with a table schema. Next, you can visualize the table data and query results using the Looker Studio report.

Apart from that, you can also opt to use Power BI or Tableau.

Jira BigQuery Integration

Loading Jira data to BigQuery can be done in multiple ways. This includes batch loading, streaming, and generated data. All of these require technical know-how to execute.

You can also use third-party tools to do Jira BigQuery integration. For example, you can use BigQuery Connector for Jira. It lets you load unlimited data to BigQuery. Moreover, it also offers access to automated querying and access control.

Jira Reports Customization options in BigQuery

BigQuery lets you run complex and extensive queries on large data sets. It helps data analysts to filter out data, re-arrange them and highlight them in reports. In addition, you can create, copy, manage, and export datasets and tables.

And, if you use it with a proper integration app (such as BigQuery Connector for Jira), you get way more control. For example, it lets you load data, centralize different data sources, and filter related data. In addition, you can use it to add or remove tables, narrow down data, and extract custom data from Jira to BigQuery.

An example of Jira reports using BigQuery and Looker is below.
BigQuery for Jira Reporting

BigQuery Price

BigQuery pricing depends on multiple factors, including analysis type, data ingestion, extraction, storage, and additional service. That makes its pricing diverse. To learn more, check out its pricing page.

Jira BigQuery is overall a cost-effective solution to query large data sets. Before you get started, you can always check its pricing calculator to know more.

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) for Jira Reporting

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) for Jira Reporting
SAP Analytics Cloud is a SaaS (Software as a Service) BI solution managed by SAP. It is an all-in-one product where you get all the tools to do analytics, reporting, and visualization.

This section will look at SAP Analytics Cloud(SAC) for Jira reporting.

Ease of Use of SAP for Jira Reporting

SAP for Jira reporting is easy to use. However, you need to invest time learning it before using it effectively. Nevertheless, its excellent documentation helps you to understand and clear doubts. Additionally, the interface is also clean and intuitive.

SAP Data Visualization Capabilities for Jira Reports

SAP Analytics Cloud is an excellent analytics tool with access to AI-powered analysis, data discovery, prediction, and visualization.

Once you import Jira data, you can use Natural language processing and query to filter data. These insights don’t require coding language knowledge; you can still get insightful answers with excellent visualization. It also offers smart insights that remove any manual effort to understand your key metrics better. It also offers a Smart Discovery feature that uses ML (machine learning) models to detect hidden relationships and patterns.

Overall, SAP offers automated visualization and analytics, helping businesses to make the right decisions.

You can also manually create data visualization by telling stories, charts, and other visualization elements.

SAP Jira Integration

To seamlessly integrate SAP Analytics Cloud with Jira, you must use Jira Connector apps.

Here, we recommend SAP Analytic Cloud Connector for Jira. It is an enterprise-ready app that requires no coding skills to use. Moreover, it offers a simple interface and lets you merge different SAP data sources with Jira. Also, you can explore Jira data visually with SAP Analytics Cloud. For example, you can create an interactive dashboard with it.

Jira Reports Customization options in SAP

There’re plenty of Jira Reports customization options in SAP. Once you connect the Jira data source, you can get started with Stories. The interface lets you play with your data by directly interacting with the data. Based on the data, you can add visual elements such as charts, variants, measures, dimensions, drilling up or down, and more.

Additionally, you can also customize Jira reports by adding tables and maps. Overall, it offers excellent flexibility and ease for custom Jira reporting. In SAP, you can create Jira reports extensively with good customization.

SAP Price

SAP Analytics Cloud offers a subscription model where businesses must pay per user/month. Its BI Intelligence pricing starts at $36 per/month. You need to contact their sales team for a quote for planning pricing.

Overall, SAP Analytics Cloud is value for money for small companies and enterprises. It helps you cost-cut by taking insight-based actions. It also lowers the total cost of ownership.

Oracle Analytics for Jira Reporting

Oracle Analytics for Jira Reporting
Oracle Analytics is a leading BI solution that lets companies make data-driven decisions through visualization and an in-depth understanding of the data.

In this section, we’ll take a look at Oracle Analytics.

Ease of Use of Oracle for Jira Reporting

For Jira users, Oracle Analytics is worth trying. New users may find it challenging as they may have to learn the platform. However, its excellent documentation and online guides are a good place to start.

The Oracle interface is clean and gets you quickly started. You can create stories, connect to data sources, and visualize creatively. It also features machine learning and natural language processing technologies which can help business owners and managers to get deep insights without the need to write a single line of code.

Oracle Data Visualization Capabilities for Jira Reports

Data visualization is at the core of Oracle Analytics. It offers self-service data visualization with natural language processing (NLP). So, you can ask by speech to gain visual insights using automated graphs and charts. These out-of-the-box data visualizations include Spark Chart on Performance Tiles, Custom Image Maps, Heat-Map Layers, etc.

You can also create geospatial maps, centralized maps, dashboards, or do high-volume reporting.
Oracle Analytics for Jira Reporting

Jira Oracle Integration

Jira and Oracle offer excellent integration out of the box. You can use the manual method to connect them both. You can also use third-party tools such as Oracle Analytics Connector for Jira.

The integration apps key features include customizing Jira Data export using basic filters and leading marketplace apps such as Tempo Planner, Advanced roadmaps, etc. It lets you add Jira cloud to your data sources. Moreover, you can import default and custom fields with it, including Worklogs, Springs, History, and any other third-party data.

Jira Reports Customization Options in Oracle

You can use plenty of customization options to create Jira reports in Oracle. As you can import custom Jira data, you can utilize Oracle’s default visualization options to create visually-powerful reports.

Oracle Price

Oracle Analytics pricing comes in two models. The first one is per user per month, starting at $80 for Enterprise and $16 for Professional. You can also pay per use. To learn more, check out their pricing page.

Overall, the pricing is spot-on for both individuals and enterprises. In addition, their pay-as-you-go model is great for small businesses still trying out different things.

SQL for Jira Reporting

SQL for Jira Reporting
Microsoft SQL Server is at the forefront of relational database providers for businesses. It offers access to SQLOS (SQL Server Operating System) and Database Engine.

This section will cover Microsoft SQL Server for Jira Reporting.

Ease of Use of SQL Server for Jira Reporting

Microsoft SQL Server is complex and not for beginners. So, if you want to use it, you must invest a lot of time. In addition, its interface could be more user-friendly, requiring good technical knowledge and know-how. However, if you rely on a Jira SQL database, then it is a good option for your project.

SQL Data Visualization Capabilities for Jira Reports

You need to use Power View to visualize your Jira reports in Microsoft SQL. It is a data visualization technology developed by Microsoft. It lets you create charts, maps, and images and showcase KPIs.

It is available on SharePoint, SQL Server, Power BI, and Excel. In other words, you need to rely on other BI tools to visualize. In that case, it is best to use Power BI as it offers excellent visualization for Jira reports.

Jira SQL Server Integration

Jira offers a lengthy but doable process to integrate Jira with the SQL server. It is a no-code solution that offers unlimited data transfer. It also provides a user-friendly interface, custom data export, scheduled auto-refresh, and ensures data security. However, the best approach is using a tool like SQL Connector for Jira to export the Jira data to your databases effortlessly.

Jira SQL Server Integration

Jira offers a lengthy but doable process to integrate Jira with the SQL server. It is a no-code solution that offers unlimited data transfer. It also provides a user-friendly interface, custom data export, scheduled auto-refresh, and ensures data security. However, the best approach is using a tool like SQL Connector for Jira to export the Jira data to your databases effortlessly.

Jira Reports Customization Options in SQL Server

With SQL Server, you can customize Jira reports. It starts with filtering data and then using any BI tools to visualize it.

SQL Server Price

Microsoft SQL Server has a different licensing model, with pricing starting at $209. To learn more, check their pricing page.

Their pricing aims to deliver services to businesses of different sizes. That’s why it offers excellent value for money for small businesses and enterprises.

Pros and Cons of Each BI Tool for Jira Reporting

Pros and Cons of Each BI Tool for Jira Reporting
Every tool has its pros and cons. It can be its ease of use, ability to handle and process massive datasets, or integration options.

For example, you pick Tableau or Power BI for Jira reporting. In that case, you get benefits such as ease of use, easy integration, and the ability to import custom data to create Jira custom reports. As a result, these tools are perfect for business leaders or managers who want to know how their business is doing.

Next comes SAP Analytics Cloud and Oracle Analytics, which require technical knowledge. However, they offer an alternative with access to AI and ML features that can give managers an easy way to gain insights.

For businesses requiring to work on Big Data, there is the option of BigQuery. Its interface lacks user-friendliness, but its ability to quickly make sense of a massive data set makes it worthy.
Overall, we suggest you carefully review each BI tool listed here to know what they offer.
BI Tools for Jira Reporting Pros and Cons

Conclusion

When selecting a BI tool for Jira reporting, many options exist. Our research shows that Tableau, Power BI, Oracle Analytics, SAP Analytics, and BigQuery have features suitable for Jira reporting. Each tool offers varying capabilities regarding data visualization, ease of use, and scalability.

Ultimately, the best choice will depend on your organization's specific needs and requirements. Consider factors such as the size of your data sets, desired level of customization, and budget when making your decision. By selecting the right BI tool, you can gain valuable insights from your Jira data and make informed business decisions.

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