Top 6 alternatives to Jira’s most-voted feature requests
Learn how Coda can deliver the data your team’s been waiting for.
Al Chen
Solutions Architect at Coda
Top 6 alternatives to Jira’s most-voted feature requests
By Al Chen
Share this article
Project management software is an essential tool for managing and executing projects. Having the right software is crucial for running and planning projects so that all kinds of bottlenecks can be prevented before they lead to a disaster. In some cases, you might be using project management software that mostly fits your needs, although it might have issues that leave your team stuck on occasion. Jira initially launched as an issue-tracking system, and it eventually expanded to planning and tracking projects. While Jira has grown into a project management tool, we’ve heard from teams that the tool has lingering issues—some of which have been around for over ten years. Because Coda optimizes for customized solutions for teams and projects of all shapes and sizes, we decided to address the top-voted suggestions in Atlassian’s public issue tracker for Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center. Here are six things you can do in Coda instead of waiting around for a Jira fix that may not come.
1. See issues from other projects in a single team-managed Jira board or view.
In Jira, you can’t view issues across different projects on one board. You can only view issues for that specific project. This means extra clicks and more balls in the air that need to be tracked when managing multiple projects.
Every Jira issue from every project synced to one view in Coda.
2. Customize fields on cards in the Jira backlog and board.
In Jira, you can customize the view in the issues panel. However, when using the backlog and scrum board, you only see the following: the due date, the priority field, and the estimation field. You’re stuck with the default view.
Coda’s kanban board of Jira issues with customized fields.
3. Allow multiple Jira boards in team-managed projects.
In team-managed projects, Jira lets you create one board per project. Multiple boards only exist in company-managed projects. There are workarounds, such as creating sprint “containers” or creating multiple team-managed projects––but these are additional, unnecessary steps. In Coda, you can create multiple boards for a team-managed project, with each board filtered and customized to a specific team, product area, or sprint. You can do this by syncing in the Jira issues and then filtering the main issues table into views for each team. Get started with creating multiple boards in Coda with our free template.4. See subtasks in the Jira timeline.
In Jira, if you’re on a team-managed project and you drill into the subtasks for a parent task, you won’t be able to view them on a timeline.
Subtasks timeline for Jira issues viewed in Coda.
5. Easily view epics from other Jira projects.
In company-managed projects in Jira, you can’t view epics from other projects. This means you can’t see dependencies and deadlines between projects. In Coda, you can view your Jira epics and issues across all projects in one place. After you sync in Jira data, you can use our template to create a timeline view. On the timeline, you can expand and collapse projects so that you can quickly view the associated tasks and epics. Below the timeline in our free template, you’ll find a table view of the same data where epics are grouped. Here’s our free template that lets you tweak the tasks and epics to manage projects the way that works best for you.6. Automatically sum estimates from Jira subtasks.
When you add original time estimates to subtasks in Jira, the parent issue doesn’t properly show the sum of those original time estimates. The time estimate is properly summed when viewing the parent issue or story on the backlog, but the issue detail view doesn’t show the sum. Furthermore, these time estimates don’t carry over when exporting data.
Using Coda to sum estimates of Jira subtasks.