You're not alone if you’ve struggled with sluggish IT service requests, scattered communication, and a ticketing system that tests your patience.
Managing IT service desks and operations is real-life whack-a-mole: requests pile up, priorities get muddled, and teams are desperate to keep things from falling apart.
That’s because office workers engage with IT support approximately three times per month.
Jira Service Management, Atlassian’s take on IT service management (ITSM), promises to bring some structure to this chaos. It positions itself as an all-in-one service management solution that helps teams manage and deliver services efficiently.
But does it deliver, or is it just one of the many tools for ITSM? Here’s what we found.
TL;DR
Jira Service Management is a platform for IT and enterprise service management.
Jira’s strengths are request, incident, problem, and change management.
We found both incident management and ticketing to be nearly flawless. The only potential issue you might face is the complexity of setting things up and getting familiar with the systems.
The entire Jira platform has faced severe security vulnerabilities in the past. Although fundamentally secure, this has caused the platform to lose some customer trust.
The pricing is quite competitive, especially considering the features you get. However, you do pay a premium for access to Atlassian Intelligence.
For medium—to large organizations, Jira Service Management appeals with its powerful automation, helpful AI features, and long list of features.
Workwize allows IT teams to save more time with powerful hardware lifecycle management features. These features allow teams to manage hardware assets from procurement to disposal.
Via Jira
Jira Service Management is almost synonymous with IT service management software.
Built on the Jira platform, Jira Service Management supports ITIL practices and integrates DevOps and Agile principles to help teams manage service requests, incidents, problems, changes, and more.
According to a recent Forrester survey, Jira recovered 115 hours monthly for IT service and operations teams.
It’s used by conglomerates like NASA, Domino’s, Sotheby’s, The Telegraph, and over 55,000 more companies.
Before that, here’s an overview of its features:
Request management: Manages work across teams in a unified solution and helps teams deliver prompt and high-quality service to employees or customers.
Incident management: Combines development and IT operations teams to rapidly respond to, resolve, and continuously learn from incidents.
Problem management: Groups incidents to problems, quickly carry out root cause analyses, and record workarounds to minimize the impact of incidents.
Change management: Gives your IT operations teams contextual data about changes from software development tools to improve decision-making.
Asset management: Manages asset inventory, tracks ownership and lifecycles, and reduces operational costs with continuous scanning.
Configuration management: Gets you visibility into the infrastructure that supports critical applications and services and helps you understand service dependencies.
Knowledge management: Offers self-service, deflects more requests, and manages knowledge articles while encouraging team collaboration.
Now, we aren’t here to recite specs. Let’s skip to how it actually performs.
🔥Hot takeJira Service Management excels in ITSM, offering strong ticketing, incident management, and workflow automation. It’s great for tracking IT issues and integrating with development pipelines, keeping teams organized and efficient. However, Jira isn’t built for complete IT asset lifecycle management. It lacks automation for procurement, warranty tracking, and device retrievals—where Workwize shines. Workwize is a complete hardware lifecycle management solution to manage your global hardware. It automates device allocation and delivery, tracks warranties and lease deadlines, and manages seamless employee offboarding, including remote device retrievals. Companies choose Workwize to eliminate the hassle of manual asset tracking, deployment, management, retrieval, and disposal. Workwize also offers ITSM capabilities to seek quick help with their equipment. Moreover, its ITAM capabilities are strong yet super simple to use. Book a Workwize demo now to see if Workwize is a great choice for you. |
We know that Jira handles incidents, manages requests, and tracks problems. But how well does it do all that? What is Jira’s approach to problem management? What kind of integrations do you get? Let’s get all the answers.
Incident management is one of the core pillars of ITSM, and Jira Service Management does a great job here. You get a structured, efficient process for handling incidents—from logging and categorizing them based on priority to escalating major incidents for rapid resolution.
Jira defines an incident as an unplanned interruption or reduction in service quality. Major incidents, on the other hand, have a significant business impact and require urgent attention. The platform makes it easy to manage these distinctions while keeping response times sharp.
One of the standout features is its automated alerting and on-call scheduling.It significantly improved response times over our earlier setup, where agents had to schedule incident resolutions manually.
Jira also integrates with over 200 services, including Slack and Datadog, to centralize alerts and notify the right team members.
Jira allowed us to swarm on significant incidents. The Slack integration, for instance, creates channels per incident and updates priorities. Agents can escalate issues to on-call teams for rapid action.
Another neat trick is Post-incident reviews, or PIRs, which you’ll find in Project settings under ITSM features. We created PIRs linked to incidents, with automation for major and critical incidents. This alone had a big impact on tracking progress and improving service reliability.
The bottom line is that few tools offer this kind of control over incident management.
Our rating: 4.5/5.
Read More: 15 Best IT Help Desk Software in 2025
Request management demands that you efficiently fulfill routine requests, like new equipment or system access demands.
For this, Jira offers a user-friendly portal where customers and employees can submit requests via email, help centers, or an embeddable widget.
Request types and workflows are customizable. You can edit them in Project settings and customize forms to collect necessary information.
For example, a request for a new laptop can have specific fields for hardware specifications.
There’s also plenty of automation to work with. You can automate request routing to the right team based on rules or trigger follow-ups for timely fulfillment.
We also loved real-time reporting and dashboards. These allow you to see request volumes, SLAs, and performance with customization options for detailed insights.
We also had a great time using the mobile app for issue management on the go with those push notifications.
However, since Jira itself has a high number of users, support response times are quite poor. Ironically, the tool you use to provide support itself doesn’t have the best support experience. Whatever the reason, it puts a small dent in an otherwise great experience.
Our rating: 4/5
While incident management focuses on immediate fixes, problem management digs deeper to eliminate root causes.
Jira supports this well.
We liked how it allows us to link multiple incidents to a single problem record, which helps identify patterns.
For example, we tested a recurring issue with database performance. By linking several incidents, we performed a root cause analysis that revealed an indexing problem, leading us to find a permanent fix.
For example, when we encountered a recurring database performance issue, we linked several related incidents to conduct a root cause analysis. This led us to an indexing problem, which we then addressed with a permanent fix.
Jira’s IT service management template includes a default problem management workflow for creating issues using the “Problem” issue type. This helped us document known errors and workarounds in a shared database to resolve similar issues in the future.
Moreover, integrating with Confluence is a boon for creating detailed documentation and enabled better knowledge sharing across our teams.
This was particularly helpful when onboarding new team members, as they could easily access past problem records and solutions.
Our only possible complaint is that the page response times could be faster.
Our rating: 4.5/5
Within the Jira ecosystem, an app is “an installable component that supplements or enhances the functionality of your instance.”
You can access over 3,000 of these Jira apps, all customized to fit your use case.
Atlassian is known for partnering with leading tech companies, including Slack, Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and more. These partnerships materialize in polished, ready-to-use integrations that you’d find in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Our design team needed to sync their recent designs with Jira issues so that the team could engage better with the work. How did it go?
The AdobeXD integration gave us easy access to the latest Adobe XD prototypes and design specs for Jira issues. With Invision, we brought our design workflow right into Jira to give every issue instant context. Draw.io stored all the diagram data, and we relied on Balsamiq for wireframes.
This is just one use case. Similar integrated workflows can be built for almost any use case. That’s one of the many reasons why Jira is loved by many.
Read More: Top 29 ITSM Experts To Follow in 2025
Here’s where cracks appear in an otherwise perfect service management experience.
Simply put, Jira is quite complex and has a steep learning curve. Plus, when you accidentally delete something, it’s gone forever. Recovery isn’t an option here.Things like setting up automations and configuring workflows are more complicated than they should be. Sometimes, even experienced folks can feel some friction while operating the platform.
We understand that it can get challenging for newcomers.
This is an issue for small and some medium businesses, which often lack the budget for dedicated service teams and rely on a single IT team.
Jira Service Management is rated 4.2 stars out of 5 in G2, based on 700+ reviews.
In Capterra, it’s rated 4.5 stars out of 5.
Users praise the software even on non-official forums like Reddit. Here’s one Redditor’s positive experience with the software
Via Reddit
However, other users wouldn’t use Jira unless they are in the Atlassian ecosystem.
Via Reddit
To be frank, it's not perfect.
Do a quick Google search on “Jira critical vulnerabilities,” and you’ll get what we mean. Saving you a search: Jira products have been affected by many critical vulnerabilities over the years.
For instance, the CVE 2025 24813 vulnerability affected Apache Tomcat versions bundled with Jira Service Management Data Center. It allows remote code execution (RCE) via a PUT request containing a base64-encoded serialized Java payload in Tomcat's session storage.
The slightly concerning part is that no authentication was required for this exploit (which has since been fixed). But vulnerabilities like this keep popping up.
Apart from these, here’s what users are saying about Jira:
Jira Service Management has tiered and transparent pricing. As transparency is becoming increasingly uncommon, we give it a thumbs-up. There’s a nice, usable free plan for three agents that will remain free forever. It includes templates for ITSM, Customer service, etc., and multi-channel support.
Next is the Standard plan, which costs $19.04 per agent per month and supports up to 20,000 agents with unlimited customers.
The Premium Plan is a nice step up at $47.82 per agent per month. With this plan, you can access Atlassian Intelligence, which improves service experiences for agents and customers and accelerates operations workflows with AI-powered incident and change management.
The custom Enterprise plan would make the most sense if you’re a large organization. In addition to everything in Premium, you also benefit from unlimited automations, and you can manage up to 150 sites.
Jira is great, no doubt, but there are equally good tools from competitors. Naturally, you’d choose the one that will make the most sense to you, feature-wise and financially. Let’s see how it compares against competitors.
|
Tool |
Pricing (Per agent/month, Annual Billing) |
Key features |
Pros |
Cons |
Ratings |
|
Jira Service Management |
Free (up to 3 agents), Standard: $19.04, Premium: $47.82, Enterprise: Custom |
Multi-channel requests, no-code form builder, Opsgenie for incident management, Atlassian integration |
Seamless Atlassian integration, customizable workflows, scalable |
Steep learning curve, complex setup, limited non-Atlassian integration |
G2: 4.2/5, Capterra: 4.5/5 |
|
ServiceNow |
Custom pricing (typically high) |
Comprehensive ITSM suite, AI/ML features, performance analysis, change management |
Extensive features, scalable, robust AI capabilities |
Expensive, slow with large data, resource-intensive setup |
G2: 4.3/5, Capterra: 4.5/5 |
|
Freshservice |
Starter: $19, Growth: $49, Pro: $95, Enterprise: $119 |
Self-service portal, AI insights, change management, omnichannel support, asset management |
User-friendly, good for SMBs, strong AI insights |
Limited integrations, customization may need coding, scalability issues |
G2: 4.6/5, Capterra: 4.5/5 |
|
Zendesk |
Team: $55, Growth: $89, Professional: $115, Enterprise: Custom |
Multi-channel support, automation, self-service portals, customer service focus |
Excellent for customer service, easy to use, strong omnichannel support |
Lacks advanced ITSM features, costly for large teams, and slower feature updates |
G2: 4.3/5, Capterra: 4.4/5 |
With Jira, you’re getting the best balance of pricing and integrations, especially for existing Atlassian users. However, the complexity is a turn-off for many.
ServiceNow, while feature-rich, is best only for large enterprises willing to invest heavily. Freshservice stands out for its user-friendliness and AI capabilities, which are ideal for SMBs, though integration limits may hinder scalability.
Zendesk is strong in customer service but won’t meet advanced ITSM needs. ManageEngine provides an affordable option with ITIL support, but its interface could be improved.
Jira Service Management is versatile and powerful. You’ll likely never run into a scenario where you wish you had more features to work with. The rich feature set, customizable workflows, and automation prowess put it high on our list.
The only issues we see that would deter you from using Jira are the learning curve and the complexity. If you have the resources and a skilled workforce, this should not be a problem.
The pricing is quite competitive. If you are one of those companies with an absurdly high number of service requests, you will pay a fortune.
Overall, Jira is a strong choice for optimizing your ITSM processes.
Jira is great at managing service requests and automating workflows, making it a favorite for IT teams that need to handle incidents and tasks efficiently.
But if you’re serious about saving time and energy as an IT team, you need Workwize.
Workwize helps you save time by managing IT hardware, from tracking devices to managing procurement and offboarding.
Use it to complement Jira’s powerful ITSM features for an IT team that functions fast using automated workflows.