Breeze is the answer to complicated and bloated JIRA

All businesses could use a project management tool. However, not all businesses have a rocket scientist in their team.

We know that these two affirmations might sound weird put together, but they represent a challenge that led us to create our own project management tool, Breeze.

For a long time, we used Atlassian JIRA Agile to organize and manage our projects. If you’ve ever used this tool, you might know how complicated it is. You need to be a rocket scientist to properly use it (starting to understand the beginning of this article?).

JIRA was too technical for an accountant or marketing manager to create a new project and that was a big problem… that we solved. But we’ll get there soon. First, we’ll tell you...

Why We Started Using JIRA

JIRA Software is a tool for teams to plan and monitor their work and, a couple of years ago, we decided to start using it for large scale enterprise projects in the telecommunication sector.

Originally, we used it as a bug tracking and ticketing system with source control management and, eventually, we gave JIRA Agile a try, in order to add more agile tools.

This meant that everyone on our team would have to start using the agile board - and this was when we realized that JIRA wasn’t for us. 

The system was overcomplicated and creating new projects took too long, which defeated one of the main purposes of using a project management tool: to increase the team’s productivity levels.

Which Problems Did We Find With JIRA?

In short, and as mentioned before, JIRA was too complex and it felt like it was slowing us down, instead of helping us streamline our work process:

• The initial setup was painfully slow and the learning curve too steep.
• It’s too difficult to implement workflows and set up projects.
• The task management features aren’t always straightforward.
• It’s not visual enough.
• It doesn’t include collaboration features.
• It’s quite expensive.
• You can’t access it on your smartphone.
• The backlog management isn’t great.
• The user interface is hard to understand.
• Although customization is possible, it’s too time-consuming.
• It’s quite a slow tool and it doesn’t allow you to disable tools you don’t need in order to make it lighter.
• JIRA documentation is very vast and cumbersome, which can be frustrating since you need to check it for most actions you make.

Our Solution With Breeze

Faced with these issues, we decided that our best chance would be to create our own project management tool and that’s how Breeze was born!

With a minimalistic design and a straightforward interface, Breeze can be used any team member, from marketers to project managers, designers, developers, and more.

Instead of being cluttered with unnecessary features, Breeze offers just enough features to help you get your work done, including:

• Tasks lists. You can organize your projects with task lists, which include each task’s status, due date, assigned user, and relevant documents.
• Time tracking and budgets. You can set your billing rate for each project and keep track of hours spent per user and per task.

• Discussions. You can easily give your team member’s feedback and discuss any details with them.
• Project progress. You can get a high-level overview of your projects, including statuses, due dates, and percentage of work completed.
• File storage. You can store all your files and documents, with no limits or quotas.
• Reports. You can receive daily or hourly recap emails, as well as weekly time tracking reports. You can also access and export reports regarding time tracking, tasks, workflow, and more.

Breeze also has a mobile app, both for iOS and Android, and it offers integrations with several other useful tools, such as Slack, Zapier, and Zendesk.

Just like any other tool, JIRA has its strengths and weaknesses and we believe it can work well for big enterprises. Breeze, on the other hand, is a better option if you’re looking for a simple tool that works well.

Get more details on how Jira and Breeze stack up in our Jira vs Trello vs Breezecomparison!