Anybody migrate from JIRA?

Many thanks for this post. As chance would have it, I am just trying to get people in a project that I am working on to NOT use Jira and go for Airtable instead. I am adding this reply primarily in order to ensure that I receive updates on the conversation; if at some point I can contribute something more substantial I would be happy to share our experiences using Airtable as a Jira-substitute.

Yeah. Honestly it looks a whole lot better use-wise. Only thing this is lacking in my opinion is automation. I.e. can I even set a field to a specific value after the status changes automatically? That would be kind of sad(I may be wrong about this but I don’t think that is the case).

While I have not migrated anything from JIRA to Airtable, I am familiar with JIRA (moreso Airtable). The con, which I would argue is actually a pro, is that Airtable is completely do-it-yourself, meaning any functionality or features JIRA may do for you now will likely need to be recreated in Airtable. However, this also gives you even more flexibility to make the Airtable base what you need and add functionality as it becomes necessary.

That being said, and without knowing the ins and outs of your use case, Airtable has enough functionality to create a formula field which would auto-update based on another field’s value (in this case, a status change). However, you would need to write these formulas for what you need.

You mean like this?

Not quite. If the status switched to closed, I would want a field called “resolution date” to be filled in with the date of the status change, and stay that way.

There are ways to accomplish that in Airtable, however, they do require some creativity. Not as straightforward as JIRA, probably.

Can you give me a rundown? I know there is zapier but I would prefer not to have to do that!

Sure - so a simple way that comes to mind is to have your Resolution Date field be a link to a record in another table of Resolution Dates. When you are closing out a record in your main table, instead of putting in a static Date into the Resolution Date field, you create a new Resolution Date record whose “Name” is a TimeStamp of when it was created.

Here’s a really bare-bones instance to give you an idea:

Clearly, there’s a lot more you’d want to do there (like adding ID#'s or something to those Resolution Date records so they don’t all look the same), but it’s a way to timestamp the closing of a record with pretty minimal effort (and it could very easily be automated by Zapier if desired).

Airtable is capable of a lot of things that don’t appear possible on the surface if you apply a bit of creativity in using linked records and formulas.

Thanks for this thread. I actually want to use Airtable and Jira. Our developers love Jira and integration with Bitbucket is great among other things. However, I find Backlog management particularly before we begin to do work difficult. So I downloaded the Product Management Base. It seems a bit like overkill to me.

I would really like to start tickets with the Business Owners in Airtable then send them to Jira for execution. I would also like to close the loop once the ticket is done. I’m going to try what @Jeremy_Oglesby suggests above for status.

You can integrate Airtable with Jira via Zapier without too much effort, especially if you only want to push the data one-way with JIRA being the “source of truth” I did this for one project where the Devs loved Jira, but the PMs and Marketing folks absolutely hated it. The PMs and Marketing folks much preferred viewing and parsing the data in Airtable, and using Blocks to reorganize the data without dealing with the clunkiness of Jira. Also, the records in Airtable can easily be linked to their Jira entries, as Jira stories can be directly linked and have a simple link structure to allow the links to be automatically created with a simple formula and the Jira story #.

For what it’s worth, I decided to give Airtable a shot a little under a week ago. A couple days later, I 86’d the JIRA instance I had (just the low level $10/month plan) and I’ve been going fullbore with Airtable.

There were a couple things I was using JIRA for.

1. (shocker) tracking some software projects that I’ve more or less neglected a while back.
2. Hacking together some custom issues and workflows for tracking some state based legislation.
3. More or less general project tracking.

While I was able to accomplish these things, JIRA had a few big turnoffs for me.

The main one was the interface change that they did. I didn’t use it a whole lot (which may have been a contributor), but I just found it clumsy and difficult to navigate to the boards.

Another was not being able to publicly share a dashboard. This was in relation to the legislation tracking stuff.

Both of these issues I’ve quickly found to be, well, non-issues with Airtable. The ability to publicly share a view (or a base) is great.

In terms of project tracking, I’ve developed out a couple different approaches with Airtable (one for my full time job, and one for work I do for the flight school I rent my aircraft from), and both of those have been working great. When I find a data model/workflow deficiency? Much easier to fix than in JIRA in my opinion.

I’m sure JIRA is great for certain things, but in my case, I quickly found Airtable to much better for my needs.

Probably the best facebook ad to have shown up on my feed, really.

A quick update related to Jira - we now have a Jira block that allows you to sync items from Jira into Airtable! Users can now collaborate with greater flexibility and visibility when working with engineering teams. You can read more about the functionality in the support article here: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046053154

To sign up for the beta, check out: https://airtable.com/shrdrxIMhGZaOpJdW

Is there any way I can update a status field in Airtable with the status of a Jira Issue in real time?