Etapero vs Jira

What Jira is

Jira is Atlassian’s issue tracker, available as Jira Cloud and as Jira Data Center for your own infrastructure. Jira’s timeline plans work and dependencies within one team and project, and cross-team planning (Plans) comes with the Premium and Enterprise plans. We found no critical path calculation or baselines in the official documentation.

Jira’s strengths

• The work data is already there. Teams keep tasks, statuses and assignees in Jira every day — nothing has to be retyped elsewhere.
• Flexibility. Issue types, fields, workflows and boards are tailored to each team.
• An ecosystem. For scheduling there are apps such as Structure and BigPicture, and Plans in the top plans.
• Reporting on work. Dashboards and filters give a team picture with no manual collection.

What users say

The experience of Russian teams on Habr, a Russian tech community, is similar: dates and Gantt charts in Jira are weak out of the box, and companies build them themselves — with apps or their own rules.

In 2021 the Ozon Tech team turned down external services such as GanttPro and Excel because they would have to duplicate Jira data, and the built-in roadmap only suited a quarterly view. They moved to Structure Gantt: dependencies between tasks, a snapshot of the initial plan to compare with, and workload by assignee. The downsides they name: about a month to learn and few practical examples in the documentation.

Bimeister, a company of 200–500 people, built one company roadmap with Structure in 2023. Before anything worked, issue types and required fields had to be unified across all teams; the authors admit their risk model came out simple and the roadmap does not cover the whole project cycle.

At Karuna about 80 teams use Plans: the authors call the Gantt chart and the dependency graph the most valuable part, and capacity planning “frankly raw”. The LANIT team, who rolled out Jira on a public-sector project, conclude that the tracker “does not replace project management”.

A separate topic since 2022 is working with Jira in Russia after Atlassian’s restrictions. A blog of another vendor describes many large companies staying on unsupported versions, security updates for Jira Server having stopped, and migration taking one to two years.

On Reddit the same apps are compared: Plans is called a quick way to build a roadmap on top of Jira but without proper milestones, and Structure more flexible but slower (2025). In another thread, BigPicture, Structure or Plans are suggested for an “MS Project-like” view, with a warning that plugins turning Jira into a scheduler add noticeable complexity.

Stories of adoption and moving

The largest public story is Rosatom. As the Greenatom team tells it on Habr, the corporation was leaving Jira and Confluence, a tender among Russian systems produced no winner, and in the end they built their own system, Atom.Project — according to the article, on a fork of OpenProject; comments on it add other details about its base. They moved more than 2,000 projects and 50,000 active tasks; for about a year both systems ran side by side.

The Ozon and Bimeister stories show the other path — keep Jira as the source of truth and build the plan on top of it. That path works when tickets are kept with discipline and the plan does not need to write back to the tracker.

How Etapero differs

Etapero does not compete with Jira or try to replace it. It covers the level the tracker lacked in the stories above: a project plan with phases, milestones and dependencies, the critical path, a baseline and slippage against it, and a portfolio of every project with goals, risks and problems.

The Jira link is built to need no sign-off from the tracker’s owners. A project’s issues are chosen by label or epic, and the sync only reads Jira — it sends nothing but sign-in, search and read requests. A plan row can be linked to an issue, and the system offers to update its status and assignee when they differ from Jira. Work outside the tracker — procurement, approvals, certification — sits in the plan alongside the rest.

Compared with apps inside Jira, the plan does not depend on how disciplined teams are with ticket fields: the work breakdown is kept separately and does not break when teams fill issues in differently. The flip side is that Etapero does not change data in Jira, so teams still keep dates in their tickets themselves.