Company Konsu used the Jira ticket management system, but in 2022 was forced to quickly find and implement a replacement due to the cessation of service. In our article, we talk about the selection process and the results of the replacement.

Jira

For over 7 years, our company has used the Jira ticket management system. Over the years, many customizations have been made to meet the needs of the company:

  • ticket forms
  • automation of ticket routing and escalation
  • analysis of employee workload
  • service level agreements (SLA)
  • Kanban boards
  • Gantt charts
  • customer satisfaction surveys
  • reports based on separate plugins

During this time, the service worked without any issues and easily, reliably provided ticket processing for over 800 requests per month.

In 2022, we were forced to quickly find and implement a replacement for the Jira system due to the cessation of services for its cloud version.

Available alternatives

We have experience testing and implementing OTRS 1C:Itilium. We also considered options such as Neaktor, Kaiten, Planfix, and Yandex.Tracker. It was important for us that the service’s stability did not depend on the international situation. In addition, we decided to move away from cloud solutions in favor of on-site deployment.

Our needs

Our main services are accounting and legal services, as well as services for conducting various types of audits. An important part of our services is IT services for providing access to 1C products, projects for implementing and improving 1C products, which entails the need to solve a large number of requests and problems from both internal and external clients, each with their own nuances, requirements, separate projects, reports, and compliance with SLAs.

Choosing a solution

We will not compare the products in detail, but will limit ourselves to the key characteristics that were critical for our company.

Kaiten

Relatively inexpensive solution with a lot of possibilities, but the interface could be more intuitive and pleasant.

Yandex.Tracker

Of all the options, it performed the worst. Confusing filter management, performance issues, difficulty obtaining support.

1С

Solutions based on 1C are flexible. In addition, we have 1C developers on staff for their adaptation and integration. However, in this case, we decided to consider other options with a more user-friendly interface.

Neaktor

The system was one of those on which we practically began implementation, but we had to abandon it due to the complexity of implementing our model of handling requests and managing ticket visibility.

Planfix

Planfix attracted us with significantly higher flexibility and the ability to implement future needs. It took over 3 months to test the capabilities and conduct a trial implementation. Within 8 months of launch, we were able to implement almost everything that was previously in Jira:

  • project management with the ability to build workload reports
  • progress tracking
  • Gantt chart building
  • invoicing
  • management of requests and incidents
  • a flexible mechanism with automatic ticket distribution
  • a convenient mechanism for tracking development with consideration of SLAs, a large number of queues, and the ability to generate reports or output to various Kanban boards

It is worth noting separately the ability to create intuitive views in the form of a planner, which can be customized for each queue or department, as well as flexible management of rights in the context of projects, templates, and clients. We received positive feedback from clients and employees and consider further development of this product to be promising.

The transition was forced, but we were able to find a local solution that fully meets our business processes at the level of foreign counterparts. Moreover, we were able to reduce costs – the price of the new solution Planfix is ​​5 EUR per user (for comparison, Jira cost about 15 EUR).

1C IT infrastructure IT outsourcing IT security IT solutions