Alternatives to Jira integrated collaboration tools
Compare alternatives to Jira integrated collaboration tools and learn how to collaborate on planning and delivery without losing Jira as your source of truth.
TL;DR
- Collaboration tools are great, but plans break when conversation happens outside Jira with no traceability.
- Choose tools that either integrate well with Jira or reduce the need to collaborate outside Jira for planning work.
- Easy Agile brings collaborative planning into Jira via story maps, roadmaps, and program boards.
What “Jira integrated collaboration” usually includes
Teams typically mean one or more of these:
- Chat and notifications (Slack, Microsoft Teams)
- Documentation (Confluence, Notion)
- Whiteboarding (Miro, FigJam)
- Video updates (Loom)
- Decision tracking and status broadcasts
The risk is not using the tools. The risk is losing decisions, context, and handovers.
Alternatives, grouped by job to be done
- Chat first collaboration: Slack, Teams. Best for rapid discussion and alerts.
- Docs first collaboration: Notion, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365. Best for long form knowledge.
- Workshop collaboration: Miro, FigJam. Best for discovery and alignment workshops.
- Async updates: Loom, short recorded demos, lightweight written updates.
Reduce context switching by collaborating on plans in Jira
If your biggest collaboration pain is planning, the easiest way to improve it is to collaborate where the work lives.
Easy Agile supports this by making Jira a collaborative planning space:
- Easy Agile TeamRhythm for story mapping, refinement, and team planning in Jira.
- Easy Agile Roadmaps for product roadmaps that stakeholders can view without relying on slide decks.
- Easy Agile Programs for coordinating teams, surfacing dependencies, and supporting PI style planning.
You can still use Slack, Teams, or a docs tool, but keep the plan anchored to Jira.
A simple operating model that scales
- Make Jira the source of truth for scope and status.
- Capture decisions in Jira issues (or link to a doc where appropriate).
- Use collaboration tools for discussion, then summarise outcomes back into Jira.
- Prefer Jira connected planning views over external diagrams for anything that changes often.
Start with all the Easy Agile products to see which planning views fit your workflow.