TestRail vs Jira – Top Key Differences

TestRail is an independent tool built exclusively for test management. Jira is a project management tool that provides easy integration with test management tools. Many tools can be natively integrated with the Jira tool to get support for test management. Let’s discuss in detail, TestRail vs Jira features, limitations, and alternatives to both of these.

TestRail vs Jira – Overview

What is TestRail

TestRail is a test management tool that focuses on streamlining end-to-end quality assurance. It centralizes all test management activities such as test planning, test case designing, and test case execution. 

It provides integration to many automation tools such as Selenium, Playwright, Robot Framework, etc. It can be integrated with popular project management tools including Jira and Azure DevOps.

 It can be used for test tracking and traceability, reporting, and maintaining security compliance 

What is Jira

Jira is a project management tool by Atlassian, the purpose of Jira is to serve for complete software development life cycle activities such as development, requirement tracking, marketing, issue assignment, etc. 

Jira is known for its third-party tools integrations; it offers a wide range of tool integrations into its ecosystem, including test management tools. However, Jira natively doesn’t support test management and it requires one of the tools such as Xray, Zephyr, QMetry, etc. to be integrated to support test management.

What is Testsigma TMS

Testsigma is known for its automation capabilities, it also supports Test management for manual testing under its platform. Testsigma TMS provides a simple and intuitive user interface. 

Testsigma’s Test Management System (TMS) can be used for planning, designing, and documentation of test cases. It supports visual reports and dashboards for test execution. 

Testsigma TMS offers analytics related to testing activities which can be used to track the progress of your testing activities. As it is a modern tool, it uses many advanced capabilities using AI/ML to generate the test cases. 

Testsigma TMS offers flexible pricing plans based on customer needs that make it a budget-friendly tool for any type of organization.

Features of Testsigma TMS

Testsigma provides a test management system(TMS) under its platform, which offers manual test case activities maintenance and monitoring. Combining Testsigma’s no-code test automation and test management system makes Testsigma an all-in-one tool to cater to all of your testing activities. 

Additionally, Testsigma TMS is built considering the modern testing scope and it uses advanced capabilities to provide a rich experience to the end user. Let’s understand the key features of the Testsigma TMS.

Key Features

• Easy to setup and configure 
• A rich, intuitive, and self-learnable interface reduces the learning time and effort
• Supports complete test management life cycle including test planning, designing, and execution of test cases
• AI-based capabilities allow to create the test cases using the text or image which accelerates the testing efforts
• Groping and shareable test steps encourage a high degree of reusability and also help to design the test cases faster
• Allows many capabilities such as filtering, tracking, and setting the status of test cases and commenting on test cases
• Provides easy integration with Jira and other popular tools to create and track defects
• One can easily create the test running by combining multiple test cases and tracking them in real-time
• The test plan allows to combine multiple test runs and track them 
• Supports rich dashboards and reports with graphs and visualization
• Provides budget-friendly pricing options based on customer needs
• Provides dedicated technical support to answer all of your queries
• Testsigma is aggressively working on bringing the most useful features, soon you will be able to execute automation suites natively by linking them with Testsigma’s test management system(TMS).

TestRail vs Jira vs Testsigma TMS Table comparison

Though the above section provides detailed information about the tools and their pros and cons – it may be difficult to choose the right tool. 

The side-by-side comparison with focused functionalities might help to come to the decision on the right tool for your project. Below table makes the comparison of TestRail vs Jira vs Testsigma TMS.

Features	Testsigma TMS	Jira	TestRail
Purpose	Testsigma TMS can be used for managing and executing both manual and automation tests	Jira is a project management tool that supports project management activities. Offers test management only with third-party tools integration	TestRail is a Test Management platform to manage both manual and automated test cases
Setup and Configurations	Easy to set up, minimal configuration required. Requires only basic technical knowledge for integration.	Complex to set up, requires technical expertise to set up Jira and integrate third-party tools	TestRail requires proficient technical knowledge to set up and configure your project
Cost	Flexible and budget-friendly pricing plans based on customer requirement	Jira for test management requires multiple licenses such as Jira license and third-party tool license which makes it cost-heavy	Offers Professional Cloud, and Enterprise Cloud plans to choose from
Usability	Rich and intuitive user interface and self-explanatory navigations and menus. Requires less learning curve.	Easy to use, however the usability for test management depends on third-party tool features. The learning curve is high.	Combining many features into a single platform is confusing for beginners and increases the learning curve.
Support for Test management	Yes, supports all different test management features.	No in-built support test management relies on third-party tools.	Yes, supports all different test management features.
Integration with third-party tools	Yes, supports many third-party tools integration including Jira and other popular tools	Yes, supports many third-party tools including test management tools, CI/CD tools, automation tools, etc.	Yes, supports many project management tools, CI/CD tools, and automation tools
Core quality assurance features	Yes, supports planning, creating, and maintaining test case features natively.	No, doesn’t support core quality assurance features natively.	Yes, supports planning, creating, and maintaining test case features natively.
Advanced AI capabilities	Yes, provides many advanced AI capabilities including AI-based test case creation.	No inbuilt AI support for test management.	No inbuilt AI support for test management
Reports and Dashboards	Provides rich graphical dashboards and reports to track and monitor testing activities	No native reporting dashboard features for test management	Provides rich graphical dashboards and reports to track and monitor testing activities
Native support for automated test execution	Yes, natively supports automated test case execution and cloud-based test automation (WIP)	No native support for automated test execution	No native support for automated test execution. Only supports via third-party tools integration
Test step grouping	Yes, provides test step grouping and encourages a high degree of reusability	No built-in support for test cases.	Yes, provides step case grouping and encourages a high degree of reusability

TestRail vs Jira – Pros and Cons

Pros of TestRail

• Provides the capability to manage both automation and manual test cases in one platform
• A centralized platform reduces the duplication of test cases and helps in the easy maintenance of test cases
• Allows the reuse of test cases in multiple test runs and test cases can be copied across the suites/projects
• Allows to create and manage the custom fields and filters can be applied on those based on requirement
• Easy to migrate test cases from CSV files and other testing tools
• Provides the templates to accelerate the testing activities
• Shared test steps will be helpful to reuse the same tests without rewriting them.
• Provides test case versioning
• It allows linking the requirement, making an analysis of gaps and defect leakage
• It also provides features like collaboration, approval, test status
• It supports integration with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools.
• Supports integration using APIs to fetch, add, and manipulate virtually any test entity or artifact
• Supports automatic uploading of reports using CI/CD tools or popular automation framework
• Supports centralized reporting which helps to track all of your testing activities

Cons of TestRail

• TestRail has bundled many features into its platform, which makes the interface complex and hard to learn. Because of this, it has a steep learning curve
• Though TestRail has many good features, there are scalability issues. Few organizations have found that as the project grows they face performance issues
• Automation integration is limited to API and CLI, which requires good proficiency in programming languages
• TestRail has an API request limit, though it might not be a concern for small organizations, but large organizations may be impacted because of this
• Though it supports integration into project management tools like Jira, some users have opined that this integration is not robust and they found many issues with it.
• TestRail offers different pricing plans however they are not budget-friendly for small-scale organizations
• Though it supports integration with popular CI/CD and test automation frameworks, if you are using less-known tools, it may be difficult to integrate with TestRail.

Pros and Cons of Jira

Pros of Jira

• Jira supports many applications/plugins to integrate into its platform to extend Jira for test management
• Integrating Jira into a test management tool allows to perform end-to-end management of projects including testing life cycle
• It provides visual dashboards and widgets that are highly customizable
• Jira provides a user-friendly interface and a lot of documentation available over the web.
• Jira supports inbuilt defect tracking, no defect goes untracked.
• It supports custom workflows for test management with integration of third-party tools
• It provides the capability to integrate with an automation tool, that makes Jira a single source to track all testing activities

Cons of Jira

• Jira add-ons/plugins are costlier, as pricing for add-ons does not depend on add-on users rather it depends on the maximum number of Jira users
• No support for inbuilt test case management 
• Requires very good technical knowledge to integrate third-party tools into its system
• Jira natively doesn’t support any testing-related activities such as versioning, designing, and execution of test cases
• Jira completely relies on third-party tools for test management, and the usability and features also depend on tools that are integrated
• Jira’s Agile-first approach is cumbersome for test management for non-agile teams
• Maintaining end-to-end traceability across the requirements and defects is less seamless compared to dedicated test management tools.

TestRail vs Jira vs Testsigma TMS – Which One to Choose?

TestRail, Jira, and Testsigma TMS are all good tools, however, they might be built for different purposes. 

TestRail offers many unique features by allowing management of both manual and automation test cases and providing third-party integration with automation testing tools, CI/CD tools, and project management tools. However, it lacks the advanced capabilities and native automated test execution features. Additionally, it may not be budget-friendly for smaller organizations. 

Jira is a project management tool, it doesn’t offer any test management capabilities natively. Test management with Jira can be done only with the integration of third-party tools. These third-party tools integration makes Jira cost heavy as the customer needs to pay for licenses for 2 tools. It makes test management complex. 

Testsigma TMS is a modern and advanced test management tool that offers seamless integration with project management tools like Jira and offers end-to-end management of testing activities. It is also user-friendly and for organizations, it is budget-friendly. 

Nonetheless, the right tool for the project depends on various factors such as type of organization, type of the project, integration needs, skill sets required, compliance, etc. The right tool can be chosen only after evaluation of the organization/project requirement.

Conclusion

Project management tools and test management tools both play crucial roles when it comes to managing the application life cycle. 

Project management tool provides broader tracking and analytics related to the project, whereas, test management focuses only on testing activities. 

Typically, dedicated testing tools provide many more features for test management than project management tools. Testsigma TMS is one of the modern tools for managing all of your testing activities. It natively allows the execution of automated test scripts and creating and maintaining manual test cases. Though there are many tools in the market for test management most of them lack the intuitive UI, advanced AI capabilities, and other required features. Testsigma’s test management platform – Testsigma TMS is built after carefully evaluating the organization’s needs and by considering the tester’s effort and learning curve.