Looking for a Jira alternative? Ask these six questions first

"We should move off Jira" is usually a symptom. Sometimes the tool is genuinely too heavy. Sometimes the workflow is too heavy and any tool would groan under it. These six questions separate the two.

1. How many fields are mandatory to create a ticket?

If it takes eight fields to file a bug, people file bugs in chat instead. A good small-team setup asks for a title, a project, and optionally a sprint and an estimate.

2. Who administers the tool?

Heavy tools assume a dedicated admin. If yours is a senior engineer doing it on Fridays, you are paying engineering salary in configuration time. Choose something whose defaults are already close to correct.

3. Can you see delivery health without building a report?

Velocity, throughput, overdue count, workload distribution, sprint burndown — these should be on a page you can open, not a dashboard you have to assemble.

4. Does the ticket page hold the full conversation?

Real-time comments, @mentions that notify, pasted screenshots, subtasks, and a visible history. When these are missing, decisions migrate to chat and are lost within a week.

5. What happens at sprint close?

Unfinished work should carry forward with a visible record, and the closed sprint should stay readable as a retrospective — what was committed, what shipped, what slipped and why.

6. What does it cost at your next headcount?

Model the price at 10, 25, and 50 seats, including the add-ons you will inevitably need. Tools that look cheap at five seats often are not at twenty-five.

If the answer is yes to "too heavy"

Migrate in one sprint, not one quarter: move only open work, keep the closed history in the old system read-only, and standardise on one board layout before importing anything. Doezze covers the six questions above out of the box, including sprint carry-over and closed-sprint retrospectives, and gives new workspaces two months free on five seats so you can migrate one team before committing.