JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable processes across a number of people.
Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes.
In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks, HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow.
Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) require ad-hoc semi-structured data.
In small teams, even if repeatable process would help you, it's not worth the cost of setting up a system - you achieve it by social means.
Trello also has many, many use-cases where you want to start something quick, or personal. In this case it really shines, with near-zero friction to get started.
This. I hear a lot of whining about JIRA, which is fair since it's a huge pain to configure and learn all the quirks of, but usually it's overkill for those folks (perhaps myself included right now).
But the folks who have a working process and a large number of people and teams are usually complaining the other way round: that no tool supports their workflow. Which is where JIRA shines. I don't know another tool that can be configured to such ridiculous detail.
The Trello acquisition makes total sense because it fills in that gap that JIRA is bad at.
JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable processes across a number of people.
Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes.
In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks, HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow.
Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) require ad-hoc semi-structured data.
In small teams, even if repeatable process would help you, it's not worth the cost of setting up a system - you achieve it by social means.
Trello also has many, many use-cases where you want to start something quick, or personal. In this case it really shines, with near-zero friction to get started.
Scott, CEO Atlassian