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Pealboard and Jira Software

Jira is a more capable, more general work-management tool than Pealboard, and it stores your work in its own database. Pealboard stores nothing of yours: the work item is the GitHub issue your engineers already have open.

Which of these is you

Choose Jira Software

Your work does not live in GitHub Issues, or your engineers do not want it to.
You need a workflow engine: custom states, transitions, conditions and validators that a team designs.
You need a no-code rule builder rather than a fixed set of behaviors.
You are already inside the Atlassian estate and want one identity, one marketplace and one invoice across it.

Choose Pealboard

Your engineers already work in GitHub Issues and you do not want a second place the work lives.
The people who need to see and triage the work are not engineers and should not need a developer tool.
Customers, partners or internal staff without a GitHub account need to submit requests and follow them.
You want the cost of the tool to fall on the handful of people who use it, not on everybody who touches the work.

What was confirmed about Jira Software

Each line was read on Jira Software's own pages on the date in its source. Nothing about Jira Software appears on this page without one.

Jira ships dozens of ready-made templates, including Scrum, Kanban, bug tracking, DevOps and business templates.^[3]
Automation is a no-code rule builder for if-this-then-that rules, with single-project, multi-project and global rules. It is included at no extra cost on every plan, and how many times it may run is limited by plan.^[2]
Board, list, timeline and calendar views are confirmed on the feature pages.^[1]
Jira advertises "Rich APIs" and 3,000-plus integrations in the Atlassian Marketplace.^[1]
SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and audit logs are not part of a Jira plan. They are sold as Atlassian Guard, a separate product layered across Atlassian Cloud.^[4]
Atlassian does offer a customer portal, in Jira Service Management. It shares a new request with the reporter’s customer organization by default, groups customers by email domain, and maps internal workflow states many-to-one onto a status name shown to the customer.^[7]
Jira’s own pricing page did not return prices to this research on eight or more attempts across two agents, because it renders them with a client-side widget. No Jira price appears anywhere on this site as a result, and none was filled in from memory.^[5]

The difference, line by line

Pealboard	Jira Software
The work item is a GitHub issue. Pealboard has no data store of its own to migrate into or out of.	Every general work-management tool in this research stores the work item in its own database. A team already working in GitHub Issues either keeps two systems in step or moves off GitHub.^[6]
Billing counts the members who sign into Pealboard. Engineers work in GitHub, never sign in, and are never counted.	Every product in this research requires every participant, engineers included, to hold a paid seat in that tool.^[6]
A person with no GitHub account submits and follows a request in a portal, and the request is a GitHub issue.	Jira Service Management’s request-to-issue mapping assumes Jira as the internal tracker. Its portal writes into Jira, not into GitHub.^[7]
The automations are a fixed set: notifications, status derivation, the portal label, adding to a project on creation. There is no rule builder.	A no-code rule builder with single-project, multi-project and global rules, included on every plan and limited by plan on execution volume.^[2]
Every price is on the pricing page, in full, with no widget and no sales call.	Jira’s pricing page did not render prices to this research at all.^[5]

What was not verified

These are gaps in the research, not findings about Jira Software. They are here because a comparison that prints only what was confirmed reads as though the rest was checked and found wanting.

Jira’s object model, its filtering and saved views, bulk edit, global search, keyboard shortcuts, mobile apps and import and export were all left as "not verified" rather than guessed at: the feature pages that would confirm them returned 404.
Every Jira price, every free-tier limit, and which Jira tier (if any) bundles Atlassian Guard.
Whether the execution limits on Jira automation are per project or per site, and what the numbers are: the support document that would say returned 404.

What Pealboard is not trying to be

Pealboard has no iteration-planning ceremony beyond GitHub's own Iteration field, no estimation model, and no custom workflow engine. Its board is a layout over a GitHub Project's ownStatus field, not a new engineering process.

That is a decision and not a shortfall to be filled in later. GitHub Projects exposes no way to author project workflows through its API, so a workflow engine built on top of GitHub would have to keep its own copy of the truth — which is the second system of record this product exists to avoid. If a workflow engine is what you need, Jira is a better answer than Pealboard will ever be.

Look at your own repositories

The Free plan connects three repositories and needs no card. Nothing is imported, and nothing in GitHub changes.

Start free

Other comparisons

Sources

atlassian.com/software/jira/features — the feature list, the confirmed views, "Rich APIs" and "3000+ integrations available in the Atlassian Marketplace". Fetched 2026-09-09.
atlassian.com/software/jira/features/automation — "Automation is a no-code rule builder that enables customers to build if-this-then-that-rules"; single-project, multi-project and global rules; "included at no extra cost" on every plan, with execution limits set by plan. Fetched 2026-09-09.
atlassian.com/software/jira/templates — "dozens of ready-made templates" — Scrum, Kanban, bug tracking, DevOps and business templates. Fetched 2026-09-09.
atlassian.com/software/jira/premium — SAML SSO, SCIM and audit logs are sold as Atlassian Guard, a separate product layered across Atlassian Cloud, not bundled into a Jira plan. Fetched 2026-09-09.
atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing — fetched repeatedly across two agents and never returned pricing content; the page renders prices with a client-side widget. Fetched 2026-09-09.
rohan-platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md §3.2 — the report's own synthesis across the ten general work-management tools it examined. Fetched 2026-09-09.
rohan-platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md §2 — Jira Service Management's customer portal: request sharing with the reporter's customer organization, domain grouping, and the customer-facing status mapping. Fetched 2026-09-09.

Recorded in rohan-platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md and rohan-platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md. Jira Software is a trademark of its owner; Pealboard is not affiliated with it.