I was tasked with evaluating project management tools for our marketing and operations teams. We're a non-tech company, so I assumed Jira would be too complex and Azure DevOps would be strictly for developers.
After a two-week trial of both, I was surprised. Azure DevOps Boards, even with its dev terminology, felt more straightforward for our use case. Jira's flexibility became a burden with endless configuration choices.
The key factors for us were cost and structure. Azure DevOps gave us clear work item hierarchies (Epics, Features, Stories) out of the box, and the basic plan covers unlimited users for what we need. Jira's per-user pricing added up quickly, and setting up a similar hierarchy felt like we were building the tool ourselves.
Has anyone else used Azure DevOps for non-technical projects? I'm particularly curious about reporting and dashboard capabilities compared to Jira for tracking campaign timelines and resource planning.