Recommendations for Management Dashboard: Jira vs Power BI

[Rachel]

Hi,

I'm exploring options for building a management dashboard and would appreciate your insights on platform suitability—specifically between Jira and Power BI.

The dashboard would need to cover:

• Manpower productivity: Billable vs non-billable time utilization
• Project overview: Internal/external classification, section, status
• Project productivity: Profit & loss, progress tracking, risk visibility

In our current setup:

• We use custom columns to track time spent per epic
• Project status and risks are stored within Atlassian tools (primarily Jira)

Given this context, would Jira alone be sufficient for building such a dashboard, or would integrating with Power BI offer better flexibility and visualization? I'm particularly interested in how each platform handles cross-project reporting and financial metrics.

Thanks in advance!

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Rachel,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community. 

A Jira dashboard has the advantage of being easy to create and set-up, no data export outside of Jira is necessary, and the data displayed is in real-time.    

Jira does not offer so many dashboard gadgets for such type of stats, but you can add additional gadgets by searching and installing for apps (plugins) on Atlassian Marketplace.

In case you consider the idea of using a Jira app, our Great Gadgets app offers many gadgets that you can use for building a Management Dashboard. Very useful for you can be the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget that allows you to created pivot tables, heat-maps and pivot charts (just like in Excel). Here are some examples:

With the Advanced Issue Filter Formula gadget offered by the same app you can calculate and display counts, sums (of a field), averages, etc or to combine them in complex match formulas to display ratios, percentages, etc

 

If you have any questions or need help with our gadgets, feel free to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Rachel welcome to the Atlassian Community Forums!

A Dashboard shows the as-is, actual, real-time situation and has no BI capabilities

Power BI gives your historical BI capabilities.

If you already have Power BI within your organization, I would suggest to either:

• integrate Jira with Power BI
• install a connector from the Marketplace
• use a custom solution with middleware for your data

In the end, Power BI will give you more capabilities to drill down, filter, group, create reports and dashboards than Jira out-of-the-box.