An honest comparison
NEWWORK Projects vs Jira
Jira can be configured to do almost anything, and many teams have spent years doing that. NEWWORK Projects starts from a narrower question: what does a ticket need to say when an agent builds it, and how do you prove it was done?
Last reviewed October 2026, from Jira’s own public pages. Sources below.
Where Jira is genuinely good
- ✓The largest ecosystem of apps and integrations in the category.
- ✓Deeply configurable workflows, fields and permissions.
- ✓Confluence, Jira Service Management and Bitbucket alongside, from one vendor.
- ✓Proven at very large organisations.
Choose Jira if
You depend on marketplace apps, custom workflows or service management, or your organisation is standardised on Atlassian.
Choose NEWWORK Projects if
Agents build a growing share of your code and you want tickets that are ready for them, done that is proven, and agent hours on the timesheet, without configuring it first.
Side by side, for agentic work
| NEWWORK Projects | Jira | |
|---|---|---|
| What an agent gets from a ticket | A brief: intent, context, behaviour, constraints and acceptance checks. A readiness score says whether it is ready for an agent, and open questions keep it from being handed over. | The work item as it was written. Rovo can help draft and summarise. |
| Agent access | MCP by URL and personal token, or the newwork-projects-mcp package. On every plan, including Free. Never counted or metered. | The Atlassian Rovo MCP server (OAuth 2.1). Rovo and agents need a Standard, Premium or Enterprise plan; enriched Teamwork Graph calls consume Rovo credits. |
| Proof of done | Acceptance checks ticked with evidence (pull request, commit, test run). Done tickets show Verified, or what is missing. | Workflow statuses and conditions; evidence depends on your process and apps. |
| Agent work in time tracking | Live timers for people and agents. Agent timers are marked “via AI agent” and booked like anyone’s. | Time tracking for people, with more through marketplace apps. |
| Client work | Change requests with prices and approval, project budgets in hours or money, cost centers, capacity planning. | Possible with Jira Service Management and marketplace apps. |
| Moving over | Direct Jira import with comments, change history, logged work, attachments and links to code, or CSV on every plan. A two-way sync keeps both in step while teams switch one at a time (Business). | — |
Where we fall short today
- –No marketplace of extensions: GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket for code, Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, Asana, ClickUp and CSV for import, Slack, Teams, webhooks and a REST API, MCP for agents.
- –Nova and Brainstorm read code from Bitbucket; GitHub and GitLab repositories are for coding agents only.
- –Single sign-on is Google or Microsoft; SCIM is part of Enterprise, and SAML comes with Enterprise agreements.
- –No native mobile apps; the web app installs on phones and computers, with notifications.
- –Agents connect with personal tokens; OAuth sign-in for MCP clients is planned.
Sources · reviewed October 2026
Products change. If something here is out of date, write to hello@newworkprojects.com and we will correct it.
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