App comparison: Dashboard Hub versus Custom Charts for Jira & Confluence

What is Dashboard Hub for Jira?

Dashboard Hub for Jira is an Atlassian app from Appfire where users can create two kinds of dashboards. One is a Dashboard Hub dashboard, completely separate from Jira’s native dashboards. The second is a native Jira dashboard which you can add their gadgets and charts to.

Dashboard Hub for Jira: Strengths

• Dashboard Hub supports a number of integrations, including ones that let you have Jira and external, non-Jira data side by side on the same dashboard. These integrations include Bitbucket, Opsgenie and Monday.com. These integrations broaden your reporting options, allowing you display data from other corners of your organization.

• Dashboard Hub dashboards can be shared externally with non-licensed users by way of public links, offering visibility to a much bigger number of stakeholders.

• You get 86 preconfigured reporting gadgets tailored to common agile, IT service management, and project management use cases, as well as customized charts you can make using the Custom JQL gadget.

• On Dashboard Hub dashboards, users can restrict access to certain reports and dashboards.

Dashboard Hub for Jira: Weaknesses

• The amount of gadgets available is a curse as well as a blessing. Having 86 gadgets to choose from can make the user experience overwhelming. Also, when you click “Add gadget”, all 86 gadgets are displayed, even if they relate to integrations you don’t have. That means you have to trawl through all of them to find what you need.

• The gadget that lets you make a fully customized chart only has options for charting by a custom Jira Query Language (JQL) statement or a saved Jira filter. That means, in order to make your own chart, you have to know how to write JQL or make saved filters. And a lot of average Jira users don’t (or don’t want to).

• You can’t rename/combine segments, hide/show percentages, add chart descriptions, or adjust the legend position on Dashboard Hub gadgets (even the Custom JQL one), limiting your visualization options.

• You’re more limited when trying to use Dashboard Hub gadgets on a native Jira dashboard. On a Jira dashboard, you can’t dynamically filter, export, duplicate, or externally share Dashboard Hub charts.

• You can’t change the default units for time, default formatting for dates, or default chart colors, which means that making the chart you want to make can take longer.

• If you want to report on time in status, you can only use the preconfigured gadgets such as lead time and cycle time; you can’t make a customized chart about time in status using the Custom JQL gadget.

• The user interface isn’t very pretty or easy to navigate and it takes a long time to figure out what all the options are.

• The preconfigured charts don’t have live previews so you can see how the data will display; only the Custom JQL one does.

• You can’t change the chart type on the preconfigured reports, and a few of them you really want to! For example, the lead time report is some sort of bizarre pie chart (or ring chart?) that doesn’t show anything that your eyes will understand!

• The rest of the charts aren’t that pretty either. Everything looks too thin. The bar charts are too skinny and the colored frames on the tile charts are too fine. The result being that neither chart type ‘pops’ or catches the eye, limiting audience engagement.

• There are no chart templates; your only option is to make a chart and copy/clone it.

How Custom Charts for Jira wins

Reporting IN Jira, with no limitations

Custom Charts for Jira was made for reporting on Jira’s native dashboards. Dashboard Hub wasn’t; it started out as an app that required you to make reports on a separate dashboard outside of Jira. Although you can now have Dashboard Hub reports on Jira dashboards, you’re much more limited than if you use theirs, e.g. you can’t dynamically filter, export or duplicate charts. With Custom Charts, there are no such limitations.

4 Jira gadgets that do everything (instead of 86 that do one thing)

Custom Charts doesn’t need 86 gadgets. Its 4 gadgets can do everything you need. The main gadget, Custom Charts, lets you make nearly all the reports covered by Dashboard Hub’s vast library. Meanwhile, the Issue List gadget lets you have a list of issue details alongside your visuals, Simple Search lets you dynamically filter charts, and Shared Dashboards allows you to externally share data with customers in the Jira Service Management portal (and soon everyone, through public links).

No need for Jira Query Language (JQL) or saved filters

With Custom Charts, you can make fully customized reports just by selecting options from dropdowns. There is absolutely no need to use JQL or saved filters if you’d rather not, whereas Dashboard Hub requires it (probably one of the reasons they have 86 other gadgets).

More reporting customization options

With Custom Charts, you can rename segments, combine them, hide/show percentages, add chart descriptions, and adjust the legend position. This gives you much more freedom to visualize data how you want to.

Time in status for Jira reporting options

You can make all kinds of reports to visualize time in status per sprint, epic, assignee, and more, whereas in Dashboard Hub, you’re limited to specific time in status visualizations that you can’t change. You can change default time and date units and formatting in Custom Charts, and you can also configure default colors, so that charts load with a set color scheme.

Prettier Jira charts and easier user interface

Our charts are nicer-looking (fatter bars and lines and rounded edges!) and our user interface is much more intuitive. It doesn’t take long to figure out what the options are.

Jira chart templates

If you’re not sure where to start, Custom Charts comes with chart templates (and soon dashboard templates too). You can also save the charts you make as new templates in your instance.

Overall, Custom Charts for Jira is the right choice for users looking for simplicity, ease of use, and the power to do data storytelling in the way you see fit.