Welcome to part two of Battle of the Apps, a series of short articles comparing various Jira reporting apps with our own Jira reporting add-ons, Custom Charts for Jira and Custom Charts for Confluence.
In this article, we tackle the Rich Filters Atlassian add-on from Qotilabs.
In part one we compared native Jira reports and in part three we compare EazyBI.
Rich Filters for Jira Overview
Qotilabs is a product and services company in the Atlassian ecosystem. Their primary product is Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards, which extends Jira’s dashboard functionality by adding gadgets that allow users to filter dashboards and build more complex reports. Rich Filters and Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence work in extremely similar ways, and address many of the same user pain points.
Strengths of Rich Filters
- Rich Filters is miles above the native Jira reporting, as it does come with replacements for all of the native gadgets plus more (Filter Results, Pie Charts, Bar Charts, Counters, Gauges, Time Series).
- Extensions:
- For more advanced time tracking reporting, the Rich Filters: Time Tracking Dashboards can give you plenty of robust worklog reporting.
- With the Rich Filters: PDF Reports for Jira free extension, you can export PDFs of entire dashboards.
- Rich Filters can be displayed in Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center without purchasing another app (minor configuration changes need to be made to Confluence at a global level).
Weaknesses of Rich Filters
- Rich Filters can’t be displayed in Confluence Cloud. So if you want to do custom reporting for your Confluence users, you’d need to purchase a different app.
- Configuring Rich Filters is fairly complex. To configure a Rich Filters dashboard, users must first go to a global configuration page. Users cannot create dashboards from the primary dashboard editor – they must do some initial configuration elsewhere before they can start adding gadgets to dashboards. This means users who are not familiar with the app are less likely to use its functionality.
- Dashboards cannot be configured without knowledge of Jira Query Language (JQL). From high-level configuration down to each individual gadget, users must be familiar with querying in Jira. Queries must be built from scratch, and basic search (dropdowns) is not available.
- If users need to report on Jira Service Management metrics (Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), Organizations, Request Types, etc.) they must purchase another app (Rich Filters: Service Desk Dashboards).
- If users need to report on time tracking information (worklogs, etc.) they must purchase another app (Rich Filters: Time Tracking Dashboards).
How Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence Wins
While Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence and Rich Filters do cover many of the same bases, Custom Charts’ user experience pushes it ahead of Rich Filters. Setting up Custom Charts can be done directly from a dashboard, and the interface is simple and intuitive so users can start building useful charts immediately.
Users do not need to be familiar with JQL to build powerful dashboards – any user could add a Custom Charts gadget to a dashboard and build a powerful and good-looking report almost right away.
Also, Custom Charts is available as a macro for Confluence Cloud, but Rich Filters isn’t. Custom Charts for Confluence is the same as the Jira app, but you can build your charts right there on the Confluence page instead of on the dashboard. This makes Custom Charts more useful to organizations overall, particularly where you have teams and managers who don’t work in Jira but do work in Confluence. Custom Charts lets them see what the Jira teams are up to.
Jira Reporting Gadget Feature Comparison Table
| Custom Charts for Jira | Rich Filters | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | ||
| Cloud |  | |
| Server | | |
| Data Center | | |
| Features | ||
| Funnel Charts | |  |
| Custom descriptions on gadgets | | |
| Export to PNG | | |
| Import/Export gadget configuration | | |
| Create and manage all configuration directly from dashboards | | |
| No knowledge of JQL required | | |
| Pie Charts | | |
| Bar Charts | | |
| Line Charts | | |
| Table Charts | | |
| Counters/Tile Charts | | |
| Calculate averages | | |
| Time Series (e.g. Created vs. Resolved) | | |
| Filter multiple dashboard gadgets at once | | |
| Export to CSV | | |
| Export to PDF | | – separate free app (Rich Filters::PDF Reports for Jira) |
| Report on JSM-specific information (SLAs, Organizations, Request Type) | | – purchase another app (Rich Filters::Service Desk Dashboards) |
| Share reports in Confluence Server and Data Center | with mirror image sister app Custom Jira Charts for Confluence (Server sales ended in February 2023) | – custom configuration required |
| Share reports in Confluence Cloud | | |
| Bulk Change from dashboard | | |
| Advanced worklog reporting | | – purchase another app (Rich Filters::Time Tracking Dashboards) |
| Gauge Charts | | |
90% of our new features for Custom Charts come from our clients. If you have a feature request that you really need, get in touch and let’s discuss adding them to our roadmap!
Morgan is a Seattle born and raised lover of rain and software, particularly software that isn’t a pain in the bum (like some Atlassian tools can be). This is why she’s a Custom Charts for Jira superfan and jumped at the chance to contribute to the solution herself. She specializes in Agile, Scaled Agile, and ITIL in the Atlassian app space, loves a cross-country road trip, and is on a mission to find the cutest coffee shop in every town she visits.