HYPE Innovation vs. Jira: Which One Is Best for Your Organization?

While both HYPE Innovation and Jira provide distinct features to boost productivity and streamline idea management and innovation, they serve different purposes and offer unique user experiences.

To help you make a decision, we’ve compared these 2 tools' key features, strengths, and weaknesses.

Read on to learn more about the battle of features between Hype vs. Jira, to discover which solution aligns best with your organization's goals.

Let’s dive in!

HYPE Innovation vs. Jira: A Quick Comparison

Before we dive deeper, let’s check the key areas of differences between HYPE and Jira.

HYPE Innovation: Overview

HYPE Innovation is an innovation management software focusing on collaboration, lifecycle management, and analytics.

It provides tooling to:

• Engage employees in ideation processes.
• Collaborate with external partners or customers on new projects.
• Develop strategic roadmaps based on trend analysis.

It has built-in integrations with Microsoft 365, Teams, Jira, and SSO providers, and has a REST API.

HYPE Innovation: Key Features

HYPE Innovation offers features to streamline innovation processes, foster collaboration, and drive outcomes.

1. HYPE Boards

The solution provides templates for different purposes, such as brainstorming, workshops, continuous improvement, and more.

You can group ideas by product lines, processes, or departments and create customizable workflows with Kanban boards, lists, or idea bubbles for organizing ideas and boosting collaboration. 

Thus, you can create layered categories with subcategories for more granular organization and use custom fields or tags to build detailed structures for your process.

You can also automate many tasks, such as task assignments, idea categorization, notifications, and moving projects across stages.

2. HYPE Innovate

It combines trend, idea, and project management to help you:

• Discover innovation opportunities — You can scout, organize, and analyze relevant trends to make data-backed decisions.
  
• Support, evaluate, and advance ideas — Launch idea crowdsourcing campaigns, track the status of every submitted idea, evaluate ideas based on your pre-set criteria, and get insights with KPIs and reports. You can structure the type of feedback you give and receive on ideas, 
  
• Test and validate concepts to check if they are ready for launch — You can customize workflows with drag-and-drop and quick-access templates, assign tasks and responsibilities and track progress. The solution provides reporting tools as well, so you can do strategic planning accordingly.

3. Employee Engagement Tools

This set of tools allows employees to contribute ideas through various channels, fostering open innovation and encouraging active participation.

The platform provides features like commenting, voting, sharing, and multi-perspective thinking to facilitate team collaboration on submitted ideas.

In addition, you can also run targeted innovation initiatives by segmenting campaigns based on specific business areas or populations.

4. Open Innovation Tool

The solution enables collaboration with external stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, partners, or research institutions.

You can manage who can participate in your organization’s innovation programs by setting up flexible hosting options and access controls.

The tool allows you to scout and evaluate potential partners, such as startups, and leverage their creative strengths without disrupting core activities.

HYPE Innovation: Pricing

HYPE Innovation doesn’t disclose pricing but, the pricing is based on your organization’s goals, challenges, and requirements.

HYPE Innovation: Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Flexible and scalable, so you can adapt innovation processes and frameworks.
• Has a user-friendly interface.
• Seamless integration capabilities with existing infrastructure.

Cons:

• Lately, there have been complaints about HYPE’s overall service and support after their merge with Planbox and other platforms.
• Lacks built-in ROI tracker.
  
  

Jira: Overview

Jira is a project management tool by Atlassian that helps you manage software development projects, track bugs, and coordinate tasks across departments.

It caters to larger companies and enterprises and provides tools for:

• Planning
• Campaign Management
• Agile Project Management, and
• Program Management

Jira: Key Features

Jira’s features and tools revolve around 4 key concepts:

• Plan
• Track
• Collaborate and Launch, and
• Report.

1. Jira Product Discovery (JPD)

JPD is a tool within the Jira ecosystem that helps you capture, prioritize, and validate ideas for new features or improvements.

It provides a centralized platform where stakeholders can share insights and align on product vision.

You can:

• Collect ideas from various sources, organize them systematically, and prioritize based on criteria such as impact, effort, and alignment with business goals.
• Connect the tool with other Atlassian tools like Jira Software for development execution and Advanced Roadmaps for strategic planning.
• Leverage pre-made and custom templates and clone, merge, and archive ideas.

2. Advanced Planning Tools

This set of tools allows you to:

• Schedule work, 
• Allocate capacity, 
• Map dependencies and 
• Model different scenarios by pulling data from Jira boards, projects, and filters. 

Thus, you can see how a team’s work relates to the work of other teams and how the team contributes to overall organizational goals.

The Planning tools allow you to safely “play” different scenarios and adjust dates, resources, and other inputs with minimal disruption.

3. Jira Boards

Jira offers two boards, Scrum and Kanban, which are pre-configured and ready for use with Jira templates.

You can also create multiple and cross-project boards, only available in company-managed projects.

Multiple boards manage workstreams within a project, give autonomy to teams, and manage different workflow stages. 

On the other hand, cross-project boards provide an overview, prioritize and track tasks across teams and projects. 

4. Collaboration Tools

Besides providing a centralized platform where stakeholders can view progress in real time, Jira also enables you to tailor workflows to fit specific team processes by defining statuses and transitions for issues.

With the workflow editor, you can create, visualize, and edit the steps and transitions of a workflow to keep all stakeholders informed.

In addition, you can create automation rules that can do anything from auto-closing old issues to notifying specific teams about a release.

On top of integrations with Atlassian tools, Jira allows you to connect third-party collaboration tools like Slack, Figma, and GitHub.

5. Reports & Dashboards

Jira has four types of reports:

• Agile reports to understand your team’s speed, spot bottlenecks, and better predict future performance
  
• DevOps reports to understand deployment pipeline and frequency to enable greater collaboration and streamline the product lifecycle.
  
• Issue analysis reports to see the types of work your team is focused on and how your team is keeping up.
  
• Forecast and management reports to evaluate your team’s capacity and better predict future performance.

Reports and dashboards help visualize, track, and monitor work across single or multiple projects, offering insights into projects, versions, epics, sprints, and issues. 

You can set dashboards to private or share them with other users.

Pricing

Jira’s pricing depends on your team size, that is, the number of users. For up to 10 users, there is a freemium plan, whereas Premium Plans start at $8.60 per user per month.

Jira: Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Great for large-scale projects.
• Has highly customizable dashboards and workflows.
• Integrates with Atlassian tools and multiple 3-rd party apps.

Cons:

• Has a steeper learning curve due to complex UI.
• Has a complex setup.
  
  

HYPE Innovation vs. Jira: The Final Verdict

Comparing HYPE and Jira reveals distinct differences in their business models, pricing structures, product offerings, and target audiences.

The ultimate choice largely depends on your business goals and organizational needs. 

If your primary need is managing the front end of product development — capturing new ideas and validating them, choosing HYPE Innovation makes more sense.

On the other hand, Jira seems a perfect fit if you need to execute those validated projects efficiently once they're ready to move forward into the development phases.

However, there is a solution that closes the gap between HYPE and Jira and supports the entire innovation lifecycle, from idea generation to concept creation and portfolio management.

Enter, rready!

rready: A Robust Alternative to HYPE Innovation and Jira

rready’s all-encompassing method enables you to monitor and oversee all ideation and innovative activities in a centralized platform.

Our solution consists of:

• rready Idea Management, 
• KICKBOX Intrapreneurship, and 
• rready Innovation Management.

This modularity allows you to opt for individual tooling or combine them depending on your innovation readiness and objectives.

1. rready Idea Management 

Our idea management tooling enables you to optimize innovation through efficient idea sourcing, assessment, and management.

Thus, your employees can:

• Search and select relevant topics
• Name and describe their idea
• Add extra information in video format, attachments, links, feedback, tags, etc.
• Submit their ideas for projects
• Upload or generate images using AI.

Employees can quickly give feedback and assess concepts using the Scorecard and Feedback tools. 

At the same time, the granular roles and permission management system allows administrators to have exact control over user activities, improving both security and efficiency.

Thanks to our AI suite, you and your employees can also:

• Search for tickets and ideas in other languages, and have them automatically translated into your mother tongue.
• Automatically detect potential duplicates and related ideas.
  
  

2. KICKBOX Intrapreneurship

Based on the Kickbox methodology, this innovation framework empowers employees within your organization to generate, validate, and implement ideas while growing an intrapreneurial mindset.

One of KICKBOX's key characteristics is that employees can take ownership of their ideas, thereby decentralizing the innovation process.

Backed up by the Physical Method Toolbox that provides various gamified tools, including the KICKBOOK, the innovation experience becomes more engaging and tangible. 

The main goal is to enable a proactive experience with the innovation process, and eliminate the risk of failure.

Furthermore, employees can share ideas, no matter their role or experience level, manage their budgets, and access necessary internal and external resources.

3. rready Innovation Management

The centralized platform combines idea management tooling with the powerful Kickbox methodology to validate and implement ideas effectively.

Some of the activities you can do on the platform include:

• Efficiently manage and track idea progress in your admin panel and use filters and search options for quick organization.
• Tailoring workflows to meet your specific needs by defining custom phases and flows.
• Tracking various KPIs, such as employee engagement, to monitor the progress of ideas as they move through the innovation funnel.
  
  

Overall, rready provides a structured yet flexible framework for fostering innovation from within.

Giving your employees the right tools empowers them to contribute ideas and genuinely be involved with the innovation process from start to finish. 

Get access to our free demo today and boost innovation across the whole company to transform selected ideas into PoCs efficiently.

Learn more:

• 6 HYPE Alternatives to Consider
• 8 Best Corporate Innovation Tools To Consider
• The 7 Best Idea Management Software Tools to Consider