App comparison: Mindpro Insights versus Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence

What is Mindpro Insights?

Mindpro Insights enables users to make a dashboard (separate from Jira’s native dashboards) containing pre-configured and customizable charts out of your Jira data.

Mindpro Insights: Strengths

• Mindpro dashboards include reports that span multiple projects/teams, allowing you a big-picture overview of what’s going on.

• Mindpro dashboards have more varied layout options than native Jira dashboards, giving you more freedom over how your charts are displayed.

• The app supports both private and shareable views, similar to Jira dashboards, which means users can create dashboards for personal use, team use, or to show to managers.

• You get pre-configured reports for common agile, IT service management (ITSM), and business use cases, as well as the ability to configure your own reports.

• You can add “summary cards” to your dashboard, which simply show the total for a chosen field or filter, e.g. the total number of bugs, flagged, or high-priority issues.

• The pre-configured charts include a variety of different chart types, allowing users to make engaging and visually appealing dashboards.

• The drag-and-drop interface is good for non-technical and business users.

Mindpro Insights: Weaknesses

• Mindpro Insights is only available in Jira Cloud. Sorry, Data Center fans!

• Mindpro reports cannot be added to native Jira dashboards; they live in a separate system that’s integrated with Jira, which means your dashboards aren’t where your people are working.

• There is limited support for non-standard custom fields such as Assets for Jira and Jira Service Management (JSM) fields, and no support for 3rd party custom fields. This limits the scale of your reporting, particularly if you’re a big enterprise with lots of data across a number of different platforms.

• You’re limited in terms of how you can visualize your data:

  • You can’t customize colors

  • Even though Mindpro offers more layout options than native dashboards, you’re restricted in terms of which content you can put on which row

  • You can’t change the layout of individual charts, e.g. positioning of legend

  • None of the pre-configured reports and summary cards can be changed. In some cases, they can’t be replicated either.

• Mindpro limits the number of cards, charts, and issue lists you can include on a single dashboard.

• Searching and filtering data on a Mindpro dashboard has limitations; you have to use the same filtering tool for all the charts on the dashboard, and you can’t make ‘tabs’ where you have different search options preset. This can complicate how easily users can access the data they need to see.

• Some chart types are only available in pre-configured reports, not the customizable charts, which is just annoying!

• More technical users may get less value from the tool due to the lack of customization.

• Mindpro Insights reports can’t be shared in Confluence with Confluence users, limiting collaboration.

How Custom Charts wins

Reporting on Jira dashboards and Confluence pages

With Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence, users don’t have to access and work in a completely separate app to get the insights they need. They build their reports directly on Jira dashboards and Confluence pages, which they’re already familiar with. Jira dashboards are also easier to navigate to, being right there in the top menu rather than buried in the apps list.

One gadget for every chart

Mindpro Insights has a separate gadget for every individual chart, meaning you cannot easily and seamlessly shift between different chart configurations in a single gadget, one of Custom Charts’ greatest strengths.

Loads more display and formatting options

Users can customize their Custom Charts reports to a much greater extent. Unlike Mindpro, a Custom Charts user can switch between multiple chart types, change colors with a full color picker, reorder data, show/hide data, and change labels. This sort of customizability is good for both technical and non-technical users, allowing everyone to communicate their data in the way they need.

Loads more filtering options

Simple Search, a gadget that comes with Custom Charts, allows users to create different views for different audiences quickly and is much more versatile than Mindpro’s filtering tool. Because it’s a separate gadget, you can add one for every chart so that users can emphasize different data points per chart. You can go even further than this by building out tabs within the same Simple Search gadget, each with unique preset filtering options. Then you can simply switch tabs to present an alternate view of the data.

Custom Charts has pre-configured charts as templates, but you can change these as you like

Our chart templates are just there to help get you started, so you don’t have to make every chart from scratch. Once you add a pre-configured chart from a template to your Jira dashboard, you can customize it however you like.

No chart types are restricted

We don’t limit any charts to our pre-configured chart templates. If something is available in a template, you can be sure you’re able to replicate it on your own, too.

No restrictions on how many charts you have

Include as many different gadgets on your dashboards as Jira will allow, without restrictions over how many of any one type can be included. Custom Charts are limited only by what Jira can support.

Custom Charts’ cross-project reporting is better

Simply by virtue of the greater flexibility and much larger range of options and customizations, Custom Charts offers a better view of progress across different projects.

Many 3rd party custom fields supported

Custom Charts supports an ever-growing number of 3rd party app-provided custom fields, including ScriptRunner, Xray, Elements Connect, and more. It also supports all of Jira’s out-of-the-box custom fields, JSM and Assets fields included. Basically, this lets you share reports on many more aspects of the things your teams are working on, giving large enterprises in particular a much more insightful overview.

Custom Charts can be replicated in Confluence

Using our mirror image sister app, Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, you can build exactly the same charts (using the exact same interface) on Confluence pages for Confluence users (including importing configurations directly into Confluence for speed). That way you can make reports for the managers and business teams that don’t work in Jira but still have an interest in what/how the Jira teams are doing.

Overall, Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence is the right choice for users looking to easily build beautiful, accessible reports in Jira. And it’s available for all Jira instances – not just Cloud.