Plandek Reviews

Pros

Really easy to use and clear presentation, slick UX

Cons

I'm yet to find anything not to like, perhaps that the colors are too close on the chart legends

Pros

I loved how easy it is to setup and get started. Simply point it to your various datasources (eg: JIRA boards, repos, build pipelines) and it'll start collecting data and providing insights.
Out-of-the-box dashboards providing an array of useful metrics and insights to help you get started quickly with industry-standard views into software development processes.
The Pipeline/Deployment API is a game changer as well; a little more involved to setup, but well worth the time. With this integration, you can track production deployments and tie those deployments back through your SDLC events to understand key metrics related to delivering software.
The ability to organize datasets into hierarchical relationships made it really easy to group teams into products / product areas for higher-level views across our organization.
The customer service is also excellent; very responsive and willing to listen to our feedback and provide help/support where needed.

Cons

Nothing really stands out here. The Plandek folks are great and they are eager and willing to incorporate feedback into the future roadmap plans where it makes sense.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Plandek

Plandek works across data sources to get insights into the plan, build & delivery phases, so it is much more extensive than purely looking at JIRA data. We choose Plandek over GitPrime and other similar vendors because of their unique ability to capture production deployment events, and correlate those events with other data points from the SDLC, providing a true end-to-end view of the engineering process.

Pros

Plandek offers a lot of information gotten from JIRA in a more user friendly way than JIRA itself. Plandek is really flexible and many information can be taken in order to identify areas for improvement in the team

Cons

Plandek offers a lot of options for tracking multiple useful areas for the business (delivery time, sprint info, tickets, etc), but some of the important things for making this really useful to the final client are missed, eg: I find the LiveView app useful, but there is not much value if I can't define specific levels and raise alerting based on the levels that I specified instead of the one that are pre-defined by Plandek.
There are small details that seem to be quick win from me and will really improve the impact of Plandek in my end (like dates flexibility, etc)

Pros

Plandek aggregates data from disparate systems to put together full DORA metrics and many other additional more comprehensive metrics into a single pane of glass. The documentation built into the platform lowers the barrier for all team members to be able to derive value from it's usage.

Cons

Some connectors to more exotic bug tracking or build environment toolsets are not yet available.

Pros

The product is super easy to use. Working with a tool that offers so much visualisation to represent statistics makes interpreting the results easy. The tool is helpful on all levels, from board to daily operations.
The tool is very customisable and is supported by a great team to help at every step of the way.
The templates are incredibly helpful to get started!

Cons

From a UI perspective I'd like to be able to change the colours in the charts - this is very superficial and not effecting the use though.

Pros

Plandek is used for Business and domestic software development for metrics and analytics. It is effortless to use, and after collecting the data, it provides insights even better than JIRA and can also report on the DORA metrics.

Cons

No standout dislike for me. I did not encounter anything significant bugs to mention.

Pros

- Dashboards were easy to use and set up
- Displays multiple metrics on a single dashboard so you can spot patterns between relatable metrics
- Friendly customer service
- Endless customisation to suit your purpose

Cons

- Having a "overall" toggle to switch all metrics on a single dashboard to a specific sprint/timeframe/project would be really handy

Pros

Plandek is easy to configure/deploy and easy to use, and Plandek give a lot of customer support to help get to grips with the product. For me, this meant that even though we were going through a lot of change (new ways of using Jira, new team structures, etc.) we were still able to use Plandek to get to our metrics.

Cons

It would be good to be able to control the colours used on metrics (maybe through a colour scheme or style sheet config feature).

Pros

I found tool very handy, easy to understand and build meaningful reports. Interpretation of data using different graphs is impressive.

Cons

Would be good to see below reporting capabilities being added to Plandek:
- Average velocity trend (sprint wise and quarterly)
- Burndown chart for the entire sprint similar to Jira view
- Ability to edit the categories. Once created it is difficult to delete or rename it

Pros

Sprint progress
Sprint tickets scope
Cycle time
Lead time
Live View
No of tickets created vs completed
etc

Cons

No real time sync with Jira and BitBucket.

Pros

Easy to setup and use. Good set of out the box default dashboards to get you started. Fantastic customer support. Gives useful insight into end-to-end cycle time and engineering performance.

Cons

Can be a bit tricky to manage links from a large number of github repos to metric datasets. Probably only a problem past a certain scale - e.g. if you have a lot of microservices each in separate repos.

Pros

Plandek is very easy to use.
It is providing a lots of usefull tools to measure performances.
Plandek team is very responsive and helpful each time we need something.

Cons

I would like that Plandek integrate data coming from Gitlab, Jenkins.
Or Tempo report from Jira.

Pros

I like the fact that it does what it says on the tin - unleashes metrics from various sources

Cons

The user interface, it feels clunky an unintuitive. Could do with some more user research.

Pros

- Good set of default metrics to start onboarding into the tool.
- Powerful set of filters and custom views to get the most out of each metric.
- Possibility to configure company templates for dashboards.

Cons

- It's not easy to quickly set up large numbers of teams. Can be solved easily with batch processing jobs.

Pros

The appealing user interface and clear presentation of data.

Cons

Set up needs to be left to technical people.

Pros

Ability to report on the DORA metrics
Very intuitive UI that is easy to navigate
Presents various useful productivity metrics to teams in one place

Cons

Could do with some more automation of adding new repos, JIRA boards, CCI projects to datasets to streamline the setup process and reduce the amount of ongoing maintenance required