Does a Jira plugin unlock your full QA potential?

Zephyr now offers cross-project hierarchical libraries, versioning, parameters, and BDD integrations, along with 70+ out-of-the-box reports. Test organisation remains constrained by Jira, however. Configurable QA workflows and shared views require native Jira support that does not exist, so neither feature is available in Zephyr. aqua provides both, and also includes full item change history, change reversal, and shared test steps as part of its dedicated QA platform.

Both platforms take the third-party integration route. Zephyr has expanded its CI/CD coverage to include Jenkins, Bitbucket, GitHub, CircleCI, and Bamboo. On the testing framework side, it supports JUnit, TestNG, Selenium, Cucumber, Robot Framework, Appium, and NUnit. aqua offers a wider native testing tool set, covering Selenium, UFT, JMeter, SoapUI, Ranorex, and database connectors for MSSQL and Oracle. It also includes the Capture bug reporting tool, which Zephyr does not offer natively. Both platforms provide REST API for custom connections.

Both platforms offer monthly and annual billing with no setup costs. The significant difference lies in Zephyr’s requirement for an active Jira licence for every user. Pricing tiers are based on total Jira user count rather than actual testers, meaning teams pay for users who never open Zephyr at all. aqua offers free Guest licences for read-only access. It also provides Scout licences at €5/month for manual testers, keeping costs lower for teams with mixed user types.

aqua supports Cloud, On-Premise, and custom deployment on any Azure data centre. Zephyr offers Atlassian Cloud and Atlassian Data Center for on-premise deployments. Atlassian has, however, announced Data Center retirement by March 2029. For teams with strict data residency requirements or long-term on-premise plans, this makes Zephyr’s roadmap a relevant risk to factor into procurement decisions.

Zephyr provides 70+ cross-project dashboard gadgets covering execution status, cycle progress, and traceability. This is a significant upgrade from earlier versions, though data access remains limited to what Jira exposes. aqua allows use of any workspace data in dashboards. It also adds KPI alerts that notify teams automatically when a metric deviates from a defined threshold, removing the need for manual checks that Zephyr does not support.

aqua’s Report Wizard supports any data source and allows external imagery, scripts, and parametrisation. This makes it suitable for complex stakeholder reporting that goes beyond standard QA metrics. Zephyr has expanded to 70+ out-of-the-box reports covering execution status, cycle progress, defect summaries, and coverage. These work well for standard needs. Custom layouts, external data, and scripting are not available, so teams with complex reporting requirements will find the options limited.

Both platforms offer comparable permission granularity, including custom roles and individual user permissions with QA-specific access controls. SSO is available on both platforms. aqua supports SAML and LDAP directly, while Zephyr inherits SSO options from Atlassian’s identity management infrastructure.

aqua handles the full product lifecycle natively as a self-contained platform, covering requirements, tests, defects, and project management without external dependencies. Zephyr provides the QA layer within Jira’s broader ecosystem. Defect management, requirements management, and project management are all handled through Jira rather than Zephyr itself, making the full ALM picture dependent on the Atlassian stack.