I deleted my original comment, because I realized after the fact that you specifically cited "project management".

I'd just say it depends on the size of your org. Depending on what the projects you're trying to manage look like, the Atlassian tools offer some features that _really_ help. Prior to adopting Jira, teams were using some combination of Trello and Asana. The lack of any shared structure between teams made cross-cutting projects very hard to reason about.

Jira definitely has warts and annoyances, but it has a solid API and the JQL language for querying issue data is incredibly useful.

You'd think so, but people and especially enterprise devs seem to discount GDocs as viable and themselves gravitate towards Atlassian. I've dropped enterprise web project mgt tools for my team's in the past and the amount of hate I experienced for going back to Excel and weekly status chats (where I fill in the Excel for them) is astounding, and yet Jira is rarely updated truthfully. Maybe that's why they do it, Jira is a great place to hide lack of progress without embarassment.

Hard disagree, particularly when non-technical people are involved. Most I've worked with are awful at organizing, labeling, and just generally managing large amounts of data scattered across a bunch of files (something we do daily as software developers, so understandable), and giving them flexibility and freedom in organization will result in a shit show