Hierarchy Totals vs Rich Filters for Jira dashboards

Short version: Rich Filters is a mature, well-liked dashboard suite — interactive filter panels and many gadget types. Hierarchy Totals is a focused gadget that does one thing — hierarchy rollups of numeric fields — with an architecture built for large instances. Which one you need depends on which problem you actually have.

The honest disclosure

We make Hierarchy Totals, so read this the way you’d read any vendor’s comparison. Everything factual below is sourced from public information (Marketplace listings and public reviews, quoted with dates), and we say plainly where Rich Filters is the better choice.

What each product is

Rich Filters (by Appfire, 9,400+ installs, rated ★4.76 at ~183 reviews as of mid-2026) adds interactive filter controls to Jira dashboards and a family of gadgets driven by them. It is a power tool for building rich, clickable dashboards on top of saved filters.

Hierarchy Totals is one gadget with one job: roll numeric fields (story points, estimates, value) up the issue hierarchy — subtask → story → epic — across up to ten projects, with sums, averages, true medians, min/max, counts, an “open work only” mode, daily trend history, and drill-down from any number to its issues.

If your problem is “I want a wall of interactive charts,” look at Rich Filters. If your problem is “I need trustworthy totals over a large hierarchy,” keep reading.

The architectural difference

Most dashboard gadgets — Rich Filters included — compute when the dashboard renders: fetch the issues behind your filter, calculate, draw. That is fine at hundreds of issues. At thousands, physics pushes back: Jira gives an app roughly 25 seconds per render, and the fetch-and-compute grows with every issue you add.

This is not hypothetical. A public review of Rich Filters from April 2026 (★3) reports “massive performance issues” with large filters containing thousands of tickets — and similar reports exist for other render-time reporting apps.

Hierarchy Totals starts from the opposite premise: the work happens before you open the dashboard. A background engine keeps a synced snapshot inside your Jira and refreshes it hourly (plus a daily full pass); the gadget render is a single read of a prepared result.

Two practical consequences:

• Scale. We measure the render at about a second on a 31,000-issue portfolio — and the time barely depends on size.
• Honesty instead of magic. Precomputed data is minutes-to-an-hour old, so every render carries a visible “data as of” stamp. We think a truthful timestamp beats a spinner.

Data residency

Check any app’s Marketplace privacy tab before installing — this matters to security teams. Rich Filters lists processing of end-user data outside Atlassian’s infrastructure; that is a common and legitimate architecture, but some organizations cannot accept it (a public ★1 review of another popular app puts it bluntly: data “stored on third party servers is not acceptable for us and our clients”).

Hierarchy Totals runs entirely on Atlassian’s Forge platform: storage lives in your installation, scopes are read-only, and nothing leaves your Jira. Details in the app’s security documentation.

Feature-by-feature

	Rich Filters	Hierarchy Totals
Interactive filter panels	Yes — its core strength	No
Many gadget/chart types	Yes	One gadget, one job
True hierarchy rollup (subtask→epic, any depth)	Limited	Yes — its core strength
Cross-project totals in one view	Via filters	Yes, with per-project summary rows
Median from the full distribution	—	Yes
Unestimated work surfaced and clickable	—	Yes
Trend history of totals	—	Yes, captured daily
Performance on 10,000+ issues	Public complaints at scale	Precomputed, ~1 s measured
Data stays inside Jira	No (external processing)	Yes (Forge, read-only scopes)
Maturity, install base, review history	9,400+ installs, ★4.76	New — judge us by the changelog

When Rich Filters is the right call

Choose it when you need interactive, audience-facing dashboards with many chart types and dynamic filtering, and your filters stay in the hundreds or low thousands of issues. It is a good product with a long track record — that is precisely why it is the comparison worth making.

Choose Hierarchy Totals when the number you need is a total over a hierarchy — a program’s remaining story points, a portfolio’s effort across four projects — and you want it instant, honest about freshness and unestimated work, and kept inside your Jira.