An Epic Sum Up Alternative With JQL-Searchable Rollups
If you're evaluating Epic Sum Up — the "ESU – Sum Up KPI & Budget Reporting" app — you're solving the same problem everyone here is: Jira doesn't total story points or time across an epic's hierarchy on its own, and Epic Sum Up is the established, well-reviewed app that fills that gap with panels, gadgets and reports. If a live panel view is what you need, it does that well.
The one thing it deliberately doesn't do is write the total into a Jira field. That's not a bug — their own FAQ is direct about it:
Can I JQL or sort by summed values?
JQL – no. ESU calculates summed values live, on-demand, so they aren't stored at the issue level.
Their product manager confirmed the same trade-off answering a customer review: "We decided to NOT cache the data for a JQL Search…" Computing live means the number you see is always current — the cost is that you can't query it, filter a board by it, or trigger automation on it, because it never lands in a field.
Try the free route first
Before reaching for another app, Jira's own free Automation can write a sum into a real field — it just needs you to build and maintain the rule yourself. The walkthrough (trigger, Lookup issues, Edit issue field, one rule per hierarchy level) is in How to sum story points across an epic hierarchy. It has real limits worth knowing before you invest time in it: a 100-issue cap per lookup by default, monthly rule-run quotas (100 on Free, 1,700 on Standard, 1,000 per paid user on Premium — source), and no automatic backfill for issues that already exist.
Where a field-first rollup app fits
If what you actually need is the number in JQL, on a board card, or as an automation
trigger — not just a panel — that's a different shape of tool than Epic Sum Up. Ours,
TreeTotals, takes the opposite approach: it writes rollups into
ordinary Jira fields, so "Rollup: Story Points" >= 20 AND status != Done is a normal
JQL query, not something you have to work around. The trade-off runs the other way:
TreeTotals has a hierarchy size ceiling (documented on the
TreeTotals page), where Epic
Sum Up's live calculation has none.
Which one to use isn't a strict either/or — it depends on whether the number needs to sit in a field or just needs to be seen.