Atlassian offers Jira in four plans: Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. Some time ago I was looking for information about how they differ. My original intention was to understand in which plan I could find asset management. I quickly realized that existing posts on the Internet were not up to date. I decided to collect this information in one place for you and highlight key differences from my perspective.
You will find the basic information about each plan in the table below.
Free | Standard | Premium | Enterprise | |
User limit | Supports up to 10 users or 3 agents | Up to 5,000 agents | Up to 5,000 agents | Unlimited Users |
Asset and configuration management | ⛔ | ⛔ | ✅ | ✅ |
Storage | 2GB | 250GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Sandbox | ⛔ | ⛔ | ✅ | ✅ |
Data residency | ⛔ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Site renaming | ⛔ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Forms | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Selected features in different plans
User limit: This is one of the most obvious factors when you choose your plan. If you have three or fewer agents, you can still consider the Free plan as a good starting point. If you have more agents, start with the Standard plan.
Asset and configuration management: Originally named Insight, it is part of the Premium and Enterprise plans only. It is often an essential part of any serious Jira Service Management implementation. Atlassian published a nice Q&A about Insight here.
Storage: In my opinion, this parameter is underrated as we are used to having as much free space as we need. 2GB from the Free plan is not enough when you attach many files to your tickets. At Appsvio, we use a support project to share app versions available to Data Center customers. They also include Jira Support zip which can be 50MB each. It can quickly become a limitation also for the sales and marketing teams. An interesting article about storage in Jira is available here.
Sandbox: This is my favorite feature, but unfortunately only available on the Premium and Enterprise plans. With the sandbox, you can test configuration changes or new apps on non-production instances. It can be a test or staging instance for the production Jira. The biggest gap is still moving changes to the production instance after successful testing. As of today, the administrator must do it manually... More information about sandboxes you can read here.
Data residency (DaRe): Atlassian decided that all paid plans would include data residency, which was a reasonable action. Missing DaRe was most often cited as the main reason why many European customers did not use Cloud. Today it is available to anyone with any paid plan.
Site renaming: At some point, you may need to rename your site. It can happen due to a company name change, an acquisition, or better customization of what you are doing. Note that this is not available with the Free plan.
Forms for Jira (formerly ProForma Cloud): This is a no-code / low-code form builder that Atlassian recently acquired to integrate with Jira. By integrating ProForma into Jira Service Management Cloud, teams can quickly create the forms to capture the data they need to get the jobs done.
If you have ten or fewer users, go for the Free plan. It’s a huge benefit that you can use Jira and some apps for free when you have a small team. Remember that not all apps are for free for up to 10 users - this is a vendor’s decision. There are other restrictions and limitations, but you can upgrade to the Standard plan anytime.
Choose the standard plan if you do not need asset management. There are still some storage limitations. Nevertheless, 250GB should be enough for any small to medium Jira instance for the first 3-5 years.
Choose Premium if you need asset management. As part of this plan, you get a lot of tools to help you manage your Jira Cloud instance (sandbox, faster help from Atlassian, list of allowed IP addresses, and more).
There are more differences than mentioned in this article. We recommend reviewing all of them here before making your purchase.
You can use the app to have features that are missing from Jira. Remember that the apps do not have plans, so if you have an app, it will work the same way on Free or Premium plans.
Apps are Jira extensions. When Jira does not meet your needs out of the box, apps can be a good choice. For example:
Hope you now find Jira Service Management plans a bit more understandable. If you think I missed something, let me know at chris@appsvio.com.
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