Jira Pricing Plans

Jira offers three pricing plan options. The first is Cloud, where you sign up for Jira just as you would for any other online service, such as Dropbox or Google Docs. Next there's the single server option, where a company installs Jira on its own server. Finally, there's the self-hosted Data Center option, designed for enterprises with teams of 500 or more.

• Jira Cloud starts from $10 per month
• Jira Server starts from $10 per month, one-time payment
• Jira Data Center starts from $12,000 per year

All three pricing options have some pretty clear use cases.

Jira Cloud is the online managed option, where companies don't have to worry about maintaining a server or protecting their data. They can just login when they need access to the product, and there it is. This also means that when new features are added to Jira, they automatically come to your subscription.

Jira Cloud also works seamlessly with Atlassian's mobile app, Jira Cloud. This is an ideal service for small and mid-sized companies, who may not have the technical chops – or even the will – to host their own server.

Jira Server, meanwhile, is available for a one-time fee. This means you will stay at the feature version of Jira that you purchase, unless you pay the annual renewal fee to receive feature upgrades and critical fixes. Jira Server’s pricing starts at 10 team members, and scales from there. This is a good option for those small and mid-sized companies that do want to host their own Jira iteration. It's also an option for larger companies that don't want an ongoing subscription. This option does not support SAML 2.0.

Finally, Data Center is intended for enterprises only, with annual subscriptions for a minimum of 500 users. This option adds some key enterprise-level features, including SAML 2.0, disaster recovery, project archiving, and compatibility with AWS. Jira Data Center is only available for Jira Software, and not the more general Jira Core project management software.

Jira Cost Per User

Jira's prices are all on a per-user basis, which is standard for business software. Jira Cloud allows you to input as many users as you'd like to get a per-user cost. This cost scales downwards, meaning the more users you have, the lower the per-user cost – another common approach for business software.

If you have just 10 team members, then Jira Core Cloud costs a flat $10 per month. If you have more users than that, you'll pay the equivalent of $5 per user, per month for teams of 100 or less. For teams with between 100 and 200 members, Jira Core Cloud scales down slowly from $5 to $4.25, depending on the exact number of seats required.

Jira Server starts with similar pricing to Jira Cloud, but this comes in the form of a one-time payment instead of a monthly charge. Again, you'll pay the flat fee of $10 to run Jira for up to 10 users on your own server. Beyond that, Jira Server charges for preset numbers of team members. There is no option to pay for 166 users, for example – instead, you must choose either the 100 team member option at $5,500 for Jira Core Server, or pay $11,000 for the 250 user license.

Similarly, the Jira Data Center license for enterprises only offers preset user packages. It starts at 500 users for $12,000 per year, which works out to $24 per user. Data Center remains at $24 per user, per year until you get past 10,000 people, when the price finally starts to go down. By the time enterprises reach the highest option of more than 50,000 users, they’ll be charged $9 per user, per year for Jira.

Jira Cloud Costs

Jira Cloud's pricing gives you access to Jira Core or Jira Software. Both offer Kanban-style interfaces, with three basic categories for managing your project: To Do, In Progress, and Done. Tasks also support basics like attachments, subtasks, and the ability to link issues to create a task dependency structure.

Jira Cloud is ideal for small and mid-sized teams that aren't interested in managing their own servers. Jira Cloud with Jira Core starts at $10 per month flat for up to 10 users. After that, you must pay per-user pricing – one hundred users on Jira Core, for example, will cost $500 per month.

Anyone looking to add additional services – such as Confluence, Atlassian's supplementary service that adds document creation to your project management software – will have to pay fees as well. Confluence Cloud pricing currently costs $500 per month for 100 users.

Jira Server Costs

For smaller and mid-sized teams that want to manage their own server for Jira, there's Jira Server. Again, this package includes Jira Core for general project management – though you can opt for Jira Software if you're a software shop, just as with Cloud.

Jira Server offers a $10 flat fee for 10 users, just as Cloud does – however, Server's costs are all in the form of flat fees, since they are licenses for downloaded and self-hosted software. That means if a new version of Jira rolls out with added features, it won't be reflected in your version. Jira does support feature upgrades and critical fixes for the first 12 months of your license, but after that, you must pay the renewal rate to continue receiving these updates.

There's no question that this path is very economical. Let's say you want Jira Core for 100 users. On Jira Cloud, that is going to cost $500 every single month, adding up to $6,000 per year. With Jira Server, you pay $5,500 as a one-time fee – and that's it. Now, the downside is that everything is in your hands – including backing up your data, and making sure you apply any security patches to the server. Nevertheless, for teams that wish to host their own data, it's a good option. Jira Server can support any number of users, but is most ideal for small and mid-sized teams with a solid IT crew.

Again, companies that want it can add Confluence for an extra cost. Our fictional 100-member team would pay an additional flat fee of $6,400 for Confluence Server.

Jira Data Centers Costs

Now we're at the Enterprise level, where the pricing starts to get serious. The big deal with Data Center is that it provides the features which large businesses typically need under a self-hosted option. The idea here is that an enterprise would put Jira in its own cloud, or an enterprise-grade managed cloud.

Jira Data Center boasts a number of added features, including optimizations for Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure cloud deployments; support for SAML 2.0 to manage single sign-on; project archiving to improve performance; and disaster recovery supported by Atlassian.

Pricing options range from the minimum 500 users to more than 50,000, and are charged on an annual basis. The basic 500 user option costs $12,000 annually, while the very top option is $450,000 per year. In between, you can pay for seats in increments of 1,000 up to a maximum of 10,000, when it starts to increase by 5,000 seats.

Up to 10,000 users, the cost is $24 per seat, per year. After that it slowly scales down until it hits $9 per seat at the very top – assuming a team of exactly 50,001.
As with the other two options, companies can pay for Confluence Data Center in addition to Jira Core or Software. A 500-seat license also costs $12,000 per year, while the top option (40,001 seats) costs $200,000 annually.

Should You Pay For Jira?

If you're looking for a simple project management solution, then paying for Jira is a smart choice. However, it also pays to look around. For fans of the Jira interface, a better option could well be Atlassian's Trello. This has a similar look and feel to Jira, but is friendlier to non-technical types – and even has a free tier for individuals and small teams. You can see our Jira vs Trello guide for more on how the two stack up.

If you're looking for a self-hosted option, however, Jira is the better option. Anyone who needs to run project management software on their own server (or group of servers) would find themselves well served.