Jira pricing: Which project management plan should you pick?
Project management tool Jira is an agile beast – but which package best suits your needs?
Jira is among the best project management software out there right now, especially for teams working in software development, with its strong emphasis on use of the Agile methodology. To see whether it’s the best project management option for you, we provide a breakdown of Jira’s pricing plans below.
From the same stable as Trello – or at least owned by the same company, Atlassian – Jira shares much functionality with its sibling, but with its own twist. The biggest of these is that Jira has geared its boards to be used in a scrum.
In short, a scrum board looks a lot like a normal kanban board, but with one difference: projects are meant to be short, furious flurries of activity, called sprints. Once one of these sprints is complete, a new one starts. Proponents of this system applaud the fact that those working on such a project get a limited but easy-to-understand overview, with remaining work in the backlog, where project managers can keep an eye on it.
While at its core it remains a scrum tool, more recently Jira has seen the addition of a number of other tools, making it a far more flexible option.
The new and improved Jira can be used by pretty much any company, although software developers and hybrid teams will likely continue to get the most out of it. For more details on how all this works, check out our full Jira review.
Jira pricing: Everything you need to know
Jira free plan
Jira’s free plan is pretty generous. It’s great for small teams; up to ten people can make use of it, and it offers all the basics of the program, such as a simple board, the backlog and the new timeline, as well as some nifty reporting features.
Although needs vary from team to team, we’re fairly confident that a small team may never need to upgrade to any of Jira’s paid plans. It comes with 2GB of storage, plus you can always plug in an extra tool or two if you need to thanks to Jira’s excellent integration system. In fact, if your needs are modest then the free plan may just last you a lifetime.
Jira Standard plan: £6 per user per month
For teams bigger than ten people and requiring a few extra features, the £6 per user per month Standard plan comes in a little cheaper than the competition. Most other options, such as Trello and Asana’s paid plans, start around the £10 mark.
You get a lot for the money here, too; it isn’t simply a removal of the user cap. Offering something called data residency, which allows you to host your own data on your own Atlassian server, means you get far more control. You can also set rules for users with associated permissions, receive support from Atlassian reps (free users can only access the forums) and storage increases to 250GB.
Overall, the Standard plan is a great buy for any team that likes Jira and wants more of it. At the same time, the price is modest enough that if all you need to do is raise the user cap, it’s perfectly affordable. We wish more project management tools would allow this; currently, the cost to upgrade can be a bit steep – we’re looking at you, Asana.
Jira Premium plan: £12 per user per month
The final two tiers are where Jira gets a little esoteric, with features that probably won’t be too appealing for small to mid-sized teams, but will make the eyes of project managers in larger organisations glitter with anticipation.
First up is the Premium plan, which at £12 per user per month is a little pricey, especially compared to other project management tools and considering that Jira doesn’t deliver too many extra features for that sum.
There are some nice roadmaps to help you plan future projects, a cool sandbox for testing, and guaranteed uptime, which will likely be a godsend for busy development teams. You also get unlimited storage space, which works well with Atlassian’s other tools, meaning all code can live in the cloud without too many issues.
READ NEXT: Best free project management software
Jira Enterprise plan
Finally, we come to the Enterprise plan, for which there isn’t a set price like the others; the amount you pay will instead be based on the number of users you sign on. A quick look suggests a price of around £18 or so per user per month, but this can rapidly reduce if you have a large team – say, over a few thousand people.
At this level, Jira mainly focuses on greater security, allowing administrators to set advanced permissions for all users, as well as many other related functions. It’s also possible at this tier to spread the use of Jira out over several servers, meaning teams won’t be soaking up each other’s resources.
Does Jira have a free trial?
If you’re interested in any of Jira’s plans, you’ll be happy to learn that all paid plans come with a free seven-day trial, which includes use of other tools in the Atlassian suite. The free plan is, of course, free forever.
