Everything you need to know about buying, using, and customizing Jira Software.
A brief overview of Jira
Jira is a family of products built to help all types of teams manage their work. Jira offers several products and deployment options that are purpose-built for Software, IT, Business, Ops teams, and more. Read on to see which is right for you.
About the Jira platform
Products and apps built on top of the Jira platform help teams plan, assign, track, report, and manage work. The Jira platform brings teams together for everything from agile software development and customer support to start-ups and enterprises (or to weddings and home renovations.)
The products built on the Jira platform are Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Core. Jira Align is an enterprise agile planning platform that connects work at scale.
Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Core come with built-in project templates for different use cases, and integrate seamlessly, so teams across organizations can work better and smarter together.
Jira products overview
Built for every member of your agile team and beyond to plan, track, and ship world-class software.
Give your customers an easy way to ask for help and your agents a faster way to deliver it.
Manage any business project including marketing campaigns, HR onboarding, approvals and legal document reviews.
Enterprise Agile Planning platform that connects product, program, and portfolio strategy to technical execution, at scale.
Users
- Software developers
- QA and testing
- Project managers
- Product designer
- Product owners
- Program managers
- Project managers
- SCRUM masters
Use cases
Hosting
- Cloud, Data Center
Licensing
- Licensed by user
- All Jira Software users can access Jira Core features
- Users have access to
- Software projects & features
- Business projects & features
Important integrations for Jira Software
Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello, Slack, GitHub, Microsoft, Google
Learn more
Users
- DevOps managers
- IT operations managers
- Support managers
- IT Service desk agents
- Enterprise architect
- Services owner
Use cases
- ITSM
- Service Desk
- Enterprise Service Management
- Service Request Management
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Management
- Asset Management
- Customer Support
- Ticketing Support
Hosting
- Cloud, Data Center
Licensing
- Licensed by agent
- Free and unlimited customers (users submitting requests)
- All Jira Service Management agents can access Jira Core features
- Users have access to
- Service management projects & features
- Software projects & features
- Business projects & features
Important integrations for Jira Service Management
Users
- Business users
- Marketing
- Operations
- HR
- Legal
- Finance
- IT
Use cases
- Non-technical team projects
- Workflow approvals
- Task management
Hosting
- Cloud, Data Center
Licensing
- All Jira Software users can access Jira Core features.
- Users have access to Business Projects & features (Dashboards, Reports, etc).
Important integrations for Jira Core
Confluence
Use cases
- Enterprise agile transformation
- Scaling agile
- Spotify
- SAFe
- Scrum@Scale
- LeSS
- Disciplined agile
- Hybrid
Hosting
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Cloud, Dedicated Cloud
Licensing
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A Jira Align Standard user has access to all functionality for collaborative planning, management execution and analysis/reporting/visualization across Program and/or Team modules.
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A Jira Align Enterprise user has access to all functionality of a Standard user plus access to Enterprise, Portfolio, and Solution modules.
Important integrations for Jira Align
Jira Software (Premium), Trello, Azure DevOps, Tasktop
Jira Software hosting options
Jira Software is available in two hosting options: cloud and self-managed. For our self-managed option, customers can choose between server and data center. Not sure which option is right for you? Check out this overview:
Cloud
With Jira Software Cloud, we host and set up your Jira Software site in the cloud for you. This is generally the best option for teams who want to get started quickly and easily, and for teams who don't want to manage the technical complexity of hosting themselves.
Key terms to know
Issues
A Jira 'issue' refers to a single work item of any type or size that is tracked from creation to completion. For example, an issue could be a feature being developed by a software team, a to-do item for a marketing team, or a contract that needs to be written by a legal team.
Tip: Other commonly used terms for issues are 'requests', 'tickets' or 'tasks'. We recommend using 'issues' to help your team stay on the same page when working across the Jira product family.
Projects
A project is, quite simply, a collection of issues that are held in common by purpose or context. Issues grouped into projects can be configured in a variety of ways, ranging from visibility restrictions to available workflows.
Jira Software projects are flexible working spaces that allow you to group like issues by team, business unit, product, or stream of work. Projects don't need to be tied to the same delivery date. For example, if you group your issues by team, you could have a marketing project, a development project, and a legal project, all of which would track ongoing work of those particular teams. Every issue would be represented by an issue keys (specific to a project) and an issue number, i.e. MKT-13, DEV-4, LEG-1.
Boards
A board in Jira software is a part of a project that displays issues giving teams a flexible way to view, manage, and reporting on work in progress. Simply put, a board is a visual representation of a team’s workflow within a project.
Workflows
Workflows represent the sequential path an issue takes from creation to completion. A basic workflow might look something like this:
In this case, Open, Done, and the labels in between represent the status an issue can take, while the arrows represent potential transitions from one status to another. Workflows can be simple or complex, with conditions, triggers, validators, and post functions. We'll dive deeper into these advanced configurations later in this guide. For now, it is recommended for novice Jira Software admins to keep their workflows as simple as possible, until business needs to determine the requirements for complex workflow configurations.
Agile
Agile is not a Jira Software-specific term. It's a work philosophy that originated in the software development field and has since expanded to a variety of other industries. While we won't belabor the definition here (there are great agile resources for that!), agile emphasizes an iterative approach to work informed by customer feedback where delivery occurs incrementally and continuously. The ideal agile team can move quickly and adapt to changing requirements without missing much of a beat.
So why are we bringing up agile here? Because Jira Software has major feature sets designed particularly for agile, including scrum or kanban. So, when you see terms like boards, estimation, or cards, it's time to start thinking about how agile fits into your work practice.
It's important to note that because agile is a philosophy and a culture of work, simply using Jira Software won't make your team truly agile. That said, it is a tool built to help your team get there.
Additional Resources
Bookmark these resources to stay connected with fellow Jira Software users, for ongoing updates about new features in Jira Software Cloud, and the latest documentation.