Why Companies Are Reconsidering Jira: Rising Costs and the Search for Alternatives

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Atlassian has raised Jira prices twice a year since 2024 — Cloud every October, Data Center every February. Each rise looks modest on its own: 5%, 7.5%, 15%. But they land on top of each other, they arrive at renewal when the budget is already set, and none of them has ever been reversed. A Jira bill from before the first of these rises costs between 18% and 62.5% more today for the same seats.

1. The price rises, one by one

All figures below are list-price changes as Atlassian published them to its investors, except October 2026, where Atlassian has confirmed the date and affected plans and its partners have published the percentages.

Two things make these rises bite harder than the percentages suggest. First, Atlassian itself says the increases “feather in over time as cloud subscriptions come up for renewal” — you don’t see them on the day, you see them on the renewal quote, usually when the year’s budget is already approved. Second, the Data Center rises apply to a product for which Atlassian has published an end-of-life schedule. Its official Data Center end-of-life page separates the end of sales, the end of support and what happens to existing installations:

The schedule covers Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence and Crowd Data Center; Bitbucket, Bamboo and Jira Align Data Center are excluded. So for a Jira Data Center customer, each renewal now buys a shorter remaining term at a higher price: no renewal can run past 28 March 2029, and staying supported beyond that date depends on an exception Atlassian grants case by case.

2. The compound effect

Percentages multiply, they don’t add. Here is what each plan costs now compared with the same seats before the first rise in the table, at list price and before any discount. Each total is the product of the individual rises, calculated unrounded; percentages are shown to one decimal place and amounts to the nearest dollar.

The Cloud rows cover two years (October 2024 to October 2026); the Data Center rows cover twelve months (February 2025 to February 2026). And this is before team growth: every new hire adds a seat at the new price.

3. The costs that aren’t on the price list

• Marketplace apps. Gantt charts, time tracking and budget reporting are paid add-ons in Jira, billed separately and priced by the same user tier as Jira itself. They were not part of Atlassian’s own Data Center rise — which means they are a second bill with its own price changes.
• Usage-based billing. Cloud subscriptions now include a monthly allowance of metered capabilities — Rovo credits, Automation steps, Assets objects — with extra usage billed separately if you opt in. Assets in Jira Service Management, for example, have been charged above 50,000 objects since October 2024.
• Features moving up a tier. In 2024 advanced incident, problem and change management in Jira Service Management moved out of Free and Standard into Premium and Enterprise. When a feature you rely on changes edition, the price rise is the whole gap between editions.
• The migration you will need anyway. Unless they secure an extended-maintenance exception, Jira Data Center customers have to move somewhere before March 2029 — or keep an unsupported, read-only archive. Moving to Atlassian Cloud is not free either: it is a project with its own consulting, testing and app-replacement costs — and it lands you on the plan that rises every October.

4. What OpenProject actually costs

Leaving Jira does not make project management free. It moves the cost into different lines of the budget — some smaller, some new. A fair comparison looks at all five:

Put together, the comparison usually turns on three questions rather than on the licence line alone:

• Do you already run infrastructure? A Data Center customer already pays for servers, backups and an administrator, so moving to a self-hosted OpenProject removes the licence line while most of the operational cost stays roughly where it is. A Cloud-only team with no operations capacity takes on a genuinely new cost.
• How fast is the team growing? Infrastructure grows in steps (the sizing table above), licences grow with every seat — and, as sections 1–2 show, so does their price.
• Who sets the price next year? With a self-hosted Community edition the remaining costs — hardware, hosting, staff time — are ones you control and can shop around for. Enterprise support, if you choose it, is again a vendor price, but an optional one.

5. Total cost of ownership: does a migration pay for itself?

The price rises above only matter if leaving actually costs less. This calculator puts both options side by side over five years — licences, apps, infrastructure, administration and the one-off migration — and shows when, if ever, the migration pays for itself.

The three scenarios load illustrative assumptions, not quotes: Jira per-user prices roughly at current Cloud Standard and Premium list levels, OpenProject running costs sized from its own hardware guide. Replace every field with your own invoices and rates; all amounts are in one currency of your choice.

With these assumptions the answer depends on scale. For the 25-user team, OpenProject’s administration time costs about as much as the Jira licences it replaces, so the migration does not pay back within five years — for a small Cloud team without in-house operations, staying on Jira can be the cheaper choice. At 150 and 600 users the licence line dominates, and the migration pays back within the first year even with Enterprise support at 600 users. Your own break-even point sits wherever your seat count, app spend and administrator cost put it — which is why the inputs, not the presets, are the point.

6. What you may lose when leaving Jira

The cost model above assumes the migration delivers an equivalent system. It rarely does on day one. Issues, comments and attachments move well; the logic a team has built around them often does not. These are the areas where a technical lead should expect gaps, and price them into the decision:

None of these is a reason not to migrate, but each is a line in the migration scope. A realistic plan inventories them first, decides what is rebuilt, what is archived and what is consciously dropped — and only then compares the result with another year of Jira renewals.

Sources

• Atlassian Investor Relations, Notice of FY25 Pricing and Packaging Changes — Cloud (16 Oct 2024) and Data Center (11 Feb 2025) rises, JSM packaging and Assets pricing.
• Atlassian Investor Relations, Notice of FY26 Cloud Pricing Changes — Cloud rise of 15 Oct 2025.
• Atlassian Investor Relations, Notice of FY26 Data Center Pricing Changes — Data Center rise of 17 Feb 2026.
• Atlassian, Cloud list price changes FAQ — 13 Oct 2026 effective date, affected plans, usage-based allowances.
• The Adaptavist Group, Atlassian Cloud price updates, effective October 2026 — per-plan percentages for October 2026.
• OpenProject, System requirements — hardware sizing by number of users, supported PostgreSQL versions.
• OpenProject, Pricing — Community and Enterprise editions, per-user prices, minimum users, support levels.
• OpenProject, Integrations — maintained integrations and community plugins.
• OpenProject release notes 17.3 (webhook actor field, workflow configuration) and 17.9 (Jira Migrator: concurrent jobs, original timestamps, fix versions).
• Atlassian, Data Center End of Life — end of sale, end of expansions, support until end of life, read-only behaviour, extended maintenance by exception, affected and excluded products.
• Atlassian, Data Center pricing FAQ.

Atlassian and OpenProject list prices only; actual quotes depend on discounts, tier, term and renewal date. Last checked 20 October 2026.