How to integrate Salesforce and Jira (A step-by-step guide)

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Salesforce CRM is commonly used by sales and support teams to manage accounts, opportunities, and customer cases. Atlassian Jira is used by engineering teams to plan development work, track bugs, and manage product backlogs.

Because these systems serve different teams, information often moves between them manually. Support teams may recreate customer issues in Jira, while engineering teams send updates back through messages or email.

Over time, this process becomes difficult to maintain. Records fall out of sync, and it becomes harder to trace how a customer issue moves from support to development and eventually to resolution.

CRM systems and engineering tools are designed for different workflows. Integrating them requires translating customer records into development work items while preserving the context needed by both teams.

This article outlines a few considerations before implementing a Salesforce–Jira integration and walks you through an example of configuring synchronization between the two platforms using OpsHub. 

Why teams integrate Salesforce and Jira?

Organizations typically connect Salesforce and Jira   bidirectionally to improve coordination between customer-facing teams and engineering teams.

• Customer issues reach engineering faster: Support agents often capture product problems in Salesforce cases. Integration allows those cases to appear in Jira as development issues without manual copying.
• Customer teams gain visibility into engineering progress: Updates made by developers in Jira can synchronize back to Salesforce so support and account teams can track progress.
• Reduced manual coordination: Synchronization removes the need to maintain duplicate records or track issues across multiple tools.
• Improved traceability: Customer cases, development issues, and resolution updates remain connected across both systems, making it easier to follow the lifecycle of a request.

What to consider before implementing Salesforce and Jira integration?

Before connecting the systems, it helps to review a few architectural considerations:

• Define system ownership: Salesforce typically remains the system of record for customer information and support cases. Jira usually manages engineering tasks such as bugs, stories, and technical work items. Clearly defining which system owns each field helps prevent conflicting updates.
• Plan field mapping carefully: Salesforce objects often include customer-related information such as account details or entitlement data. Jira issues contain development attributes such as sprint assignments or story points. Mapping these fields often requires translation rather than simple one-to-one matching.
• Align workflows: Salesforce service workflows and Jira development workflows are structured differently. A single Salesforce case status may correspond to multiple Jira workflow states. Mapping those transitions carefully helps keep both systems consistent.
• Synchronize selectively: Not every field or object needs to synchronize across systems. Limiting synchronization to relevant objects and fields usually simplifies integration maintenance.

The integration platform used in this walkthrough

To illustrate the configuration process, the steps below use OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM), an integration platform listed on the Atlassian marketplace that supports bidirectional integrations between systems such as Salesforce and Jira.

A few prerequisites to consider before we proceed on with the integration:

• OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM) should be installed on the machine before you proceed with the integration.
• You should have OpsHub login credentials
• Each system has its own set of prerequisites for successful integration.

Step 1: Configure Jira system

Once you log in, navigate to Configure Systems by clicking the plus sign at the top-right corner of the screen.

• Write Jira in the system type or select the Jira system from the system type list.

• Then, configure Jira by selecting it from the system list and providing the necessary connection information.

 Step 2: Configure the Salesforce system and fill in the details as shown below: 

Step 3: Mapping the entities

Configuring the mapping after the systems are configured: Drag and drop the systems in the Configure System screen, to initiate the mapping. After you put the system, click ’Proceed to Mapping’.

• It will redirect you to the Configure Mappings page automatically. Select your project and entity type here to proceed.

• Here, you select the fields you want to map, check if you want to sync the comments and attachments, define the flow of information between the two systems, then click Create Mapping’ to save it.

Step 4: Integration creation

Once your mapping created, it would look like below, click the integrate button to proceed.

• You need to check the name and direction of the synced projects.

           

• Now, you need to set up the polling time, and it will be based on your data in Salesforce.

 Now, you can click the ‘Save’ button to save your integration.

Step 5: Activating the integration

After saving the configuration, activate the integration using Activate All option as seen below. Records will begin synchronizing between Salesforce and Jira according to the defined mappings. 

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Real-world example: What cross-team sync looks like in practice 

Customer issues logged in Salesforce don’t seamlessly flow into Jira, forcing teams to manually transfer data and increasing the risk of delays and errors.

This disconnect leads to poor visibility, misaligned teams, and slower resolution of customer issues.

A well-structured bidirectional Salesforce and Atlassian Jira integration ridges that gap. Here’s how:

• A support agent creates a customer case in Salesforce describing a product issue.
• The case synchronizes to Jira as a development issue via OpsHub Integration Manager
• Developers investigate the issue and update progress within Jira.
• Status updates synchronize back to Salesforce, allowing support teams to track progress.
• Once resolved, the issue status is reflected in both systems.
• Each team continues working in its own environment while sharing the information needed to resolve the issue.

Closing thoughts

Salesforce and Jira serve different roles in the product delivery process, but the work managed in each system is often connected.

A well-designed integration helps maintain visibility between customer operations and engineering teams while reducing manual coordination.

In practice, successful integrations usually focus on clear data ownership, careful field mapping, and selective synchronization rather than attempting to synchronize every available attribute.