Jira Gantt Chart: What are your options?

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With a clear visual timeline, a Jira Gantt chart helps teams stay on track, manage task dependencies, and hit deadlines with greater visibility. In this guide, we’ll look at how to create Gantt charts in Jira, compare Jira’s native options with dedicated project management tools, and share practical best practices for building a useful project plan.

What is a Gantt chart?

A Gantt chart is a project management tool that displays work as horizontal bars on a timeline. Each bar represents a task or work item, with its position and length showing the planned start and end dates.

The concept dates back to Henry Gantt, whose work popularized this type of bar chart for planning and tracking work. Today, Gantt charts are common project management tools for visualizing everything from simple projects to complex projects involving multiple teams.

A Gantt chart makes it easier to visualize:

• Task start and end dates

• Task dependencies and the sequence of work

• Project progress and the overall project schedule

• Work across multiple teams or multiple projects

• Project phases and key milestones

• How individual tasks fit into a larger work breakdown structure

• Potential delays, overlaps, and bottlenecks

For project managers, the main advantage is context. A Gantt chart helps you see the big picture while still allowing you to drill down into individual tasks.

How to Create a Gantt Chart in Jira

There are several ways to create a Gantt chart in Jira, depending on your Jira plan, project type, and the level of planning you need.

Jira offers a built-in Timeline for basic planning. If you need more advanced planning across multiple projects, teams, or levels of the Jira hierarchy, Jira Premium and Enterprise include Plans, formerly known as Advanced Roadmaps. You can also use a dedicated Jira Gantt chart app such as Planyway.

Let's look at each option.

1. Jira built-in timeline (Free/Standard version)

If you're using Jira Free or Standard, your Jira Software project comes with a Timeline feature. While it isn't a classic Gantt chart, it provides a Gantt chart view of epics and their related work, making it useful for basic project planning.

The Timeline is particularly useful when you want to visualize project timelines, dependencies, and upcoming work without adding another tool to your Jira instance.

Steps to Create a Timeline:

1. Create Epics: start by creating epics, which represent larger initiatives or high-level tasks.

2. Add Issues and Dependencies: add issues under each epic and set their start and due dates. You can also link tasks to define dependencies.

3. View Timeline: go to the "Timeline" tab to view a timeline representation of your epics and tasks.

The built-in Timeline works well when you need a simple project roadmap. However, the built-in Timeline has limitations when you need more sophisticated project planning, especially across multiple projects, teams, or resources.

2. Advanced Roadmaps (Plans)

If you're on Jira Premium or Enterprise, you can use Plans, formerly known as Advanced Roadmaps, to create a more sophisticated Gantt-style roadmap for complex projects.

Plans are designed for teams that need to coordinate work across multiple projects, teams, or levels of the Jira hierarchy. They can give project managers a broader view of the entire project and its dependencies.

1. Create a plan: Go to Plans → Create plan and choose the projects, boards, or filters you want to include.

2. Add your issues: Jira pulls epics, stories, tasks, and other issues into the plan.

3. Set dates: Add start and target dates to your issues. Plans display these on a timeline.

4. Add dependencies: Link issues using Jira's dependency relationships to show which tasks need to happen before others.

5. Adjust the timeline: Drag and resize items on the timeline to change dates and see how changes affect dependent work.

6. Plan across teams: Group work by project, team, epic, or other hierarchy levels to get a portfolio-level view.

7. Review and save: Once your roadmap is ready, save the plan and share it with stakeholders.

The main downside is that Advanced Roadmaps is only available on Jira Premium and Enterprise, so it can be an expensive upgrade (2x or more) if all you need is creating Gantt charts.

Jira Gantt chart plugins

If Jira's native timeline isn't powerful enough but you don't want to upgrade to Premium or Enterprise just for advanced planning, you can use a Jira Gantt chart app.

Planyway is one option.

Planyway's Gantt Chart brings Jira's issue hierarchy and project schedule into one visual view. It takes the Jira issues you already have and puts them on a detailed timeline, so you can see hierarchy, dates, assignees, durations, and dependencies together.

Instead of viewing Jira work as a flat list, you can see how it is structured:

Epic → Story → Task → Subtask

alongside the schedule for each level.

This makes it easy to move between high-level planning and detailed scheduling. You can use epics and other parent issues to communicate the overall plan, then expand them to understand the underlying stories, tasks, and dependencies. Plus, you can also connect multiple spaces in Planyway to bring their work together in one Gantt Chart. 

Jira Timeline vs. Plans vs. Gantt Chart Apps

The right option depends on your project type and how much planning your team needs:

Option	Best for	Main limitation
Jira Timeline	Simple project timelines and basic roadmaps	Limited customization and planning depth
Jira Plans	Advanced planning across multiple teams and projects	Requires Jira Premium or Enterprise
Gantt chart app	Flexible visual scheduling and project planning	Requires an additional app

• If you only need a basic Gantt chart view for one Jira project, the native Timeline may be enough.

• If you're managing multiple projects and teams and need portfolio-level planning, Plans may be a better fit.

• If you want more flexibility while keeping Jira as the source of truth (and don't want to 2x or more your Jira bill), a dedicated Jira Gantt app such as Planyway can give you a more powerful way to visualize, plan, and track progress.

Jira Gantt chart best practices

Start with major deliverables

Don't start by adding every task you can think of. Use epics for the big pieces of work and add stories and tasks underneath them.

This gives you a work breakdown structure without turning the Gantt chart into a wall of multiple tasks that nobody can read. You can always add new tasks as the project gets closer to execution.

Give your work realistic dates

Add start and end dates to the work you're scheduling—or at least to the parent items you're using for high-level planning.

Keep in mind that dates are estimates, not guarantees. If priorities change or deadlines shift, update the project schedule rather than letting the Gantt chart become outdated.

Map the dependencies that actually matter

Don't add a dependency between every pair of tasks. Focus on relationships that genuinely affect the sequence of work.

For example, user testing might depend on development being completed first. Making that relationship visible can help the team spot potential delays before they affect subsequent tasks.

Good dependency-identification practices can also help reveal potential bottlenecks early.

Mark the moments that matter

Use milestones for important checkpoints such as releases, approvals, launches, or the completion of major project phases.

Your milestones should represent meaningful outcomes rather than every individual deadline. This gives stakeholders an easy way to understand the project's most important dates.

Keep the plan alive

A Gantt chart shouldn't be something you create once and never touch again.

Review dates, dependencies, milestones, and project progress regularly. Priorities change, estimates become more accurate, and shifting deadlines can affect the rest of the plan.

Keeping the chart updated makes it much more useful for progress tracking and team collaboration.

Keep views focused

Stakeholders usually need the big picture, while the delivery team needs more detail. For example, an executive may only need to see epics, milestones, and major project phases, while a delivery manager may need stories, tasks, dependencies, and individual assignments.

Use the right level of granularity for each audience rather than showing everyone the entire project at once.

Don't confuse Gantt planning with sprint planning

A Gantt chart and sprint planning answer different questions. A Gantt chart shows the broader project roadmap: major deliverables, project timelines, dependencies, milestones, and expected dates.

Sprint planning focuses on what an Agile team will actually work on next. Jira's Scrum boards and Kanban boards are designed for that day-to-day execution.

So you don't need to choose between Gantt planning and Agile planning. Agile teams can use a Gantt chart for the big picture while using sprints and boards to manage the work in progress.

Use the Gantt chart to communicate, not just track

One of the biggest benefits of using Gantt charts is that they give project managers and stakeholders a shared view of the plan.

A good chart can help everyone stay on the same page about priorities, deadlines, dependencies, and milestones.

That's especially valuable when you're coordinating multiple teams, managing multiple projects, or working with stakeholders who don't spend their day inside Jira.

Final thoughts

Jira already gives teams several ways to plan and visualize their work, from a basic Timeline to Plans for more advanced planning. But the right solution depends on how much visibility and flexibility your project management process requires.

For simple Jira projects, the built-in Timeline may be all you need. For larger projects involving multiple teams and projects, Plans provide more advanced roadmap capabilities. And if you want a dedicated Gantt chart view while keeping your Jira data connected to day-to-day work, a tool like Planyway can provide another option.

The goal isn't to create the most detailed chart possible. It's to build a project plan that helps your team understand the entire project, manage dependencies, allocate resources, track progress, and adapt when priorities change.

Whether you're following a waterfall project management methodology, managing an Agile delivery process, or using agile Gantt charts as a hybrid approach, a well-maintained Gantt chart can turn a long list of Jira issues into a project schedule that people can actually understand and use.