The Complete Guide to Cloning in JIRA in 2025: How to Clone Work Items in Various Ways
Cloning helps you reuse work in Jira without starting from scratch. You might need to duplicate a single work item, clone a group of tasks, or move cloned work across different projects. In some cases, you may also want to automate cloning based on a custom schedule.
In this blog post, you’ll find step-by-step instructions for different cloning scenarios, with clear examples for each case.
What You Need to Know About Cloning in JIRA
Cloning in Jira means creating a duplicate of an existing work item. The new work item automatically copies important information from the original. This includes the summary, description, work type, and other key details. However, not everything is duplicated. Comments, work logs, and the full change history are not copied to the clone.
Teams typically use cloning when they need to:
- Reuse standard tasks
- Create multiple similar items quickly
- Assign the same work to different teams
The main benefits of cloning in Jira:
- Time-saving for recurring work
Instead of manually entering the same information time after time, you can clone an existing work item and reuse its structure. For recurring tasks, this speeds up setup and reduces the chance of missing important details.
- Automatic linking between related work
When you clone a work item, Jira automatically links the original and the clone using the “Clones” / “Is cloned by” link type. This keeps related work connected and makes it easier to track.
- Consistency across similar tasks
Cloning preserves the structure of the original work item. You can use the cloned copy as a starting point, only adjusting the parts that need to be different. This helps maintain consistent processes across all your projects.
How to Clone a Jira Work Item to the Same Project
This type of cloning in Jira is quite straightforward. Open the work item you want to clone, click the three dots in the upper right corner, and select Clone:
In the pop-up window, select the additional assets to include in the cloned work item (if your initial work item features any). In particular, these can be:
- Attachments
- Child work items
- Links
- Sprint value
- Custom fields
Jira also allows cloning directly from the board view. To do this, hover over the card you want to duplicate, open the three-dot menu, and choose Clone. This option is especially useful when you’re reviewing tasks during planning or backlog grooming.
The new work item will appear in the same project and include a link to the original. Jira adds the word “Cloned” to the beginning of the summary by default, but you can update it before finalizing. Keep in mind that this method may not be available in all board configurations, depending on your permissions and project type.
How to Clone a Jira Work Item to a Different Project
There are times when a work item needs to be reused outside its original project. For example, you might want to duplicate a QA ticket—complete with its checklist and linked bugs—and send it to another project as a report for the product manager. Or you may simply need to run the same task in multiple project spaces. Depending on your project management processes, there can be many other cases when you need to move issue / work item to a new project. Instead of recreating everything manually, you can use Jira automation to handle the cloning.
Jira doesn’t offer a built-in option to clone a work item directly to another project, but you can achieve this with a simple automation rule. If this action isn’t something you do often, the best approach is to set up a manual trigger. That way, the clone is created automatically when you choose to run the rule—no need to configure a recurring schedule or complex conditions. Here’s how to make it work:
- Go to Project Settings → Automation, then click Create Rule.
- Select Manual trigger from work item as the event. You can define who is allowed to run this rule and which work item types / issue types it applies to.
- Add the Clone work item as an action.
- Choose the target project and the work item type for the clone. It can match the original or be different (e.g., clone a bug as a task).
- Customize the summary if needed—for example, remove the default “Cloned” prefix.
- Pick the fields you want to copy over, such as Description, Assignee, Reporter, Attachments, Linked items, and others.
- Save and enable the rule.
Once set up, the rule can be triggered manually from any work item to which it applies, according to the conditions you specified in the rule. Go to the work item you want to clone, click Actions, and select Clone issue to another project.
The new issue / work item will be cloned to the selected project according to your settings.
How to Clone a Jira Work Item Automatically With Custom Rules
Manual cloning works well for one-off tasks, but in many cases, you can fully automate the process based on specific triggers. This saves time and ensures that important work moves forward without waiting for someone to take action.
For example, imagine you have a board where team members submit ideas, feature requests, or product suggestions. Once the product team reviews and approves an item, it should move into development. Instead of copying it manually, you can set up an automation rule that clones approved suggestions into a separate project or as a different work type—such as a development task.
Here’s an automation scheme for this:
When a work item is transitioned to Approved and the work type is an Input item, it gets cloned into the specified project as a Story. In this example, we also added the prefix “Input” to the summary and a corresponding label for easier tracking.
You can customize the automation rule to fit your specific process by choosing different triggers and adding conditions. For instance, the rule can start when a Jira ticket transitions from one status to another, a label is added, or a custom field is updated. To set it up, go to Project Settings → Automation → Create Rule and define the conditions that should trigger the cloning. Once your setup is complete, test the rule to make sure it behaves as expected, then enable it.
How to Remove the “CLONE” Prefix From Cloned Tasks in Jira
By default, Jira adds a “CLONE –” prefix to the summary of every cloned work item. This can be helpful for quick identification, but in many workflows—especially automated ones—it adds unnecessary noise.
If you want to remove or change this prefix system-wide, go to Administration → System → Advanced Settings. Look for the entry named jira.clone.prefix (it should be the first on the list). The default value for it is CLONE –. Click on the value text to edit or clear it.
Note that this change requires Administrator permissions. If you don’t have admin access, you can still remove the prefix by modifying your automation rules.
How to Clone a Jira Epic With All Its Tasks and Subtasks
Currently, Jira does not offer an out-of-the-box option to clone the whole hierarchy of work items within an epic. Here are the alternatives you can consider:
- Use Smart Templates for Jira to clone the whole hierarchy
With the help of this app, you can save an epic and all its work items, subtasks, and checklists as a reusable template. From that template, you can create an exact duplicate of the original epic. This allows you to clone an epic both to the same project or to another one.
- Clone an epic manually from the work item view page
In this case, an epic and its work of the first level of hierarchy will be cloned into the same project, but subtasks and checklists will not be copied.
- Use Automation for Jira to clone an epic with its work items
You can set up a rule that will clone an epic and the work it includes to the same or to another project. However, subtasks and checklists will not be transferred. The available workarounds for including subtasks often don’t work reliably due to Jira’s limitations.
As you can see, currently, the only way to clone a Jira epic with all its work items and subtasks is to use a third-party solution.
Let’s explore these options in more detail.
Option 1. Using Smart Templates
While cloning is commonly used for recurring tasks, it isn’t always the most efficient option, especially when you need to replicate the same structure multiple times or across teams. Using work item templates can be a better solution for this purpose.
First of all, the native cloning options don’t preserve an entire epic hierarchy. Secondly, cloning a task repeatedly is inefficient. You have to search for the original issue / work item, duplicate it, and then remove or change outdated details left over from the previous version. There’s also the risk of someone accidentally editing the original item, especially if it’s being used as a reference point for multiple clones. If you’re cloning a lot of work items often, the process becomes hard to manage and easy to get wrong.
Smart Templates for Jira offer a cleaner, more reliable solution. You can save a full epic as a template—including all tasks, subtasks, checklists, descriptions, and field values. Variables can be added for details that change from one case to another. All templates are stored in one place as a list, so your team always knows where to find them and doesn’t need to rely on manually maintained “clone-ready” Jira issues (work items).
Instead of copying and editing the same item over and over, you create a standardized template once. Then, you can reuse it anytime you need and create a new epic from your template. The new epic will include all the tasks, subtasks, and checklists from the original epic. Issue fields, descriptions, assignees, and other information will be preserved as well.
In the example below, we cloned an epic for the recruitment process. The original epic with its tasks, subtasks, and checklists was saved as a template. Now, we make a copy of it every time we need to launch the recruitment process for a new position. This keeps the process consistent and saves time on setup.
To prepare this template, we used Smart Templates and Smart Checklist for Jira by Titan Apps. If you want to recreate a work item regularly at set intervals, use the built-in scheduling feature in Smart Templates.
Additionally, you can enhance your templates with variables of different types. This allows you to include values that change from one task to another:
When you create a new work item from a template, a pop-up will appear asking you to fill in the variables. Once filled in, Jira will generate the work item using the template structure and the information for the variables that you provided. Here’s what the result looks like:
Another benefit of using Smart Templates is the built-in History feature. It lets you track all work items created from a specific template. You can quickly check their status, see their assignees, and monitor overall progress.
By default, a new epic created from a template is added to the same project as the original. If you need to use it elsewhere, you can share the template across multiple projects. This can be done from the Projects tab in the Smart Templates settings.
As you can see, with Smart Templates, it’s easy to clone a complete Jira epic, including all the hierarchy of tasks it contains. The process is quick, consistent, and works across both Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center.
Option 2. Manual Cloning
Epics, like other work items in Jira, can be cloned directly from the work item view page. While this method won’t clone the full hierarchy, it does allow you to duplicate an epic along with its first-level child items. Subtasks and checklists inside those items won’t be included.
To use this option, open the view page of the epic you want to clone. Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner and select Clone from the list.
In the pop-up window, you’ll see a list of additional items you can include in the clone—such as attachments, issue links, and child work items. To copy the epic along with its related tasks, check the box for Child issues / work items and then click Clone.
Your epic and its work will be cloned to the same project. However, the subtasks from those work items will not be transferred.
Option 3. Utilizing Automation For Jira
Another native option—Automation for Jira—also doesn’t provide a clear way to clone an epic with all its dependencies. There are many workarounds shared in the Atlassian Community, but most of them come with limitations or don’t work reliably across different setups.
At the moment, the most feasible option is to configure a rule that clones a parent work item along with its child items from the first level of hierarchy:
The rule created in this way will only clone the epic and its immediate child work items. Subtasks and checklists linked to those tasks won’t be included.
This limitation exists because Jira automation doesn’t allow building a branch inside another branch, which would be necessary to reach deeper levels of hierarchy.
Some teams try to bypass this by setting up two separate automation rules: one to clone an epic and its tasks, and another to handle subtasks. However, this approach often causes problems. Rules may fail to trigger properly or leave cloned items disconnected. For that reason, using multiple rules for cloning full structures isn’t considered a reliable method.
Here’s how to configure the automation shown in the screenshot above.
- As a trigger, select Manually Triggered.
- For the condition, set Work type equals Epic.
- The action will be Clone work item into. Specify the project where you want to clone your epic to. Then click Choose field and select Parent. You can also add any other fields you want to copy. In the Linked work items/Linked issues, select Clones and Trigger work item, as shown in the screenshot below. This will add the link to the original task to the cloned version.
- Add a Create variable step and specify the variable name and its smart value as shown below:
- Next, create a branch For: Children and add Clone work item into as the action. Select the same project you chose for the parent task. From the Choose fields list, select Parent and enter the variable name from the previous step.
Once your rule is ready, validate it and enable it. To use it, open the epic you want to clone, click on Actions, and select the rule you created from the dropdown menu. This will trigger the automation and create a clone of the epic along with its child work items based on your configuration. Subtasks and checklists will not be included. The cloned epic will also contain a link to the original work item.
How to Clone Jira Work Items in Bulk
Currently, Jira does not offer a native option to clone multiple work items at once. This has been a long-standing request from users, with an open input ticket dating back to 2014. Although Jira has announced that the bulk-clone feature is now on their roadmap, it may still take time before a full solution becomes available.
In the meantime, here are the alternatives you can use:
Automation for Jira
You can create an automation rule to generate similar work items based on specific triggers. This works well for recurring tasks but isn’t practical when you need to clone different sets of work items once or twice. It also won’t help if each cloning batch is unique.
Third-party apps
Several apps fill this gap by offering bulk cloning options. One of the most popular tools is Deep Clone. Another option is Smart Templates for Jira by Titan Apps. If the work items you need to duplicate are grouped under the same epic, Smart Templates can be used to quickly recreate the entire structure by saving it as a reusable template.
Here’s an example of how this works. Imagine you manage several products across different Jira projects. Each product must go through the same sequence of tasks to prepare for a security compliance audit. Instead of setting up the same work manually for each project, you create an epic with all the necessary tasks:
Since all the audit tasks are organized under a single epic, you can bulk-clone them into another project using Smart Templates for Jira.
First, install Smart Templates and save your existing epic as a template. This will capture the epic along with its full structure of tasks and subtasks. Next, make the template available across all relevant projects by sharing it through the Projects tab in the Smart Templates settings.
After that, you can use the template to create a new epic in any selected project. The new epic will automatically include all the tasks from the original structure, achieving the same result as bulk-cloning multiple work items at once. We already covered how to create and use templates earlier in this blog post if you need a step-by-step guide.
Should You Use the Native Features For Cloning in JIRA?
The built-in Jira cloning features work well when you need to duplicate a single work item. You can trigger it manually or set up a simple automation rule to handle the basic use cases.
But when it comes to more advanced scenarios, the native options fall short. Jira software doesn’t provide a way to clone multiple work items in bulk or to replicate an epic with its full hierarchy. Sometimes, using automation for Jira can be a viable choice here, even though it’s not the most straightforward and bulletproof solution. Creating a rule that fulfills your requirements for cloning and runs without any surprises can prove to be a tricky task.
As an alternative, we recommend you consider third-party solutions for custom cloning use cases. Smart Templates for Jira by Titan Apps can be helpful for cloning issues in bulk and cloning a Jira epic with the included subtasks and checklists. Due to the ease of use, this is a rather cost-efficient solution that will help you streamline the cloning process and better organize your work in Jira.
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Olga Cheban _TitanApps_
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