Doesn't Atlassian provide free licenses for JIRA and Confluence to be used in teaching anymore?

[Arne Styve]

Hi all,

Since 2014 my University has had free unlimited users licenses for Atlassian Data Center self-hosted JIRA and Confluence products. The licenses were Community Licenses.

In April this year, Atlassian apparently changed their terms for who qualifies for Community Licenses, and as of August 2024, our University will not be able to use JIRA and Confluence in courses for free anymore. The alternatives seems to be either teacher/staff cloud licenses, or Academic 50% discounted licenses.

I would love to hear from other Universities using Atlassian products in teaching, if you have similar experience, and what type of licenses you have.

Best

Arne Styve

[Dave Long · Accepted solution]

Hi Arne, 

The University of Iowa had a Confluence (Server) Unlimited Users: Academic License for Confluence Server, this covered all faculty, staff, and students at the university.  Hosted on-prem in one instance, we had about a 60/40 split, where 60% of spaces were used for academic courses, and 40% were used for research or other administrative use cases.  

Based on pricing changes that Atlassian announced in 2020, we discontinued the enterprise-wide Confluence service in 2024 (keeping that service would have resulted in price increases between 700% to 1,000%), and shifted most users to other services, except for a small set that is helping pay for the Confluence Cloud license cost.  See https://teach.its.uiowa.edu/wiki-alternatives for a list of other enterprise services that offer similar instructional functionality.  You may want to check with your university's IT department to see if there are similar services available at your institution. 

From an instructional / pedagogical perspective, that's a shame, as the flexibility and collaborative nature of the Confluence platform were used in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses (building collaborative knowledge across semesters, group projects, etc).  Plus, Confluence feels like it has better knowledge management / collaborative editing tools than others in that space.  It's been a few years since I delved into this, but there are other products out there (js.wiki, xwiki.com).       

For all of the positive uses of Confluence in education, I'm not sure that Atlassian fully understands the higher education market (see lack of support for LTI, a discombobulated pricing structure where non-profits get 75% off Cloud products or 100% off data center products for non-profits compared to academic institutions who get 50% off cloud products except for 75% off Confluence compared to 75% off all Cloud products for students and teachers, etc).  Atlassian does have HECVATs for their products, which is a good sign for institutions who review software for security and accessibility standards. 

A few related links: 

• https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing#do-academic-institutions-receive-special-pricing  - 75% off Confluence cloud for academic institutions, 50% off other products 
• https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing#do-students-teachers-receive-special-pricing  - 75% off Confluence cloud and other products for students and teachers   
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/free#plan-and-track - free Confluence and JIRA for 10 users, would not use your university's login / authentication / SSO

Hope this helps, 

-Dave

[Arne Styve]

Hi Dave :-)

Thanks for responding to my question, and for explaining how you guys have been using Confluence at your University, and most importantly; confirming my suspicion regarding the change of license policy by Atlassian.

My university (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU) uses Confluence as the main Wiki-system for admin purposes. I.e. we as staff/teachers can set up wiki spaces for our own use as well as for teaching (not for teaching the tool Confluence to the students but to host learning material that we keep between semesters etc.). This Confluence instance is managed by our central IT department. Recently we received a message from the IT-department that they had to reduce the number of active users of the wiki due to the changes in Atlassian's licensing policy, which is a shame.

I teach Computing Science, and as part of this, Agile Methodologies. For this we introduce JIRA and Confluence as excellent tools (also still the most commonly used tools in the professional industry) for the students to practice both SCRUM, Kanban and ScrumBan etc. For their Bachelor Thesis (6th semester) all groups are provided both a JIRA project space and a Confluence wiki-space for them to use to manage their project. It's been a great success, and the IT-industry hiring our students are extremely satisfied that we as a University teach our students to work in a structured way in IT-projects supported by good tools.

The licenses for these instances, purely used directly in IT-teaching, I have managed since 2014. We host both JIRA and Confluence Data Center versions on virtual servers where the IT-dept manages the virtual machines, while I manage the Atlassian SW (keep them updated when new releases are out etc). These licenses have been "Community Licenses" with unlimited users and free of charge since 2014. But after the changes made by Atlassian in the licensing policy this winter, we do not qualify anymore for the free Community Licenses for use in teaching computing sciences. I'm not quite sure that Atlassian really knows what they are doing. While other CS tools like GitHub has excellent free solutions, with a dedicated Educational tool kit (GitHub Classroom etc.) and sees the importance of this, Atlassian has moved the opposite direction it seems.

Anyways, I'll have a look at the links you provided.

Most likely we will leave Atlassian and we will have to move all teaching from JIRA and Confluence to start using the issue boards and wiki + projects on GitHub instead. Not quite as good as JIRA + Confluence, but we cannot afford to pay what Atlassian now is demanding for the licenses :-/

Thanks again Dave for your quick respons and good and informative answere.

Cheers,

Arne

[Arne Styve]

Hi,

Just wanted to give you all an update on this issue:

We have finally reached a conclusion with Atlassian: Universities are no longer qualified for the free Community License for JIRA and Confluence Data Centre. There are only two options available for us:

1. Data Centre at Academic discount of 75% - I received a quote for "JIRA and Confluence Data Center 500 Users: Academic Term License Downgrade from Unlimited Users" at USD 36.000 per year …and that is VAT exclusive. 
2. Cloud solution - for 10 users they charge USD 718,75 (VAT incl). So scaled up to say 200 users, we end up at USD 14.375 per year.

Both of these options are way too expensive for us to even consider. So we have decided to leave Atlassian after 10 long happy years.

From next semester we will turn to GitHub and use their Project-solution with built in Wiki and issue-tracking. Far from as good as the Atlassian tools (yet), but more than adequate for teaching our students good software project practices.

- Arne