🪐 Jira Spaces have landed!

[#1]

Last year, we commited to evolving the language in our tools to better reflect the diverse ways teams define and manage their work in Jira.

Today, we're excited to announce that Jira's transition from 'projects' to 'spaces' terminology is now available for users on Free and Standard plans.

We'll begin rolling out the new terminology to sites on Premium and Enterprise plans starting October 20, 2025. For more details on our release timeline, read our previous blog post.

What's changing from today?

The term 'project' is being replaced with 'space' across all Jira Cloud products, including Jira Service Management and Jira Product Discovery.

This update is purely a terminology change – everything else about how you use these containers remains the same.

Why are we making this change?

The term ‘project’ has been central to Jira since its beginning. However, we've heard from many of you that it can lead to confusion.

For many teams, 'projects' are often understood to have defined start and end dates, hierarchical structures, and clear scopes. However, Jira ‘projects’ function differently – they're containers for work, not tied to the traditional definition of a project.

Furthermore, we've recently introduced Atlassian Projects, purpose-built to provide high-level visibility into work with defined timelines, goals, and stakeholders. By renaming Jira 'projects' to 'spaces,' we’re making it easier to distinguish between these two features and their unique purposes.

Check out our announcement blog for more on why we’re making this changes

An important note on JQL

As we roll out these updates, we've aimed to ensure that all mentions of 'project' are updated to 'space' at the same time, providing a consistent experience across your tools.

Updates to JQL, however, aren't able to roll out concurrently. This means some users may continue to see 'project' terminology when applying JQL filters during this period.

We expect this to be resolved by mid-December. Thanks for your patience as we work through this.

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As we implement these changes, we’re open to your continued questions and feedback.

Thank you for your patience and support as we refine Jira's language to better align with the needs of all teams.

FAQs

Q. When will I see these changes on my site?

We have started transitioning users on Free and Standard plans to the new terminology. Users on Premium and Enterprise plans can expect to see these updates beginning October 20, 2025.

For more details on our release timeline, read our previous blog post.

Q. Can admins choose what term replaces 'project'?

No, admins will not have the option to decide what term replaces ‘project.’ By default, ‘project’ will be replaced with ‘space’ for all Jira customers at the site level.

Q. Can admins opt out of this terminology change?

As this update is being implemented across all our Atlassian products, we’re unable to provide the option to opt out of this change.

Q. Why rename 'Projects' to 'Spaces' when Confluence spaces already exist? Isn't this confusing?

We’ve intentionally standardized the terminology across our tools to create a more seamless navigation experience for teams.

We’ve heard your concerns about distinguishing between Confluence and Jira spaces and are actively working to address this to ensure a smooth user experience

Q. Will this change be implemented in Jira Data Center as well?

As of now, there are no concrete plans to introduce this change to Jira Data Center in the near future.

Q. How does this change affect Jira Cloud APIs?

There are no changes to existing APIs; they will continue to function as they currently do.

Q. What impact does this change have on JQL and existing filters?

JQL clauses and any existing filters/saved searches will continue to support the term 'project' to maintain backward compatibility.

We'll introduce a new alias for 'space' to support the terminology updates.

Q. What impact does this change have on automation smart values?

There are no changes to your automation smart values at this time, they'll continue to use {{project}} terminology.

We're currently exploring how we'll be updating smart values in the future and will keep you updated.

Q. How does this impact other languages supported by Jira?

We will be updating our terminology across all our supported languages to reflect this change.

All our supported languages will be using Confluence 'Space' terminology to match the standardization of terminology across our tools.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Josh Sherwood  - looking forward to our end users opinions and thoughts as this gets rolled out.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Why?  Why Space?  Could you not have come up with something that wasn't already used in Confluence?  

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Josh Sherwood 

As several customers asked with comments for your original post on this change: why change the UX, REST API endpoints, and automation smart values on different release cycles, or perhaps not align them at all ever?  Compare this to the changes from "issue" to "work item" which still have not been aligned across products, even though the documentation for JQL seems to indicate this has happened.

My follow-up would be: how does change management work at Atlassian to prevent such types of misalignment?  Thanks for anything you can share on the processes used.

Kind regards,
Bill

UPDATED 16 October 2025:

After the most recent change management incident with the movement of the Status field on views, Dave Meyer, the Head of Product for Jira, stated this after the rollback:

We’ve initiated a comprehensive review of Jira’s change management and feature rollout processes. We will share our plans for how Jira will release UI updates going forward in the Jira Cloud admins group on Atlassian Community by December 2025.

I respectfully suggest watching that group to learn what is shared regarding Atlassian's review and decisions on change management going forward.  Thanks!

[Patrick S_ Stuckenberger]

I really hope that the german version mapping also gets this update. 

[Domagoj Kenda]

Do not like the direction Jira is going with these updates....especially after the status button position change was tremendously bad. 

[LynnG]

I spend a good 10 minutes looking for the status button on the right-side of a work item and used "find my field" function before I turned my head to the left and found it in its new position.

Change is constant 

[Wendy Grapentine]

At least they gave us a pop-up this time.  Wish we had had this for the status move.

[FS (Admin-Account: JIRA)]

Hi @Patrick S_ Stuckenberger

our instance shows a mix when using german language

and rather weird expressions.

[Mohammad amin Mozaffar]

That is the perfect choice and we used to call them Space in our company before this. I'm happy to hear it from you. Project has no meaning for this section.

[Smaricic Daron]

Got a alert (left bottom of screen) telling me that "projects" are now "spaces". But I still can see only "projects". How come?

[Chris Calvert]

The reasoning for this change does not make sense and feels like a marketing ploy to eventually sell a new service. 

Why on earth would anyone not think of projects in jira as projects? The whole point of using jira is for project management, not spaces management.

I had a discussion with my dev team and pmo team, and both are very confused on the reason to make the change and do not agree it needs to be done. It will just cause more confusion being called spaces since these are all actual projects.

[John Eisenschmidt _External_]

A reminder, and a question:

• For those of us that grew up in this ecosystem - I started administering JIRA (all caps, not an acronym) and Confluence in 2007, incumbency used to be a major asset but has more recently become a liability. I realize for many people newer to this platform, or work management tools, or frankly work: some of these {names, idioms, metaphors} don't make the most sense, but when you've developed muscle memory over 5, 10, 15+ years, these seemingly small changes throw people for a loop. Last Friday in our weekly office hours, I was demo'ing the "new" Cloud UI (I've been a daily JSM Cloud since it was JSD) to our Data Center users, and kept getting tripped-up with basic navigation. Apologizing for not knowing a suite of products I've administered/used/trained-on for most of my career is starting to feel like early onset dementia.</soapbox>
• QUESTION: where was this particular change pre-announced before it launched? We were given ~3 months notice of the "new UI" for Jira Cloud that went early-access before TEAM '25, and had time to opt-out before we were saddled with it forever. If there is anything about "Projects -> Spaces" in the linked article about "Issues" becoming "Work", I didn't see it. Whether or not it makes sense, I have training material and documentation that needs to be updated to reflect this, and while I've seen many other announcements this year about changes I don't completely agree with, this caught me completely off guard (formerly off access, formerly off crowd)

Some free consulting/fortune-telling for the sales team at Atlassian:

• irrespective of the existence of the Team Work Collection (TWC) bundle that includes Jira, Confluence, Guard, Loom, and Rovo...
• You're going to have a more difficult time selling Confluence or TWC into organizations that know-and-want Jira --
  • they MIGHT understand the concept of Issue management vs Knowledge management
  • they might have the misunderstanding they can get away with Knowledge Management using another tool they already license that isn't suited to the task (e.g. Sharepoint, Teams, Google Sites)
  • but over the years, how most notionally "got it" was that Jira had a "Project" (not what the PMI defines as "something we do once", but a container of related work items) and Confluence had a "Space"
  • if you have two products that call something a "Space" that store different information about a related topic, they're not going to understand:
    • why one is $30k and one is $25k and TWC is $55k, they're probably going to buy Confluence and wonder why they didn't end up with Jira?
    • why they have to license different Plug-ins for two different tools, often from the same vendor, that seem to go the same thing? E.g.
      • Git for Jira scans my source code repos for related commits and shows them related to the Work Item, e.g. Feature Request or Bug (300 users / $4500/yr)
      • Git for Confluence pulls Mermaid diagrams kept in that same Git repo live from the repo and renders them on a page (300 users / @$2500)

Good luck at your next sales retreat!

[Trevan Householder_Isos-Tech-Consulting_]

@Josh Sherwood Regarding @Bill Sheboy comment: As an Atlassian trainer I share his concern as it also has implications for Atlassian training and lab environments/workbooks, enablement academy training, and exams. 

Additionally, I get the desire for one term to refer to across products, but with this change your customers will now be forced to say "Confluence space" vs "Jira or JSM space" instead of just saying "Space" or "Project". 

It's a little frustrating when Atlassian makes sweeping changes without thinking through all of the ramifications and impacts to their customers. 

[Jayesh Raghuvanshi]

Spaces in Jira is not an ideal approach as whats I assume, Jira Projects was the correct terminlogies.

Software Projects
JSM Projects 

These terminolgies are gone nowww. :( 

[tom_hawkins]

As mentioned on Rishabh Jhawar's related post "using the same term but to describe fundamentally different though related things is not speaking the same language CORRECTLY, so not so nice in my view. Americans claim to speak a version of English, but when they say "Chips" and mean "Crisps" when they should mean "Chips" (which they call "French Fries") it may be ~the same language, but this can't be described as NICE speaking of the same language! They're both edible and made from potato, but not helping the clarity of communication. " 

[Anne Saunders]

I need to know a cutover date for the API and JQL filters, as I have 700+ filters to review/revise, not to mention a handful each of API calls and automations, and all the references in our internal materials. 

This is unideal.

[vasanth]

I think it's not a good decision by Atlassian, since Jira is project management tool, how come the name "SPACE" ? 

[AAlbero]

Just plain stupid. I can't believe I just renewed our subscription. Now I need to plan to move us out of this "thing". ARGH

[Alexander Smotrov]

This change is completely bad and useless.

Renaming Issues to Work Items has already introduced additional complexity, disruption and chaos to users’ daily life, but now it has reached a new level.

It seems that Atlassian’s team has run out of fresh ideas for new functional improvements and has switched its focus to so-called non-functional evolution and they did not forget to increase pricing for that.

In fact, all these decisions just push end users to switch to completely different vendors.

P.S. For years we had Confluence Spaces and Jira Projects, now we have Jira Spaces and I cannot imagine how Atlassian wants to rename it in Confluence.

[Jamie Stanczyk]

With the change from projects to spaces, will that also affect the term "Project Roles?"

[Josh Sherwood]

@Bill Sheboy @Anne Saunders @Trevan Householder_Isos-Tech-Consulting_ 

Thanks for sharing your feedback. We understand your concerns about the misalignment of API and JQL updates with this change. This decision was influenced by complexities that would have impacted our release timeline, and we wanted to introduce more user-friendly terminology for teams as quickly as possible.

For JQL, we will introduce a new alias for 'space' to align with the terminology update, ensuring that your existing filters and saved searches continue to function as they do today. We are finalising the timeline for these changes and will communicate the details in advance to give you time to prepare.

@John Eisenschmidt _External_ 

Thanks for your feedback John, and I apologise that this change caught you off guard. We announced this back in June on the blog here.

@Patrick S_ Stuckenberger @FS (Admin-Account: JIRA) 

Yes, we will be updating our terminology across all our supported languages to reflect this change. Thanks for flagging that error. I've informed the team, and they are working on a fix.

@Smaricic Daron 

Apologies for the confusion Smaricic. There was an error where some users saw the pop-up before the change was implemented in their instance. Our team is working on resolving this issue. Thanks for letting us know.

@Jamie Stanczyk 

In most cases, the term 'project' has simply been replaced with 'space' – so in this instance, 'project roles' will become 'space roles.' All other functionality will remain the same.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Josh Sherwood 

Thank you for that information, although I am still puzzled how what you describe aligns with common change management practices for an enterprise the size of Atlassian.

For example, I recommend reverting the apparent batched changes to the JQL documentation as they were updated many months before the yet-to-be-announced changes to JQL.  Here is one of them:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/jql-functions/#linkedWorkItems--

Kind regards,
Bill

[Jacob Ebenhoe]

I have a few legacy spaces/projects that have one or more boards associated with them. Each of those boards is powered by a JQL filter which allows me to integrate work items from multiple projects with it. 

I notice with spaces, there is no option to add a board - and thus no option to utilize a filter to power my backlog. Am I to take that as - it is no longer supported to display work from other spaces/projects under my new space? 

I see that I can add "custom filters" which is great, but they do not display any work items from outside of my work space. 

I have multiple development teams working out of different projects/spaces, however I need to articulate a shared backlog across those projects. 

Hoping I'm just missing something here...looking for insights!

[Anne Saunders]

@Jacob Ebenhoe I just made a test project and you're right - even though Board is a Feature according to the Space settings for my shiny new test space, I don't have a board, and I'm not seeing where to add one. 

It's time to check out Backlog.

UPDATE: I found it! (*sigh of relief*; keeping my demo meeting with Nulab anyway)

[Jacob Ebenhoe]

@Anne Saunders I think my issue is that the space was team-managed vs company-managed. I took over the space and that's the only reason I can see I that I can't add a board (I still can't).