On the sidebar choose Spaces > any project > Knowledge base. Click on any article. Now on the right sidebar it will show "Space:".. but it's not the same meaning of Space as on the left sidebar.
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
@Josh Sherwood thank you for the description of what's changing including the rollout timeline; it's very helpful.
Overall, I'm in support of moving away from Jira "projects". I was still hoping that there'd be some consideration to using a slightly different phrase (e.g. "workspace" - a space for your work) instead of using the same terminology in use with Confluence for a decade plus.
It feels a bit like we're trading one type of user confusion for another here. Any efforts to disambiguate "spaces" between Jira and Confluence would be greatly appreciated!
I am still failing to understand why there is confusion around the word "Project". Jira's whole intent is for project management, specifically for agile development, and it is fully understood that each "Project" in Jira is a project being worked on, with a start and end. Collaboration is still possible among other teams without having to rename it to "Space".
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
@Chris Calvert I imagine internally we're going to end up with (singular focus) Project Spaces and (cross-functional) Team Spaces. That seems to be our only sensible approach to the terminology.
Thanks @Josh Sherwood for fixing the wording issues (not in the sense of work item ;-)) for german language.
Overall, I am not in favour of these terminology changes. In technical environments, I believe it is good practice to use established expressions consistently throughout documentation and lifecycles to minimise doubt and questions within the end user community.
'A car is a car is a car' may sound boring, but it is consistent.
If you use different terms such as 'car', 'vehicle', 'auto', 'automobile', 'motorcar' or 'wheels', it will raise questions as to whether you mean the same thing.
and we wanted to introduce more user-friendly terminology for teams as quickly as possible.
I sincerely hope this was meant as a joke (but I know it wasn't).
So Atlassian made a bad decision to go with the rename of projects to spaces. Then they implemented that change poorly. Projects are randomly renamed in some places and randomly they are still "projects".
Go to a Permission Scheme. The permission is Administer Projects. You can grant that permission to Project Lead, for example. Or, you can grant it to a member of a Space Role.
Try to create a Data Security Policy and good luck understanding what Coverage type "Spaces and projects" means now. Hey Atlassian, you forgot to rename projects to spaces here. And when you do rename it, what will it be? "Spaces and spaces"?
Try to read documentation, kb articles. How many of them are still using terms "issue" and "projects"? Tons of them.
these are just some examples I came across, and I didn't do it on purpose, I am sure there are tons more
It is a mess. A poorly done job. You may argue that the renaming of projects to spaces is actually a good decision (and you would be wrong). But you can't argue that you failed to actually do the renaming. Why do customers have to deal with this? Customers pay to get quality. This is not it. You can't rename it in 20 places this month, in 10 places next month, and in 150 places next year. Actually, we can see that you can, but you shouldn't. Would you do it properly please?
And when asked in a comment above "how so?", Atlassian's excuse is "we wanted to introduce more user-friendly terminology for teams as quickly as possible.". What? It was like that for 15-20 years, then came 2025 in which many users no one asked to rename projects to spaces, and now you are suddenly in such a hurry to make it as soon as possible that you do a messy rename job.
Bad job every step of the way: decision making, implementation, communication.
Why? Why don't you respect customers who pay money for your products? Why don't you respect your 'ecosystem' - people who try to sell your products, administer them and try to teach others to do it? Why don't you respect yourself and allow releasing/deploying such a bad job to a very wide audience?
Sure, they might have thousands of places to make the change.. but then take some weeks to do it properly.
It's specially ironic with all the recent changes and all the talk about "consistency"... The last thing I think of Atlassian is about anything being consistent anywhere.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 9, 2025 edited
@Andriy KozynetsApologies, Andriy. It appears that some UI references to 'project' were missed during the updates. Thanks for highlighting these, I've passed it on to the team and they'll be fixed shortly.
Thanks for sharing your feedback on this terminology update. I understand that this change has raised some concerns, particularly around the overlap with Confluence's established use of 'spaces.'
Here's a bit more context on this decision:
Consistency across apps: Our goal is to create a more seamless experience across Atlassian apps by standardising terminology. Just as concepts like settings, users, and notifications are consistent across apps, using 'spaces' as a common term for containers of work and information helps build familiarity and ease of navigation. This is especially important as teams increasingly use multiple apps together.
Simplified connections: By aligning terminology, we hope to provide clearer connections between different areas of our apps, e.g. the ability to associate any 'space' to a team profile, or link it to Goals and Atlassian Projects will become more intuitive.
We know that this change might initially be a bit jarring and could cause some temporary confusion. However, we believe that it will ultimately lead to a more consistent and improved user experience for teams.
It is very interesting to watch the trend of software companies. Ones which are successful in the beginning and addressing a clear need, seem to drift into more and more complexity over time and seem to make changes for the sake of justifying their existence or trying to "keep up with the Jones's." Jira keeps making changes and the official story of why often is lost in word salad explanations which leave confusion and bewilderment for simple users like myself which only a couple years ago found Projects as sensical and helpful, but I was left with why not a clear option to rollforward a Project but had to go to a 3rd party plug in like Deep Clone. So...instead of fixing that, we have these incremental changes which, again, add complexity without seemingly real help for those of us who want a sensical SaS experience that doesn't leave us scratching our heads from week to week.
If this comment leaves you scratching your head, welcome to the club.
I must say.. This is such a breath of fresh air. It doesn't have the same glamour as a 'New AI tool!', but this was needed so badly to avoid confusion. Especially as we try to push business users into Jira, this was a BIG source of confusion.
You mentioned what to me should be the right word (and the one I've used for a long time): "Container"... "Space" will get confused with Confluence. My opinion only.
I’m honestly very disappointed with this terminology change from “Project” to “Space” in Jira.
This isn’t just a cosmetic update — it breaks years of established clarity between Jira Projects and Confluence Spaces. When we hear Project, we know it’s Jira; when we hear Space, we think of Confluence.
Even if there are currently no major impacts on JQL, APIs, or smart values, this still feels like an unnecessary and confusing change.
And from a technical standpoint, how are we supposed to distinguish between {{space.id}} in Confluence and {{space.id}} in Jira?
The term Project is deeply integrated into Jira’s structure — Project Lead, Project Category, Project Roles, Project Settings, Project Permission Scheme, and so on. Turning all of that into Space Lead, Space Category, Space Permission Scheme… just sounds wrong and out of place.
Jira Projects had structure. Jira Spaces have… well, space. I went to update a ticket and drifted straight into Confluence. Same word, wrong Space. 🤦♂️
40 comments