Coming to this late, but the two questions in this thread that never got answered are the important ones, and they're still worth answering for anyone finding this.
"We do not do sprints — how do I get capacity on non-agile projects?"
Plans allocates capacity per iteration. On a scrum board that's a sprint. If your team doesn't run sprints, there's no bucket for the capacity to attach to, which is why the field never appears no matter how the team is configured. The kanban suggestion doesn't really close this — you can put kanban work in a Plan, but you're back to capacity with nothing to allocate it against.
The native workaround is to manufacture time buckets. Use fixVersions as your periods (a version per month or per week) and treat each one as a planning bucket, then sum Original Estimate per assignee per version with a filter. It's crude, it's manual, and you'll maintain it by hand — but it's free and it gets a flow team a per-period supply-versus-demand number.
"Or even better, individual capacity?"
This one has a firm answer: Plans doesn't do it, on any tier. Capacity in Plans is team-level by design — the reasoning being that agile commitments belong to the team, not the person. That's a defensible philosophy and a real gap for anyone whose team has specialists, part-timers, or people split across projects.
The gap matters more than it sounds. A team rollup can show comfortable headroom while two people on it are badly over-committed, because the average absorbs them. And someone allocated half-time to two projects reads as fine on both plans, since neither one sees the other half. There's no native view that sums a person across projects.
If you go looking for an app for either of these, three questions to ask, because they're what separate the tools:
- Does it compute per person, or only per team?
- Does it read demand across every project that person appears in, or only the one you're planning?
- Does it handle non-sprint cadences — weekly or monthly buckets — as first-class, or does it assume sprints and bolt the rest on?
- And one worth asking regardless: does the app sync your issue data out to the vendor's servers, or run inside Atlassian? That determines whether your security review is a short conversation or a long one.
Disclosure: I build a Jira app in this space — MassMod Agile Tools for Jira, free up to 10 users — which does per-person cross-project capacity with scrum, weekly, and monthly cadence lanes on one timeline. The fixVersion workaround above is genuinely worth trying first if you only need one team's numbers.
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