Jira Plans (Advanced Roadmaps) for a specific user/group only, not the full site users

Hi @Vinit Soni,

As others already pointed out, Plans is part of the Jira Premium plan. To be very specific about your 2 questions:

1. Is there any way to scope Jira Plans access (or the underlying plan tier) to a specific users/group rather than the entire site?

Yes, there is. Plans do have their own permission settings. You can find them at https://<your site name>.atlassian.net/jira/plans/settings/permissions and available settings are these:

You do at specific users or groups here as you are referring to.

2. Does Atlassian offer a per-user or add-on based licensing model for Advanced Roadmaps, separate from a full site-wide Premium upgrade?

Unfortunately not. Plans are one (of many) feature(s) that comes with the premium plan. On a single Jira site, all your Jira users are on the premium (or standard) plan - you cannot create separate cohorts in terms of licensing.

In summary, you can - functionally - control who can access plans. But in terms of licensing, all your Jira users move to the premium plan, not just a subset of them. In practice, making sure that your Jira users have read access to plans, does contribute to sharing delivery roadmaps to ALL your users rather than only e.g a selected set of PM's, which tends not to be a bad thing.

Hope this helps!

Hola Vinit,

The distinction is access versus licensing. You can restrict who can create, edit, or view Plans by assigning Plans permissions to specific groups, so operationally, you can limit the feature to just the roadmap-planning team. Atlassian documents the Plans Administrator, Plans User, and Plans Viewer permission levels here.

However, that doesn’t change how Jira Cloud is licensed. Plans are included with Jira Premium and Enterprise, and the Jira subscription tier applies to the Jira users on that site. You can’t keep most users on Standard while licensing only a small group for access to Premium Plans on the same Jira site.

So the practical setup is to upgrade the Jira site to Premium, then restrict Plans permissions to the specific planning group. That gives you the access control you want, but it won’t reduce the Premium license count.

I also don’t see a standalone Atlassian add-on or per-user license for Plans separate from Jira Premium. If the cost of upgrading the entire Jira population is difficult to justify, then the decision becomes whether the other Premium capabilities provide enough additional value, or whether a Marketplace planning product is more economical for your specific use case.

Another option worth considering before upgrading is whether the standard Timeline in individual Jira spaces already meets your needs. The major gap is that Plans is designed for cross-space and cross-team planning, so if multi-space roadmap planning is the requirement, Timeline won’t be a direct replacement.

Thanks,

James

Hi @Vinit Soni 

As you suspect, there's currently no way to scope the Roadmaps access because it's a native instance wide Feature of Jira Enterprise.

While historically Roadmaps was the only way to access a gantt view in Jira, fortunately now the regular Jira plans include the Timeline view at the Space level, so you can be covered from the "Gantt need". Then you still have the multi-project planning problem to solve.

While working with customers we identified several customer having the same challenges where they couldn't justify acquiring Jira Enterprise just for few users for a single feature. Then working together on trying to solve their needs, we even presented better ways to do a cross-project planning with clear visibility.

Full disclosure, I'm part of the team behind Millarum Roadmap.

With Millarum Roadmap you can get a single pager view on the status of several projects at the same time, projects are visualized into single swim-lanes and Milestones (Epics or Releases) show the maturity of the project, where you can drill down and look at the content of said milestones.

If you're willing to look into 3rd party solutions, our visualization is still scoped to the entire Jira instance due to the Atlassian way of handling add-on billing, but the model already considers not all users will use it, so the cost is just a small fraction of what it would cost the Jira Enterprise.

Hi @Vinit Soni 

Welcome to the Atlassian community

Plans (formerly known as Advanced Roadmaps) is a built in feature available with Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise plans. As far as I'm aware, it isn't available on Free or Standard plans, and Atlassian doesn't offer it as a standalone add-on license

More info on Advanced roadmaps - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/advanced-roadmaps/overview#what-is-advanced-planning

Cheers!

From what I've seen, the easiest approach is to control access through Jira permissions rather than exposing Plans to everyone. If only a specific team or group needs Advanced Roadmaps, assigning the appropriate project roles and plan permissions can help keep it limited. Has anyone found a reliable setup that works well without affecting access for other users?