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Jira Software - access for internal users without license

Jira Software - access for internal users without license

Hello Team,

I've been away from Atlassian administration for a little while and it seems I missed a memo in the past year or so... It looks like I can no longer have users with collaborator access to multiple Jira Software Project (Spaces) without a full Jira Software license. Is that correct?

If they're within my main domain, they also cannot be guests in the space?

I have at least a dozen users that only need view & comment permissions once per quarter to 5 Jira Software spaces, but that kicks us over the 50 user mark and the cost significantly increases. Any way to address this?

4 answers

1 accepted

2 votes

Answer accepted

Hello and welcome to Atlassian Community @Rosa Fossi

Even read-only users need a paid Jira license. You can't skip that.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira/kb/create-a-read-only-user-in-jira-cloud/

Guest access won't work here because it's strictly limited to one space per site and external collaborators and giving it to your internal collaborators break rules of use this function.

For five spaces, give standard licenses with restricted permissions or use a JSM portal or static exports.

Best,

Arkadiusz 🤠

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0 votes

@Arkadiusz Wroblewski @Trudy P Claspill @John Funk

Thank you all for the responses! I think I may be thinking of the old Jira Work licenses (I had users with Work licenses that could "see" the Software projects as collaborators). But "work" licenses have been gone for well over a year apparently and folded into "Jira Software".

And thanks for the "Welcome"... but I've no idea why the system keeps thinking I'm new LOL. I've posted as recently as April (and late last year before that!). <<shrug>> But that's a bug for some other thread ;)

Screenshot 2026-07-08 at 13.58.05.png

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Hello @Rosa Fossi

You appear to have more than one account here in the community, and this Question was posted under the other one. Notice the different avatar. You may have multiple accounts linked.

Screenshot 2026-07-08 at 5.54.39 PM.png

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@Trudy P Claspill That's the avatar I always get when I click in to see my profile. Sometimes it gives me a duckling. I changed it again today to my photo, and it's gone again. 😆

Honestly, I've had some drama with my account for a LONG time (because I dared get divorced and changed my last name and my email address changed along with it). Eventually, support told me to link my accounts to my personal email and use it as the primary... and it somehow made it all worse. The final option they gave me was to start my account from scratch; which I politely declined.

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Like • John Funk likes this

0 votes

Hello @Rosa Fossi

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

There are third party apps that can help you expand access to Jira data outside of the Jira application itself. That would, however, incur additional cost. Are you willing to consider a third party app?

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0 votes

Hi Rosa,

Access to Jira projects has always required a paid license unless the total number of users was less than 10. You might be thinking of the Customer license available for Jira Service Management projects/spaces which are indeed free. But JSM Customer licenses do not give the user access to Jira projects/spaces.

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Jira Software - access for internal users without license

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