Need for Crowd Tool Integration | JIRA Software Server

[prasenna.kannan]

Team,

We are a team of less than 25 people. We had bought the JIRA Software Server for 25 users. 

Now, for the user management, I can see option to invite \ create user. This allows me to create users with the email address, user name, first name and last name.

My Questions :

1) If I enable SMTP configuration, when I invite users, mail should be triggered to the specified mail address and then users should be able to register. Enabling the SMTP configuration will trigger email when I invite users?

2) If I can use this invite user \ create user ribbon to register users, what is the use of Crowd? I understand, there will be auto-sync of users from Microsoft AD, Azure AD when we enable Crowd. However, for a team of less than, can't we use invite user \ create user to manage the users and have them in the JIRA internal directory ? Because, If I install Crowd, I will have to create a database, create a separate application, configuration crowd to talk to JIRA, configure JIRA to talk to crowd and this seems to be an additional overhead. Please clarify. 

Thanks,

Prasenna