How many Jira are there? What's the difference between them?

Karmandroid Singularity

Hi, 

I am curious on how many option of Jira available on the market. I often saw when there are question, someone will ask "what Jira do you use? cloud?".

In the Product page, Atlassian mentioned: 

• There are 2 type of Jira products: Jira and Jira Service Management
• There are 3 options of hosting: Cloud, Server, and Data Center

So, is it in total we have 6 Jira options? What are the difference?

Thank you

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Karmandroid Singularity 

That is not quite correct.

Atlassian is no longer selling licenses for Server. Those stopped being available in February 2024.

I am not going to provide an exhaustive list of the differences between Jira and JSM, between Cloud and Data Center. Here are some highlights.

Jira vs. JSM

- The target audience for Jira is product development teams and other teams that need to manage work, but specifically not directly supporting "help desk" type functionality. It provides project templates that server this type of work, with the addition of Scrum and Kanban boards and relevant Agile methodology reporting.

- The target audience for JSM is teams needing "help desk" functionality to support receiving requests from "customers" to whom they don't want to grant full access/licenses to the Jira/JSM product. The functionality is oriented towards serving a help desk, include a customer facing portal that is distinct from the interface the help desk agents use including Queue organization and SLA monitoring. It does not include functionality more geared towards product development, such as Scrum board support and burndown charts.

Cloud vs. Data Center

- Data Center is the "older" product. For this product the client must set up their own servers and databases and networking for hosting the product. That infrastructure can be physical or virtual, on-premise or in a Cloud provider like AWS. Updates to the software version are made only when the client's Jira Administrators implement those.

- Cloud is the "newer" software-as-a-service product. It is hosted by Atlassian on their own infrastructure and they handle software updates. Clients can access the product through the UI and through the Atlassian-provided REST API. Clients do not have direct access to the backend database of the servers on which the products are hosted. There are some significant functional differences with the Cloud product because of product evolution and architectural differences compared to Data Center.

 

Another variation is that with the Cloud hosted product you can choose between four subscription plans; Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. You can find information about how those offerings differ by looking at the Pricing pages for the products.

If you want to look into the differences more deeply I suggest you start by reviewing the product information available at https://atlassian.com