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

Question

We want to use Jira Plans (Advanced Roadmaps) for roadmap planning. Out of all current user, only few users are actually involved in roadmap planning and would use this feature.

From what I understand, Advanced Roadmaps availability is tied to the plan tier (Premium/Enterprise) and applies site-wide once enabled, which means we'd end up paying for the upgrade across all users even though most won't touch the feature.

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?

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

We'd like to avoid paying for a feature that 90% of our users won't use. Any guidance on licensing options or workarounds would help.

Melika-Everview · Answer

The answers above are right on the core point!
Roadmaps access can't be scoped to a subset of users, since the tier applies instance-wide, and that's an Atlassian licensing model rather than something a setting can fix. And the honest caveat holds for third-party apps too: because of how Atlassian handles add-on billing, most Marketplace apps are still priced against the whole instance, not per-user.

So the realistic question isn't "how do I license this per-user" it's "is there a way to get the cross-project roadmap visibility a few planners need, without paying for Enterprise across everyone."

On that: disclosure, I'm on the team at Everview. It sits on top of Jira (Jira stays your source of record) and gives you a live cross-project view what every team is working on, dependencies across projects, delivery status which covers the multi-project planning need without the Enterprise upgrade.

The part that's directly relevant to your cost concern: we run an Insider Program — six months free for teams that have a real execution/visibility problem but can't justify a big spend to solve it. Given you're specifically trying to avoid paying Enterprise-across-everyone for a few planners, that's probably the most sensible way for you to see whether it solves the problem before any budget conversation.

The sandbox is open if you want to look first (no signup) and it's on the Atlassian Marketplace here:  Everview.ai 
Happy to point you to the Insider Program details if it's a fit.

James Gamble · Answer

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

Laura Marin - Millarum · Answer

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.