Starting with JIRA Software starter license and increasing users with JIRA Core starter license

Question

I had for 3-4 years a JIRA Software in my own server, with a starter license (10 licenses). During this 3-4 years, we have had people going in and going out in the company, and, althought, we have had never more than 10 active users (in fact, it is not possible to have more than 10 active users wioth starter license), we have more than 10 users in our JIRA, and some of them are unactive.

Now, I'm interestd in increaseing the number of licenses, becasue I need more than 10 people working with JIRA. And, I have realized that I don't need features of JIRA Software, and I can deal simply with features of JIRA Core. So, I have to decided to buy a starter license of JIRA Core, which includes 10 licenses more.
I have bough the starter license and have "activated" it by pasting the SEN in my server.

Then, coming back to users, I have re-activate some old user, in order to check if it works fine, or not. But, when doing it, a warning is shown:

We couldn't change application access
You have no JIRA Software licenses remaining. Manage existing users or upgrade your tier.

I have seen, also, the next points:
- In Adminsitration->"User management"->"Groups screen", some of the groups I have set up show "Multi-app-access" icons.
- In Administration->Applications->"Version & Licenses", I see 10 users of 10 available JIRA Software users are used, and 9 users of 10 avaliable users for JIRA Core are used.
- In Administration->Applications->"Application access", I see similar information about users usage, but I see also a list of the shared groups in both applications.

So, I'm interesting in knowing which options may I have enabled that belong clearly to JIRA Software and are avoiding to assing JIRA Core license to the users.

PD: I don't know if this question has sense o not :S

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Raul,

You can activate both a Core and a Software license on the same JIRA instance.  However you will need to segment the application access for each group of users, and you would need to make sure that each group that is granting application access does not exceed the license count for that particular license.    That means having one group that grants application access to "JIRA-Software"  and another group that grants access to "JIRA-Core".   I would also strongly recommend making sure that user accounts do not duplicate membership across both groups, as it can count that as a user towards each application.
 
The users in the Core group won't have access to boards, agile reporting, sprints, and other kanban/scrum features.   This could be a problem if all your existing projects are JIRA Software projects, these Core users might not have the ability to use these projects like the JIRA Software users can.  If all your projects in JIRA are business projects, then you should not have a problem with interoperability between users.

What you stated about your environment makes sense.  Since you tried to reactivate an inactive users from the JIRA Software group, and you already have 10 active users in that group, JIRA generated that warning.   That is expected given what we know.

If you have a separate group that only contains the JIRA-Core members, and this group is being used to grant application access to Core, then you could change the group membership of that group to add this user (any remove him from the jira-software group).   Once you do this you can then reactivate his account.

If you're looking for more details on the differences between JIRA Core and JIRA Software, I recommend this link:

JIRA Software Vs JIRA Core : License

Stefan Arnold · Answer

Iam not sure if its possible to combine starter licenses to increase user count.

If its possible, make sure you have your users in different groups and these different groups assigned to the different applications.