Announcing Compass pricing - Free software catalog for all

[#1]

UPDATE: 2023-10-05

We have an update Pricing Page for you to look at which will be the source of truth for all pricing information related to Compass moving forward.

Please visit https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass/pricing.

Do not use the information below in this post as it may not be accurate.

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 The content described herein is intended to outline our general product direction for informational purposes only. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described herein remain at the sole discretion of Atlassian and is subject to change.

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Compass, your developer experience platform and software component catalog from Atlassian, has two major updates during Team '23.

1. Compass is here to stay: Thousands of customers, Atlassian included, have already adopted Compass to reduce cognitive load, create a better developer experience, and improve ops readiness across their engineering organizations. Compass will GA, and while we don’t have a specific GA date to share just yet, we’ll notify users in advance. It will remain free until GA, with a generous free tier beyond. In the meantime, check out all of our latest innovations, including new software templates, config-as-code, and integrations with Jira Software, Slack, Azure DevOps, SonarCloud, and more.
2. Initial pricing details for Compass are now available. We often field questions from customers about pricing so they can plan their software budgets for upcoming cycles. Now, more than ever, we believe it’s critical for every engineer in every organization to have access—without barriers—to the data they need to build and operate their software. With that in mind, we wanted to provide a transparent look into our pricing model. This pricing model is directional, and we will be collecting feedback from customers to determine final pricing at GA. If we don’t have an answer yet, we’ll just say so.

To set up your software catalog and begin seeing DevOps health scorecards and metrics in minutes, sign up for your free Compass account today.

Summary of the Compass pricing model:

• Compass will initially be available in two plans - Free and Standard.
  • The Free plan is for small teams or individuals who want to get started tracking all of their software components and understanding their DevOps health in a single platform
  • The Standard plan is for every team ready to improve their developer experience, reduce cognitive load, and increase ops readiness at scale.
• The software component catalog will be free regardless of plan: Compass will make it free for every customer to connect their repositories, libraries, APIs, and more, within one unified catalog that connects to teamwork data across all Atlassian Cloud products, giving you visibility across your entire software development lifecycle.
• Beyond the free plan, you’ll pay one low price per user for software templates; full editing capabilities; create and view custom metrics, unlimited scorecards, reports and team dashboards; manage config-as-code; and have access to more advanced functionality. We intend to include 10 standard users with the free plan.
• Compass is only available as a Cloud product, and not on Data Center or Server.

So, what’s the initial pricing?*

See what’s included in the free software component catalog

Every engineering team should have access to a unified catalog to reduce their cognitive load, build performant software fast, and maintain ops readiness thresholds. When we graduate to GA, we intend to keep our software component catalog free. This means:

• Everyone in your organization gets the benefits of unified software component catalog. Whether they’re searching for details from Jira Software about how component health is impacting sprint cycles, or drilling down from Jira Service management to get component details during an incident—we believe everyone should be able to access and collaborate within a single source of truth for their technical architecture.

• No estimating costs per software component, event, or GB of data ingest. We don’t want customers to have to deal with tracking costs for services, events, metrics, data ingest—particularly within dynamic, event-based architectures. Your software component catalog should reduce complexity for your software teams, not add to it. That’s why we intend to continue to offer a free, managed software component catalog without ongoing hosting costs or requiring you to limit the services and workloads that you connect to Compass. The best part? You can connect any repository and start seeing component details and health in less than 7 minutes with our automatic importers.
• With the free catalog, every user across Atlassian Cloud can:
  • Use all Atlassian Cloud catalog integrations including related components for Jira Software issues and Jira Service management incidents.
  • Create software components via the UI and connect their repositories to populate the catalog.
  • Search and edit core component details including ownership, fields, and smart links.
  • See what’s changed in their stack via the component activity feed.

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Compass Pricing FAQs

Why did you choose this pricing model?

It’s simple. Our goal is to create a simple, transparent pricing model that provides great value and makes it easy for every software team to get the data they need to build and operate their software, improve their internal developer experience, and encourage ops readiness to increase the health of their stack and minimize disruptions.

When is GA? Will we get some warning before being charged?

We don’t have an exact date yet for GA, and Compass will remain free for all until GA. We will inform all customers via community, emails, and in-product notifications once the date is finalized. Equally we will give plenty of notice so you know when your first billable month will be, if applicable.

What if I decide I don’t want to become a paid user?

No problem. You can ensure you have ten or less Standard users and remain free, or you can choose to delete your site—even though it would make us very sad.

What does it actually mean to move from beta to GA (General Availability)?

When Atlassian moves a product to general availability, it’s a commitment to our customers to continue to offering and supporting that product as part of our Atlassian Cloud portfolio. This can include removing all of the beta tags, and offering paid plans so that any customer of any size can purchase and use.

Will there be more features coming?

Definitely. Atlassian is invested in continually building and improving new features and functionality to make life better for your developers in Compass. Got questions or feedback? Ask it directly in the product via “Give Feedback” button in the top navigation or join the Compass product team at our regular office hours.

Will there be a Premium and Enterprise plan?

Similar to other Atlassian products, we intend to offer additional Premium and Enterprise plans in the future that will come with value-aligned advanced features for greater scale and governance like intelligent recommendations, advanced role-based access controls (RBAC), audit logging, 24/7 premium support, unlimited data retention, and more. If you are interested to speak to us about this, please comment here in our Community or in-product via the “Give Feedback” button in the top navigation. Otherwise, stay tuned.

How does Compass connect with Jira Software?

Compass allows you to track all the software components you build and operate in order to deliver customer value. Jira Software allows you to track all the work, or issues, you need to do in order to deliver that customer value. Together, they allow you to connect work to your architecture.

Within each Jira issue, you can select the components related to it as a new field. You can search JQL or over to Compass to look at a specific component or team and see what open issues are outstanding for that particular service, library, capability, etc. This makes it much easier to track technical debt, asks from dependent teams, required work from failing scorecards, and much more.

How does Compass connect with Jira Service management?

Similar to Jira Software, Compass helps you connect all of your IT workflows to the real-time, contextual information about software components tracked in Compass. Jira Service Management does have an existing ‘services’ object which can connect and sync with Compass components that are a type:service. This ensures “Service A” is the same service across all of Atlassian.

Our starting point is with Incident Management workflows. When you raise an incident against a ‘service’, there is a Compass link available to click out and see more details about activity, key metrics, runbooks, team ownership, slack channels, and anything else relevant to developers about that service. Over time, we can bring in more information directly into the incident issue view to stay in context of resolving the problem and reducing MTTR. Compass just helps provide additional contextual information to help, Jira Service Management provides the end-to-end workflow to resolve the incident.

Wait, I’m new here—what’s Compass?

We’re surprised you read this far. Compass is a developer experience platform and software component catalog so you can reduce cognitive load, create a better developer experience, and improve ops readiness across your stack and teams. You can try it for free here or watch the overview below:

Thank you and feedback welcome

We are committed to providing a simple, intuitive and transparent pricing policy for Compass. If you have questions about costs or want to share your feedback to help shape our pricing model, please reach out directly via the “give feedback” link in the product or attend our regular office hours.

If you’re not a current Compass user, sign up for your free Compass account today to start setting up your software catalog and seeing DevOps health scorecards and metrics in minutes.

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Maybe I missed this: @Taylor could you plz elaborate a little on the differences of free vs standard users and their permissions/role?

[Chrissy Clements]

hey @Taylor 
Is the pricing for every licensed Jira Software user?  If so, does it come with a sliding scale like other Atlassian cloud offerings?

[John Kinmonth]

@Jan-Hendrik Spieth Great question. I work in product marketing across Compass and Atlassian's Agile DevOps solutions, and I'm happy to elaborate a bit.

As mentioned, this is a directional look into the Compass pricing model, so we're still gathering feedback/research around granular permissions/roles for each user, but at this point, you can think of it this way:

Free software catalog for all: We expect any user within Jira Software, Jira Service Management, etc. across Atlassian Cloud to be able use the default software component catalog with search and filtering functionality, create components, drill down to the individual software component level with associated metadata (like associated repos, fields, ownership details, relevant projects/issues in Jira, etc.), and view some default scorecards and metrics.

Standard users: We expect standard users (both on the free edition and paid standard edition) to be able to create and manage custom fields/metrics/scorecards, connect and use unlimited integrations/metrics/scorecards, create and manage software templates with golden paths enabled, and generally get access to all advanced functionality within Compass.

[John Kinmonth]

@Chrissy Clements Another great question!

We do expect to offer volume discounts similar to other Atlassian Cloud products. 

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

@John Kinmonththanks for clarifying the user roles!

Do I get it right that, on a standard plan

• standard users can edit and see custom metrics and scorecards
• free users can not even see these custom metrics and scorecards

?

(That would be a real bummer imho.)

[Taylor]

+1 to @John Kinmonth. Just want to add a few additional things that may help.

@Jan-Hendrik Spieth First off, thank you for the questions and feedback! I'd love to schedule a call to talk through this in more detail to get your feedback if you are open to that?

To your question though:

• Yes, you have that right. That is generally the split. Free users may be able to see a default scorecard and/or some default set of core metrics to get them started but our stance is that paying $7/user for those features will be exceptional value for that price point. Curious to hear your thoughts! 
• Based on our research, we believe this is the most developer friendly pricing on the planet which makes it a no-brainer to get started. The free catalog helps improve the value you get out of all Atlassian Cloud products as well - for example the Jira Software 'components' tab and capability will get a 10x improvement giving you all this extra data about components, components become global so a single component can connect to work across dozens of Jira Software projects.
• The $7/paid moves beyond connecting and organising critical information but into how you think about health across components & teams, how to improve practices, and start to further improve the developer experience that goes beyond the catalog.

@Chrissy Clements This example might help explain our pricing here.

• Let's assume you have 1,000 users in JSW on the standard tier.
• Within Compass -> 1,000 users will have 'free' access to the core catalog features and being able to view that across Atlassian Cloud products like Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and Bitbucket.
• Within Compass -> You elect 250 users to be paid because that is your engineering / R&D org. You just need to pay for the engineering and R&D teams that are actively owning software components and therefore need a model of health, team dashboards, weekly summaries called CheckOps, suggested areas to improve, software templates to streamline creating new components, etc.
• Your cost in this scenario is only 250 x $7 = $1,760/month!!

Let me know if this is what you were asking for? 

[Jimmy Seddon]

Thanks for posting these details @Taylor!

Looking forward to the GA date for Compass!

[Roman Pechenkin]

Limiting free user access to only default metrics and scorecards could result in confusion among users regarding the current status of the project as different people will see different metrics and scorecards. We use scorecards and custom metrics to formalize quality standards and present the current status of our backend services to everybody in our organization. Therefore, it is important that everybody has access to custom scorecards, metrics, and the activity feed, which displays recent incidents and deployments. The problem is that in the current scenario we would be required to purchase access for the entire company.

Our ideal scenario includes having paid users who own specific components and allowing all other users to view the current status of our systems including scorecards, metrics, and the latest deployments. This way Compass becomes a platform that provides a unified real-time representation of the engineering output in one place.

[Taylor]

@Hey @Roman Pechenkin thanks for sharing this feedback! Would love to grab time with you to explore this further in more detail. I will coordinate with @Josh Campbell on my team to reach out to you and coordinate a time for all of us.

To your question:

• I can understand that metric + scorecard information would be relevant widely but we do need to draw the line somewhere! When you say "everybody in our organization" where does that appear? Do you expect them to go to Compass? Or maybe a Confluence page or Atlas update or a Jira issue? Would love to know more here.
• Our current thinking is that the core catalog is the boundary for free (very generous). It describes the thing, let's you search, and key information about it. Activity Feed would all be free in this regard.
• However, moving to a model of 'health' or improvement and then scaling that across teams is where we believe $7 is very good value for the benefits and ROI you would be getting on improved developer experience, higher quality components, time saved acting on poor performing areas, etc. This is in addition to the immense time saved with the free catalog!
• If you only pay for users who own specific components - what is stopping you or other people from just having 1 person own the component but then letting 1,000 people get all the metrics, scorecards, rollups, reporting, team dashboard, recommendations, etc. Running all these features does cost us money.
• Perhaps there is a way for you to pay for all engineering teams the $7 - they interact/live in the scorecards and then you could have a Smart Link or something in Confluence that could be a very read-only simplified view for others to see. If you are paying $7/user for some set of people, I think displaying that info outside Compass is different than seeing it throughout Compass, leveraging it in Teams, managing off-track criteria, etc.

Curious to hear your thoughts on above and looking forward to video call for further discussion. Cheers!

[Elmer Hahn]

Curious how this will work in site that use JSM/JSW/Opsgenie/ASSET databases

Will this be able to pull in the Asset databases from JSM and affected services lists of Opsgenie?

[Taylor]

Hey @Elmer Hahn, great question! An updated community post on this topic will be published soon based on some recent work we are shipping to sync JSM services with Compass services.

Do you mind sharing a bit more on how you use JSM/Opsgenie services and JSM Assets today?

• Do you just track services or other types as well like libraries, cloud resources, capabilities, ML Models, UI elements, etc?
• How do you use JSW Components with JSM Services. Or do you use the existing Jira `component` field across both JSW and JSM?
• Additional context will really help here and we would love to talk to you more about our direction here.

To your question: Will this be able to pull in the Asset databases from JSM and affected services lists of Opsgenie?

• Compass components and their core metadata about those objets will be free for all Atlassian Cloud users.
• For Jira, this will replace and upgrade the 'component' field providing 10x+ the value of what exists there today which basically a generic way to group issues via components. The existing component field in Jira is project-scoped. Compass provides a global list of components that you can connect any Jira issues (work) to and search across that combination.
• Jira Service Management has services which can be synced to Compass. So to start, we will be shipping:
  • A field called "Compass" will appear in JSM Services view and you can see the link out to Compass. Service "Foo" will be the same object it just has different views. Again, Compass provides a huge improvement to JSM Services as you get a bunch of extra metadata using Smart Links, activity information, metrics, etc. Over time, we can bring more of that info into JSM.
  • Incidents in JSM will appear in Compass on the activity feed. Compass component info will appear under the 'affected service' if the service is also in Compass the link out to Compass info will be there to jump right into. Over time, we can bring more info right in context of the incident view.
  • JSM Assets can be imported into Compass as components to seed the catalog then start syncing. Much like we do when we import services from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, New Relic, AWS, and more.
• For Opsgenie, the integration is already live:
  • It shows on-call schedules in Compass component detail view.
  • It shows Opsgenie incidents once a service is linked to Compass service to denote that is the same service across tools.
  • Additional work should be done here to improve the service syncing. We also need to consider how JSM + Opsgenie is bringing functionality closer together. 

So, TL;DR -> Yes, we want it to (1) import (2) sync (3) connect ops workflows - i.e. incident & change to Compass components and (4) bring the right information to the right place at the right time to improve how people work and reduce toil/context switching. This is our Open Toolchain philosophy which Compass very much embodies.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this starting point and where we are headed! How would you expect these tools to work? What would be the ideal scenario to make your team the most productive and happy when using Atlassian Cloud and our products together?

[Elmer Hahn]

@Taylor 
Currently we have a list of services in opsgenie, that's sync with JSM, that is also used for change management, incident tracking, and service requests. all of that is done inside of JSM. I also use that asset database in my Jira Software planning since the two products are in the same site in our space because it spans multiple products. Components are sometimes used on a project by project basis but since they cant expand beyond a single project the asset database is more powerful to me.

I'm in the process of building databases of micro services, studios, orgs, product catalogs, hardware inventories and a lot of other things.

I haven't started to mess around with compass yet but I'm intrigued now, I will reach out to my account rep and see if they can also get us in touch so we can have a more in depth conversation.

[Chrissy Clements]

Keen to learn more about the Change Management side of things.  How do we ensure that every change is treated as a change?

What becomes the record of truth for production?  The Compass component or the Opsgenie service?

[Taylor]

Hey @Elmer Hahn, thanks for the context - yeah we should definitely talk, it will be a fun conversation! In the meantime, Compass is currently in Beta (aka free), you can sign up here https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass, and it's a completely stand-alone product on Cloud. So you can just sign up and add it to an existing site (and manage all users separately via AdminHub, etc. - it is kind of it's own sandbox) or you can stand up a new site and add Compass.

I can see we are already trying to figure out times, so talk soon!

@Chrissy Clements Hey! Happy to walk through this in more detail with your team. To your question, here is what I am thinking for Compass:

• Change Management is still just a Jira issue with a workflow. So, however you have set that process up with CI/CD or some other way to track 'changes' in automated, manual, or mix of processes while using JSM Change Management, Compass components should be able to work with that easily.
• Just like in JSW has bugs, features, tech debt, or any other issue type you can think of with it's own workflows. Those issues can attach a 'Compass component' to it. 
• On the record of truth for production - I suppose the answer is Atlassian is the record of truth :). What we have just recently built and will continue to iterate on is making the Compass component type of `service` the same object as the Opsgenie or Jira Service Management `service`. They reference each other. 
• Our recommendation is that Compass would ideally become the record of truth for production, especially for software components your engineers are building/operating to deliver customer value. That data will be visible across Atlassian Cloud, including Opsgenie (free catalog). We still have work to do to merge & sync where existing 'service' concepts exist like in Opsgenie. 
• One caveat though is that building an internal dev experience means there will be a lot of bespoke experiences for any given customer. Compass has to be flexible enough to handle these and focus on the dev experience. That is why we have spent so much time on our public APIs - some customers still have the true 'record of truth' of services either still in an underlying internal system but they use Compass has the primary UI for all developers to access that record of truth. There are several strategies to use.

I hope that helps and doesn't make it more confusing haha! Would love to hear your feedback on what you would prefer/like to see us build towards to best meet your needs.