For billing purposes how do you add Guests in Jira without getting charged?

[Principal Force]

Hi, I have just started to run the admin side of Jira for our company, however, I am a bit confused. We currently have 8 active licenses for Jira software and are looking to jump onto a paid plan eventually. However, out of the 8 active users, only 5 interact with the product on a frequent basis while the other 3 are stakeholders looking to view updates on their individual projects. For billing purposes is it best to deactivate the 3 users and invite them with guest permissions to their individual project boards? Would we be billed for those 3 guests, and can someone explain how guest billing works for Jira in particular? As a company, we would prefer not to pay for more user licenses than necessary, in order to be cost-efficient. Thanks!

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Principal Force 

Jira Cloud does not currently support "guest" users. That is a concept available only in Confluence Cloud at this time.

The users will have to be granted Jira product access/licenses.

For Jira Cloud the only way to have users that don't require a license or incur licensing costs is to enable Anonymous access, or use a third party product for sharing the Jira information with "external" unlicensed users such as the external share products listed here:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=cloud&product=jira&query=share%20external

[Principal Force]

Can anonymous access be limited to only a set of emails keeping boards private?

[Trudy Claspill]

No, anonymous access cannot be limited based on a user's email address. The access is anonymous. The user is not required to provide their email address to get access to your site.

You can limit the IPs from which Anonymous access is accepted. However the IP limiting applies across the board, not just to Anonymous access, so you have to include the IPs for your licensed users also. Without IP limiting your site will be accessible to anybody on the internet.

https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/specify-ip-addresses-for-product-access/

You can limit which projects can be accessed Anonymously by managing the permissions allocated in each project.

[Principal Force]

I appreciate all of the help & explanations. Seems like that is a pain to do as a work around for basic guest permissions. Do we know if guest permissions will be coming to Jira if they are in Confluence? Our company also uses Azure DevOps which allows for users to be set as a stakeholder with view only access & we are not billed for said user

[Trudy Claspill]

There is a change request for it here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-74242

I don't see anything on the Roadmap about it.

https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/cloud?

[Principal Force]

Thank you for sending me that information, as I really appreciate it

[Trudy Claspill]

You're welcome.

If your questions have been addressed satisfactorily, please consider marking the Answer(s) as Accepted to help other users looking for answers on the same topic.

[abhishek_sharma03]

Hi @Principal Force It is not possible to add guest users in Jira. To get any updates the user will consume product license. 

BR

Abhishek

[Principal Force]

Since we are a consulting company we have multiple different clients & boards too does that mean we’d have to pay for a license for each stakeholder whom may never update the board & would just want to view progress 

[abhishek_sharma03]

That's correct. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Yes.