Whats the difference with Customers in the workspace compared to managed users?

[Toby Te Rupe]

Struggling to understand the difference between the customers in this space

 Screen 1

And customers in this space, Screen 2

Our use case is scenario is we would like our customers (non agent license) to use the portal to lodge requests.  Right now we are not opening the portal to customer to perform this option but we still need to lodge request on our customers behalf.  The way we are doing this now is adding the customers using screen 1, adding their email address. Once this is done we assign the reporter attribute in the requests to this email address.  Eventually we would like the same customers using the same email to use the portal.  
I am assuming when we allow portal access all the customer needs to do is create an Atlassian account with the same email and they will also see the previous tickets we have lodge against the same email?

So a couple of questions there please.

Thank you

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

The difference is that customers added from within the project (your first screenshot) are added as portal-only customers. Some time ago Atlassian introduced external users, and they are added as users and you will see them in the users list in admin.atlassian.com. These external users can be managed by setting customer access settings, and you can set up user security policies for those. You can also give them access to other Atlassian products if needed. 

[Toby Te Rupe]

FYI I do understand that in Screen 2 I can manage what access these users have to products and also assign a user to a customer or agent, hence I can add a user here as a customer why use screen 1?