Deactivate vs Disable vs Delete an Account

[Lauren Kliever]

Can someone help me understand the difference between deactivating an account, disabling an account, and deleting an account? I want to know what effect each of these has on an account as well as how it affects billing and license count.

Thank you in advance.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

A lot of people use de-activate and disabling an account interchangably.  The basic idea is that there is a flag on the account that says "this account is inactive".

Disabling/Deactivating an account

• Means it can no longer log in
• Means it does not count towards your licence
• It can not be selected as new data in some places (you can't reassign issues to disabled users), but does not remove any existing usage of the account

Deleting an account

• Means it can no longer log in
• Means it does not count towards your licence
• Destroys all the data that the account has been used anywhere.  Something you should avoid, because you're going to need to re-assign all issues it is assigned to, change the reporter and accept that a load of your reporting is going to break when it refers to a deleted account.

[Brant Schroeder]

Organization admins can delete or deactivate accounts they manage for users who no longer need to use Atlassian account services. When their accounts are deleted or deactivated, users immediately lose access to Jira Cloud and all other Atlassian account services, and we’ll stop billing for their account.

If an organization admin deactivates a user’s account, the user’s personal data will remain in Atlassian account services, and the admin can reactivate their account at any time.

If an organization admin deletes a user’s account, we’ll delete the user’s personal data from Atlassian account services, and no one will be able to reactivate their account.

An organization admin can delete a previously deactivated account if they decide to later.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiracloud/deactivate-or-delete-managed-accounts-962965079.html

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Bear in mind that Organisation admins can only delete Atlassian accounts that are explicitly managed by them.  If you are looking at a personal Atlassian account or one managed by another organisation, you can only disable them in your system, you can't edit, deactivate or delete.