Developer license vs end user license

[John Rummell]

My company is considering JIRA for our IT department made up of developers, support technicians and sys admins. The one thing that may be a show stopper is the way user licenses are defined. We only have about 25 IT people, but hundreds of users.

My understanding is that in order for our users to submit issues and recieve email updates and perform any workflow tasks (e.g. user approval of a new feature), they would need to have a full user license. I'm pretty sure I won't get approval for the 101+ user license. Are there any other licensing options or could we customize our installation to perform anonymous user updates based on a custom field?

[Sander Brienen [Avisi] · Accepted solution]

I've seen this problem before. Your actual Jira users are your 25 IT people. All others are only reporters. What you can do is configure Jira for 25 users and allow for anonymous access.

Create a simple cusom field where one can enter his email address. Make this field required. Then add a custom notification task to your workflow steps so that people are notified with the updates. It is even possible, with a custom plugin, to have all usernames imported into the custom Jira plugin to make a selectable custom field.

So Yes, it is possible with only a 25-user license.

[John Rummell]

That may work for us. I don't think we'll have that many users that would need to perform workflow actions (one or two per department).

[Stefan Kohler]

If it's just reporting I agree with Sander, but you describe that the non-IT people need to "submit issues", "receive updates" and "perform workflow tasks". Roughly translated, they are using JIRA! JIRA is not just for development, it's for project management and issue tracking and your non-IT users are a key part in that.

I would suggest that you take a good look at the different roles within your company. Reporting issues can be done anonymous as Sander describe. But tracking, assigning tasks, performing workflow tasks and even reporting is something completely else. You could also start with a 25 user license and slowly upgrade based on the demand. If your users are asking more it's a good usecase for convincing your manager for more budget :-)

JIRA pricing is really affordable, but you have to make sure your users are using the app. A 100+ license isn't expensive if you have 100+ active users. Same goes the other way around, if you don't have active users any license is to expensive :-)

[John Rummell]

I agree with you 100%, but unfortunately I'm not the one making the final decision.