What are key differences between a project role and a group

[Manoj Kumar R]

What are key differences between a project role and a group?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

• Group membership are maintained by the administrators (mainly the business admins, not your Jira admins), roles by the project administrators.
• Roles are administrated at a project level.
• Roles give your Jira users much more power; they enable teams to be self-governed.
• Roles work a little bit faster than groups (at least on Jira 3.7 through to 7, where I have tested it.  Don't know if that carries over to Cloud or later versions)

[Alex Koxaras -Relational-]

Hi @Manoj Kumar R 

In jira global permissions are assigned to groups only and groups can be altered/created by org/site admins.

Project membership can be given by project admins. By creating roles and using them on permission, issue security and notification scheme, this provides more power to the project admin to decide which member should go to what role, without having the obligation to ask for a site/org admin to add a specific user to a group.

So the basic rule of thumb is that you have your users, which you place into groups and then project admins can grant any group/user with a dedicated role. 

[John Funk]

Hi Manoj,

Groups are used throughout Jira and are maintained by Site Admins (you add a user to a Group in the User Management settings available for Site Admins). Groups can then be used to grant permissions to those members for the group.

Project Roles are specific to the project and users must be in the appropriate project role to have the related permission for that project. 

So Groups are more general in nature and Project Roles are more granular in that they relate to an individual project only.