Jira is the best issue tracker most engineering teams will ever use, and this page does not argue otherwise. It argues about everything that happens around the issue — the conversation that produced it, the people who are not engineers, and the number of separate Atlassian subscriptions it takes to get a whole company working.
Capability by capability
Every line about Jira was read on its own pages on 24 September 2026. Where we are still building something, the table says so.
| Jira |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| Conversation | ||
| Team chat | None. Atlassian’s product line has no messenger; Rovo Chat is a chat with an AI, not with a colleague. | Chat is the ground floor. Channels, threads, voice notes and meetings on every plan, including Free. |
| From talk to work | ||
| People on the free plan | Up to 10 users, on one site. | Eight people, and the free plan is a real plan — chat, boards, surveys and kudos included. |
| Storage on the free plan | 2 GB of file storage. | Boards, chat and files together, with six months of chat history on Free. |
| Automation on the free plan | 150 automation steps per subscription per month — counted for the whole site, not per person. | Repeatable procedures become workflow templates with steps, deadlines and an owner for each stage. |
| People and focus | ||
| Roles and permissions | User roles and permissions start at Standard; the free plan has none. | Roles on every plan, because deciding who sees what is not an upsell. |
| Guests | Free guest access starts at Standard. Guests are free, up to five per paid user, and sit in a single Jira space. | One guest per user on Free, two on Workspace, three on Business OS — one named channel and one project on Boards each. |
| Single sign-on | SSO, SCIM and directory sync need an Atlassian Guard Standard subscription — a separate purchase — unless you are on Enterprise. | In development, and it will not arrive as a second invoice. |
| Culture, clients, tickets | ||
| Culture: kudos, surveys, eNPS | Not part of the product. | Feedback Friday, kudos and surveys from Free; pulse surveys and eNPS from Workspace. |
| Where it runs | ||
| Audit of user activity | Audit logs of site changes start at Standard; audit logs of user activity are Enterprise only. | Audit log in the product, not in the top tier. |
| Who you sign with | Atlassian Pty Ltd, an Australian company. For customers domiciled in EMEA the agreement is governed by the laws of the Republic of Ireland, with venue in the Irish courts. | HOMtu® sp. z o.o., a Polish company, on European infrastructure at OVHcloud — on every plan. |
Sources: Jira Cloud plans (Atlassian support) · Guest access in Jira · Atlassian Customer Agreement · Atlassian Product Terms — contracting entity · Atlassian products. Checked against Jira’s own pages on 24 September 2026.
Giving the point away
Three of them, and none is a throwaway. If these are what your team runs on, Jira is the right answer and we would rather you knew now.
Workflows, JQL, sprints, versions, permission schemes — twenty years of software teams pushing on one tool. If your work is shipping software, Jira models it more precisely than we do, and we would rather say so.
The Atlassian Marketplace is the deepest catalogue in this category. Whatever odd thing your process needs, somebody has already built it for Jira.
Five free guests per paid user, each in their own Jira space, from the Standard plan up. Our allowance is one to three per user and we are not going to pretend that is the same thing.
Where the difference shows
Atlassian has no messenger, so a Jira team talks somewhere else and pastes links back. In taos the message is where the work starts: it becomes a task with an owner and a deadline, and the comments on that task come back as a reply in the channel they came from.
Tracking is Jira, the wiki is Confluence, video updates are Loom, and single sign-on is Atlassian Guard on top. Four decisions, four line items. taos is one subscription with chat, boards, processes, culture and — in development — tickets and CRM inside it.
User roles and permissions begin at Jira’s Standard plan. In taos, deciding who can see and change what is part of the product on every plan, because a team of eight has that question on day one.
Jira is precise because it was built for one trade. Sales, operations and HR end up in spreadsheets beside it. taos assumes the same company holds all of them and gives them one place with the same context.
Feedback Friday, kudos, surveys and anniversaries from the free plan; pulse surveys and eNPS from Workspace. In Atlassian this layer simply does not exist, so it becomes another vendor.
Atlassian’s EMEA customers get Irish law — which is European, and we say so plainly — but the company on the other side of the agreement is Australian. Ours is Polish, on European infrastructure, with no parent company anywhere else.