Atlassian today added new pricing tiers for its cloud products, including free and premium options for Jira Software and Confluence. The Australian company hopes the free editions, in particular, can entice new customers onto its cloud services.
Entry-level versions of Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Jira Core and Confluence will be available at no cost “in the coming months” said Atlassian. The free version of Jira Software and Confluence will be limited to 10 users; Jira Service Desk will be limited to three. File attachments are limited to 20MB, with a 2GB file storage limit for the free versions. And free-tier users will only have access to community support, as opposed to the Standard support package, which offers access to the Atlassian support team during working hours.
There are other limitations for each of the applications:
- For Jira Software and Jira Core, no support for project or issue permissions, or audit logs.
- For Confluence: No support for space or page permissions, or audit logs.
- And for Jira Service Desk: No support for audit logs.
The changes bring the project management tools into line with other cloud collaboration tools such as Slack, as well as other products within Atlassian’s own portfolio, including Trello and Bitbucket – they already offer free access with no time restriction. Atlassian previously offered a seven-day trial for Jira and Confluence at no cost.
Aileen Horgan, Head of GTM for Cloud Editions & Ecosystem at Atlassian, said the addition of free tiers “is an opportunity for us to standardize across all of our product portfolio, barring StatusPage for now.” It also means providing an option for startups and small businesses, as well helping smaller teams in enterprise organizations get started with Atlassian tools, she said.
The free tier will likely appeal to university students, too, said Thomas Murphy, a senior director analyst at Gartner. More generally, the free tier provides an introduction to some of Atlassian’s most popular products. “It also means there are more people coming to the product that ‘understand’ the product, which in turn controls the outlays for support,” he said.
In addition, Atlassian announced that academic and non-profit organizations will have access to discounted rates for certain cloud services used by Confluence and various Jira tools.
Premium tier for Jira Software and Confluence
With the new top-pricing tier for Jira Software and Confluence, Atlassian is offering access to features aimed at larger deployments.
The premium version of Jira Software is now available; it adds unlimited storage, a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and faster support response times. Prices start at $14 per user per month, double that of the standard version.
The premium version of Confluence is also available, with similar improvements to storage, support and SLAs, along with enhanced analytics and access to upcoming features, such as the ability to collaborate with external clients. Pricing for the premium version starts at $10 per user per month, compared to $5 for Confluence Standard.
A premium version of Jira Service Desk is also on its way, said Atlassian.
“The premium tiers in general will be well received because users often want more support and scale as they mature in their use of Atlassian [products],” said Murphy.
The Australian software vendor already offers two-tier pricing for on-premise versions of both Confluence and Jira Software, with a more expensive Data Center option launched in 2014 to sit alongside the standard Server product.
Cloud migration and management tools
Atlassian also today introduced new admin tools to encourage customers to adopt its cloud applications.
The company, founded in 2002, initially focused on selling on-premise software, but has embarked on a major cloud push in recent years. It now has more 10 million monthly active users of its various cloud products, and 90% of new customers select cloud services.
Last year, Atlassian completed a major overhaul of its infrastructure, moving to Amazon Web Services to provide greater scale and performance improvements. The move has allowed it to double the user limit for Jira Software and Confluence Cloud to 10,000, for example.
The company also launched Atlassian Access in 2018 to offer admins centralized management of Atlassian’s various cloud products across an organization. A range of updates to Atlassian Access have now been announced. They include integration with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services and Google Cloud Identity to support single sign-on and user provisioning, and better insights into user adoption of Atlassian products across an organization.
New data residency controls for cloud products, also announced, offer more control of data for customers that operate in countries with strict compliance requirements. This will allow customers to soon be able to choose exactly where their information will reside.
Atlassian also wants to make it easier for existing on-prem customers to make the switch to the cloud. A new Cloud Migration Tool for Jira will be made available later this year. (A similar tool is already available for Confluence customers.)
Other announcements include extended cloud trial licenses, the release of the Cloud Platform Roadmap and channel partner incentives for cloud sales.
Wider adoption of cloud services has benefits for both Atlassian and its customers, said Murphy, with regular updates to applications handled by the vendor rather than in-house staff. For Atlassian it offers predictable revenues.
“If you are Atlassian, it shifts your revenue recognition and creates a nice recurring stream,” he said.
Copyright © 2019 IDG Communications, Inc.