Jira Cloud: pros and cons
When talking about pros and cons, there’s always a chance that a competitive advantage for some is a dealbreaker for others. That’s why I decided to talk about pros and cons in matching pairs.
Pro: Scalability is one of the primary reasons businesses are choosing Jira Cloud. DC is technically also scalable, but you’ll need to scale on your own whereas the cloud version allows for the infrastructure to scale with your business.
Con: Despite the cloud’s ability to grow with your business, there is still a user limit of 35k users. In addition to that, the costs will grow alongside your needs. New users, licenses, storage, and computing power – all come at an additional cost. So, when your organization reaches a certain size, migrating to Jira DC becomes more cost-efficient.
Pro: Jira takes care of maintenance and support for you.
Con: Your business can suffer from unpredicted downtime. And there are certain security risks.
Pro: Extra bells and whistles:
- Sandbox: Sandbox is a safe environment system admins can use to test applications and integrations before rolling them out to the production environment.
- Release tracks: Admins can be more flexible with their product releases as they can access batch and control cloud releases. This means they’ll have much more time to test existing configurations and workflows against a new update.
- Insight Discovery: More data means more ways you can impact your business or product in a positive, meaningful way.
- Team Calendars: This is a handy feature for synchronization and synergy across teams.
Con: Most of these features are locked behind a paywall and are only available to either Premium and Enterprise or only Enterprise licenses (either fully or through addition of functionality. For example, Release tracks are only available to Enterprise customers.) In addition, the costs will grow as you scale the offering to fit your growing needs.
Jira Data Center: pros and cons
I’ll be taking the same approach to talking about the pros and cons as I did when writing about Atlassian Cloud. Pros and cons are paired.
Pro: Hosting your own system means you can scale horizontally and vertically through additional hardware. Extension of your systems is seamless, and there is no downtime (if you do everything correctly). Lastly, you don’t have to worry about the user limit – there is none.
Con: While having more control over your systems is great, it implies a dedicated staff of engineers, additional expenses on software licensing, hardware, and physical space. Moreover, seamless extension and 0% downtime are entirely on you.
Pro: Atlassian has updated the DC offering with native bundled applications such as Advanced Roadmaps, team calendars and analytics for confluence, insight asset management, and insight discovery in Jira Service Management DC.
Con: Atlassian has updated their pricing to reflect these changes. And you are still getting fewer “bells and whistles” than Jira Cloud users (as we can see from the feature comparison).
Pro: You are technically safer as the system is supported on your hardware by your specialists. Any and all Jira server issues, poor updates, and downtime are simply not your concern.
Con: Atlassian offers excellent security options: data encryption in transit and rest, to mobile app management, to audit offerings and API token controls. In their absence, your team company has to dedicate additional resources to security.
Pro: Additional benefits from Atlassian, such as the Priority Support bundle (all DC subscriptions have this option), and the Data center loyalty discount (more on that in the pricing section.)
Pricing
Talking about pricing of SaaS products is always a challenge as there are always multiple tiers and various pay-as-you go features. Barebones Jira Cloud, for instance, is completely free of charge, yet there are a series of serious limitations.
Standard Jira Cloud will cost you an average of $7.50 per user per month while premium cranks that price up to $14.50. The Enterprise plan is billed annually and the cost is determined on a case-by-case basis. You can see the full comparison of Jira Cloud plans here. And you can use this online calculator to learn the cost of ownership in your particular case.
