What Is Jira: Uses, How to Work in It and What Changes by 2029

Jira is a task tracker from the Australian company Atlassian in which teams manage tasks, bugs, sprints and releases. Every unit of work becomes a task with an assignee, a status and a priority, and progress is visible on boards and in reports. Jira has been the standard for development teams for decades, but in 2026 Atlassian is moving it almost entirely to the cloud.

This article is for founders, managers and team leads of IT companies in Kazakhstan who hear about Jira in every job interview but aren’t sure whether they need it. We’ll look at how Jira works, what products and versions it has, what changes with the Data Center shutdown, how to work with it from Kazakhstan and when it makes more sense to choose something simpler.

Jira in plain words: what kind of software it is

Jira is a system where all of a team’s work is broken down into tasks. A task can be a feature, a bug, a technical improvement or a customer request. It has a reporter, an assignee, a status, a priority, a due date, a description, attachments and comments. Tasks are grouped into projects, projects are shown on boards, and reports are built from the boards.

Jira was originally built for tracking bugs in code, which is why its vocabulary still has a lot of “engineering” terms: issue, resolution, components, versions. Over time, the product grew into a full development management system, and the Atlassian ecosystem formed around it: Confluence for documentation, Bitbucket for code, Trello for simple boards, Rovo as an AI assistant and a Marketplace with thousands of third-party apps.

Hence Jira’s defining trait: it’s very flexible. Almost everything in it can be configured: issue types, fields, statuses, screens, permissions, notifications. That flexibility is great for a large company with a dedicated administrator and becomes a burden for a team of ten.

Who Jira is for and what tasks it handles

Jira is most often chosen by:

• Product development teams: SaaS, mobile apps and web services with sprints and regular releases.
• IT studios and outsourcing companies that need to run several client projects with different access permissions.
• Large companies with dozens of teams, where common rules, portfolio planning through Advanced Roadmaps and end-to-end reporting matter.
• Support teams and internal IT departments that work in Jira Service Management.

Several roles work with Jira inside a company. The administrator configures schemes, fields and permissions. The product manager or team lead maintains the backlog and plans sprints. Developers, testers and designers pick up tasks and move them across the board. Managers and clients look at dashboards and leave comments. If nobody takes on the administrator role, Jira quickly accumulates settings nobody understands.

Jira is less convenient for small teams without a dedicated administrator, for departments where tasks are short and don’t require stages, and for companies that need to store data on their own servers in Kazakhstan. We’ll come back to this below.

Jira’s core concepts

To work in Jira, you only need to understand seven entities. Everything else is their configuration.

Concept	What it is	Example
Project	A container for one team’s or product’s tasks, with its own permissions and settings	“Mobile app,” “Payment service backend”
Task (issue)	A unit of work with an assignee, a status and fields	“Add Kaspi payment to the cart”
Epic	A large block of work made up of many tasks	“Online payments”
Sprint	A one- to four-week period with a fixed set of tasks	“Sprint 14, October 6–17”
Board	Task cards in columns by status, Scrum or Kanban	The mobile development team’s board
Workflow	Statuses and the allowed transitions between them	“To do → In progress → Review → Testing → Done”
JQL	A query language for finding tasks	project = APP AND type = Bug AND status != Done

A couple of clarifications. Workflow is the heart of Jira: it determines whether a task can go straight from “In progress” to “Done” or must go through review. This is where companies most often overcomplicate their setup. JQL is why experienced users love Jira: filters, boards, dashboards and Jira Automation rules are built on it. JQL filters accumulated over years are among the hardest things to move when switching to another system.

How to work in Jira: where a team should start

If a team is opening Jira for the first time, we recommend starting with a minimal setup and adding complexity only when actually needed.

1. Create a project from a template. Scrum if the team works in sprints and ships releases on a schedule. Kanban if the flow of tasks is continuous, as in support.
2. Cut statuses down to four or five. For example: “To do,” “In progress,” “Review,” “Done.” Every extra status is a place where tasks will get stuck.
3. Agree on issue types. “Story,” “Bug,” “Task” and “Epic” are enough to start.
4. Fill the backlog. Move current tasks from chats and spreadsheets into it and set priorities.
5. Launch the first two-week sprint. Take on less than seems possible.
6. Connect your repository. Integration with GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket shows commits and pull requests right in the task.
7. Set up one dashboard. Tasks in progress, high-priority bugs, sprint progress. That’s enough for management.

After that, daily work is simple: a developer picks a task from the sprint, moves it across the board and discusses details in the comments. Once per sprint, the team lead runs planning, a demo and a retrospective.

Common mistakes in the first months

In our implementation experience, problems with Jira almost never stem from the product itself. They stem from how it was configured.

• Copying someone else’s setup. The team brings a ten-status workflow from a previous company, and half the statuses sit empty. Statuses should reflect your process, not someone else’s.
• Required fields for everything. Every required field slows down task creation. Within a month, people start bypassing the tracker and writing in the chat again.
• Tasks without an assignee. The backlog has hundreds of tasks nobody triages. The backlog needs cleaning once per sprint: close what’s outdated and clarify what’s important.
• A separate project for every little thing. A year later, the instance has dozens of projects and nobody sees the big picture. Fewer projects and more filters is better.
• No system owner. If nobody is responsible for Jira, settings sprawl and permissions are handed out to anyone.

If you already have an instance like this, you don’t have to abandon it. An audit and cleanup are usually enough: simplify the workflow, remove unused fields and schemes, and appoint an owner.

Jira Software and Jira Service Management

The word “Jira” covers several products. The two main ones are a tracker for teams and a system for support desks. In the cloud, Atlassian has in recent years called the main tracker simply Jira, but in search and conversation it’s still called Jira Software.

Criterion	Jira (Jira Software)	Jira Service Management
Who it’s for	Development and product teams	Support desks, IT departments, internal services
Main object	A task in the backlog and sprint	A request from a customer or employee
How work comes in	The team creates and plans tasks itself	Requests come in through a portal, email or a widget
Key tools	Backlog, sprints, boards, epics, releases	Queues, SLAs, a customer knowledge base
Who needs a license	Every team member	Support agents, not the people submitting requests

Companies often use both products together: a customer request comes into Jira Service Management, and if it’s a bug, a linked task is created from it in the development project. If your support still lives in WhatsApp and email and there aren’t many requests, Service Management may be overkill, and a separate project in the main tracker will do. We covered how to handle bugs, priorities and SLAs in a single tracker in our article on bug tracking and SLAs.

Cloud and Data Center: what changes by 2029

Jira had three deployment options: Server, Data Center and Cloud. In 2026, effectively only one remains.

Version	Where it runs	Status
Jira Server	Your own server	Support ended on February 15, 2024
Jira Data Center	Your own servers, cluster	New licenses not sold since March 30, 2026; renewals for existing customers, according to Atlassian partners, until March 30, 2028; end of support March 28, 2029
Jira Cloud	Atlassian’s servers	The main product, actively developed and getting new features

What the end of Data Center support means in practice. After March 28, 2029, the license switches to read-only mode: you can view tasks, but you can’t work in the system. Marketplace apps stop working. So companies currently on Data Center must, before that date, either move to Jira Cloud or switch to another tracker that can be installed on their own server.

It’s better to make the decision early: migrating a large instance with years of configuration, ScriptRunner scripts and dozens of apps takes months. A step-by-step breakdown of the options is in Jira Data Center is shutting down in 2029, and a list of what to check before moving to the cloud is in Before moving to Jira Cloud: 10 checks.

Jira in Kazakhstan: payment, data, language

You can use Jira from Kazakhstan without restrictions on the vendor’s side, but working with it has some local specifics.

Kazakhstan context. Jira Cloud is paid by corporate card in US dollars, and Atlassian doesn’t issue closing documents that meet Kazakhstan standards, so accounting records the expense as payment for a foreign service. Jira Cloud data is stored in one of Atlassian’s regions: the US, the EU, Germany, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Japan, India, South Korea, Canada. Kazakhstan is not on the list. This is worth considering if it matters to the company to store data in the country. Language is easier: Jira has a built-in Russian interface, and Kazakh is available as a language pack in the Atlassian Marketplace. Atlassian partners operate in Kazakhstan and help with licenses and setup.

For most product teams without sensitive data, Jira Cloud remains a workable option. For banks, fintech, companies with government clients and anyone whose tracker holds customer data, the storage question becomes decisive.

When Jira is overkill and what the alternatives are

Jira is a powerful tool, but it isn’t always necessary. Signs it’s overkill for your team:

• The team has up to 15–20 people, and nobody is willing to spend time administering schemes.
• Of all the features, only the board, backlog and sprints are used; JQL, Automation and Marketplace apps aren’t needed.
• Documentation lives separately because nobody wants to buy Confluence.
• Data needs to be stored in Kazakhstan or in a closed environment without internet.
• License costs are growing faster than the team.

The main alternative for IT teams is Plane, an open source tracker with a similar model: tasks, cycles (the equivalent of sprints), modules, epics, built-in Pages and Wiki instead of Confluence, and the PQL query language instead of JQL. Plane can be installed on your own server via Docker or Kubernetes; the Community Edition is free with no user limit, and the cloud plan is free for up to 12 users. Plane has a native importer from Jira Cloud and Server/Data Center: it moves projects, tasks, comments, attachments, sprints and users, but not automations, dashboards or JQL filters. Plane’s weak points are a smaller integration ecosystem and a Russian interface translation that is maintained by the community and whose completeness varies by version.

Other options: YouTrack from JetBrains for teams working in JetBrains IDEs, and OpenProject for projects with Gantt charts and budgets. A detailed comparison is in Plane vs Jira in 2026.

How we do it

We work with Jira in both directions. If Jira fits the team, we put things in order: simplify the workflow, clean up schemes and fields, and set up boards, automation and reports. If Jira is overkill or runs into data storage requirements, we help you move to Plane. The order is always the same: a diagnostic of the process and requirements, a two- to four-week pilot with one team, then moving the other teams and the task history.

If you’re deciding whether to stay on Jira, move to the cloud or change trackers, start with our page on Jira and Plane task tracker implementation: it describes the process, timelines and what the result includes.

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Sources. Data Center timeline: atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center. Jira Cloud pricing: atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing. Atlassian Cloud data residency regions: support.atlassian.com. Plane pricing: plane.so/pricing.

Terms in plain words

Atlassian

The company that develops Jira, Confluence, Trello and other teamwork products.

Epic

A large block of work that groups many tasks, for example 'Online payments in the app.' It helps you see how tasks add up to product goals.

Sprint

A period of work, usually two weeks, with a set of tasks chosen in advance. It gives the team a rhythm for planning and releases.

Workflow

A set of task statuses and rules for moving between them. It defines which stages work goes through from idea to release.

JQL

Jira's query language for finding tasks by conditions. It's used to build filters, boards and reports for management.

Jira Service Management

Atlassian's product for support teams: request intake through a portal, queues and response time tracking.

Data Center

The version of Jira for installing on a company's own servers. New licenses haven't been sold since March 2026, and support ends in March 2029.

Data residency

Choosing the region where a cloud service stores customer data. Kazakhstan is not on Atlassian Cloud's list of regions.