Is automation in Jira free? A complete 2025 guide

So, you’re looking into Jira automation and you’ve hit the big question: is it actually free? If you ask Atlassian, they’ll say yes, and they aren’t technically lying. You can get started automating tasks without opening your wallet. But as plenty of teams have found out the hard way, "free" comes with some pretty serious strings attached.

This guide is here to cut through the marketing talk. We’ll break down what you really get with Jira’s free automation, where the limits are, and what it actually costs when you need to scale. We’ll also explore a smarter way to build out your team’s automation strategy.

Understanding Jira automation

Jira’s built-in automation is a no-code feature that lets you set up simple "if-this-then-that" rules to take care of repetitive tasks. Think of it as a little helper bot that handles the small, predictable stuff so your team can focus on work that requires actual brainpower.

It all boils down to three simple parts:

• Triggers: This is the event that kicks everything off, like an issue being created or a comment being added.

• Conditions: These are the specific requirements that need to be met. For instance, a rule might only run if an issue’s priority is set to "Highest."

• Actions: This is the task the rule actually does, like assigning the ticket to someone, pinging a Slack channel, or updating a field.

With these three pieces, you can cook up rules for all kinds of common situations. Teams often use it to automatically assign new tasks to the right person, move a parent ticket to "Done" once all its sub-tasks are finished, or send an alert to a Slack channel when a critical bug pops up. It’s a handy way to keep workflows moving and make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

The truth about Jira’s free automation

Yes, automation is included in Jira’s Free plan. But the limits are so tight that for any team with a real workload, it feels more like a free sample than a functional tool. The limitations give you a taste of what’s possible, but you’re going to hit a wall, and probably sooner than you think.

The Free plan: What you get (and what you don’t)

On the Jira Free plan, your monthly allowance is 100 automation rule runs. A "run" gets counted every time a rule is triggered and does its job. If you have a rule that transitions an issue and adds a comment, that’s one run. If ten new bugs trigger that same rule, you’ve just used up ten of your runs.

For a tiny team just getting started, 100 runs might sound okay. But if you have even a few basic rules running, like auto-assigning tasks or sending notifications, you can burn through that limit in a week, maybe even a single busy day.

On top of that, the Free plan only lets you create rules for one project at a time. You can’t set up global or multi-project rules that work across your entire company. This means if you want the same automation for five different projects, you have to build and maintain five separate rules. That gets messy fast and chews through your tiny monthly limit even quicker. The Free plan is fine for a test drive, but it’s not designed for any kind of meaningful, long-term automation.

The real cost: When ‘free’ runs out

<quote text="Hitting your monthly automation limit isn't just a small hiccup; it can bring your team's entire workflow to a grinding halt. One Reddit user with 3,500 users on a Standard plan summed it up pretty well when their billing cycle reset and the limits kicked in: "we are completely fucked."" sourceIcon="https://www.iconpacks.net/icons/2/free-reddit-logo-icon-2436-thumb.png" sourceName="Reddit" sourceLink="https://www.reddit.com/r/jira/comments/192kyju/how_do_you_guys_are_dealling_with_jira_automation/">

Once you’ve used your runs for the month, all your automations just stop. That rule that was closing parent tickets? Off. The automatic assignments? They’re not happening. Notifications? Silent. All of a sudden, your team is back to doing everything by hand, which is the very problem you were trying to fix. Productivity tanks, frustration goes up, and you’re stuck waiting for the first of the month. This is the point where "free" starts to feel very, very expensive.

Scaling up with Jira’s paid plans

So, to get out of this "free" plan trap, Atlassian’s answer is simple: you have to pay up. They tie automation capacity directly to the paid subscription tiers, effectively turning a core workflow feature into a premium upsell. Here’s a look at the limits and pricing for Jira Cloud.

Plan	Rule Runs per Month	Key Features
Free	100	Single-project rules only.
Standard	1,700	Adds global and multi-project rules.
Premium	1,000 per user (pooled)	Higher limits, advanced features.
Enterprise	Unlimited	For large-scale organizational needs.
Source: Jira Software Pricing

Jumping from Free to the Standard plan gives you a much bigger allowance of 1,700 runs and unlocks global rules, which is a definite improvement. But for a medium-sized team with a few dozen active projects, 1,700 runs can still vanish surprisingly fast. The Premium plan offers a much larger pool of runs (1,000 per user, per month), but it also comes with a much higher price per person. True, unlimited automation is reserved for the top-tier Enterprise plan, which puts scalable, worry-free automation out of reach for most companies.

How teams work around Jira’s limits

Since upgrading to a pricey plan just for automation isn’t realistic for a lot of companies, teams start looking for workarounds. The problem is, these solutions usually end up trading one headache for another, bringing in new costs, complexity, and dependencies.

Marketplace apps and plugins

The Atlassian Marketplace is packed with third-party apps like ScriptRunner and JSU Automation Suite that add more power to Jira. Many of them offer unlimited automation runs and more advanced features than what Jira gives you out of the box.

That sounds like a great fix, right? But there are trade-offs. You’re now paying for another subscription on top of your Jira plan, and these tools can be pretty complicated to learn. ScriptRunner, for example, is incredibly powerful, but you need to know the Groovy scripting language to use it. That’s a huge barrier for non-technical folks, like the Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters who are often in charge of setting up workflows. Instead of empowering your team, you end up with a bottleneck where only a couple of technical experts can build or fix anything.

Building custom scripts with the Jira API

Another common route is to skip the third-party apps and build custom solutions using the Jira API with a language like Python or PowerShell. This approach gives you total control over your automations without any extra software costs.

However, this option only really works if you have developers with time to spare. Building and maintaining these scripts requires time and very specific skills. They can be fragile, breaking anytime Jira updates its API, and they often end up with little to no documentation. For the non-technical people on your team, these scripts are a total black box. They can’t create them, they can’t tweak them, and they definitely can’t fix them when something goes wrong. It’s a solution that creates a lot of technical debt and walls off automation from the people who manage the day-to-day work.

A smarter approach: Integrating AI with Jira

Rule-based automation, whether it’s native or through a plugin, can only get you so far. A more modern and scalable approach is to bring in an intelligent AI platform that works with your existing tools, including Jira Service Management, without forcing you into an expensive upgrade or complicated scripting. This is where a tool like eesel AI can make a real difference.

Overcoming rule limits

Instead of depending on a limited number of "if-this-then-that" runs, eesel AI uses artificial intelligence to understand context, make decisions, and take action. This completely changes how you think about automation. You stop having to count every little action and worry about hitting a monthly cap.

This also leads to more predictable costs. The pricing for eesel AI is based on the features you need, not on how many tickets you resolve. You won’t get a surprise bill at the end of a busy month, which lets you grow your support operations without your costs spiraling out of control.

Unifying knowledge beyond just Jira

Native Jira automation is great, but it lives in a silo. It only knows what’s going on inside Jira. But today’s workflows are spread across a bunch of different tools. A customer issue might start in a Slack thread, reference a guide in Confluence, and relate to a spec sheet in Google Docs.

eesel AI breaks down those silos by connecting to all of your company’s knowledge sources. It learns from past tickets, internal wikis, and team documents to get the full picture. This means it can do much smarter things. For example, an AI agent could create a super-detailed Jira ticket by pulling info from a Slack conversation and a Confluence page at the same time, making sure developers have all the context they need right from the start.

This infographic shows how eesel AI connects various knowledge sources, a key advantage when considering if automation in Jira is free is enough for your needs.

Testing and deploying with confidence

One of the biggest anxieties with traditional automation is launching a new rule and just hoping for the best. A badly configured rule can create chaos in your projects, leaving you with a huge mess to clean up.

This is where having a safety net is a huge deal. eesel AI lets you test everything out first in a powerful simulation mode. Before you activate any automation, you can run it against thousands of your own past tickets in a safe environment. You get to see exactly how the AI would have responded, what actions it would have taken, and what the impact would have been on your resolution times. This lets you fine-tune its behavior and get a real forecast of your ROI before it ever touches a live customer ticket, taking all the guesswork and risk out of the process.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which helps teams test their setups before going live, a crucial step when deciding if automation in Jira is free is sufficient.

Move beyond basic rules for true efficiency

While Jira’s automation is technically "free" to get started with, its tight limits create a major roadblock for any team that’s trying to grow. The common workarounds, like third-party apps or custom scripts, just bring their own costs and complications that can get in the way of your goal to be more efficient.

For teams that are serious about automation, it’s time to look past simple, brittle rules. Modern AI platforms like eesel AI offer a more powerful, flexible, and cost-effective way to automate not just your Jira projects, but your entire workflow across all the tools you use.

Ready to see what automation looks like without counting every run? Start your free eesel AI trial and see how you can automate your Jira workflows in minutes.