What is Jira? A comprehensive guide for 2025

If your team is trying to manage projects with a mix of spreadsheets, email chains, and sticky notes, you know the feeling. Sooner or later, things start falling through the cracks. Keeping track of who’s doing what becomes a job in itself, and that’s when someone inevitably says, "Should we be using a real tool for this?"

Chances are, you’ve heard of Jira. It’s a huge name in the project management world, used for everything from building apps to planning marketing campaigns. This guide is a simple, no-fluff look at what Jira actually is, who it’s for, and what it costs. We’ll break it all down so you can figure out if it’s the right move for your team.

Because here’s the thing: Jira is incredibly powerful, but getting the most out of it isn’t always straightforward, especially for support teams. Sometimes, it works best when you pair it with other smart tools.

This video from Atlassian provides a clear, concise overview of what Jira is and how it helps teams manage their work.

What is Jira?

At its heart, Jira is a project management and issue-tracking tool made by Atlassian. Its whole purpose is to help teams plan, track, and manage their work in one central place. Every task, bug report, or customer request gets logged and follows a clear path from start to finish.

It got its start back in 2002 as a bug tracker for software developers. The name is a fun little nod to its inspiration, Bugzilla, as it’s a shortened version of "Gojira," the Japanese name for Godzilla. But it’s grown a lot since then. Today, Jira is actually a family of products built for different kinds of teams.

You’ll mainly come across these three:

• Jira Software: This is the original, built for software teams that use agile methods like Scrum and Kanban.

• Jira Work Management: A more streamlined version for business teams like marketing, HR, and finance to manage their projects.

• Jira Service Management: A full-blown help desk for IT and customer support teams to handle requests and incidents.

Core features and concepts of Jira

Jira’s flexibility comes from a few key concepts that all fit together. Once you get these, the whole system starts to click.

Issues, projects, and boards in Jira

In Jira, everything starts as an issue. Don’t let the name fool you, an issue is just a single piece of work. It could be a bug, a new feature idea (often called a "story"), a marketing task, or a customer support ticket. Each one gets a unique ID, so nothing gets lost.

Issues are then organized into projects. A project is just a bucket for all the work related to a specific team, product, or goal. You might have one project for developing your mobile app and another for your marketing team’s content calendar.

The most famous part of Jira is the board. This is where you see your project’s workflow visually. It’s usually set up with columns like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." As the team works, they drag the issue’s card from one column to the next, which gives everyone a real-time status update at a glance. The most common boards are Kanban (for a continuous flow of work) and Scrum (for work broken into time-boxed sprints).

Jira workflows

A workflow is the journey an issue takes from creation to completion. It’s the set of statuses ("Open," "In Review," "Resolved") and the rules for moving between them. One of Jira’s biggest strengths is that these workflows are completely customizable. You can design a different process for every single project or issue type. The downside? This can get complicated to set up and even harder to maintain as your team’s process changes over time.

A visual representation of a customizable Jira workflow, showing the path an issue takes from 'To Do' to 'Done'.

Jira reporting and dashboards

Jira also has built-in reporting tools and dashboards you can customize. These are great for seeing your team’s progress, spotting bottlenecks, and tracking metrics. Agile teams love the burndown charts, which show how fast they’re getting through work in a sprint.

An example of a Jira dashboard used to track support team metrics and progress.

The Atlassian Marketplace for Jira

One of Jira’s biggest perks is the Atlassian Marketplace, which is filled with thousands of third-party apps and integrations. You can find an app to connect Jira to pretty much any other tool you use. But having that much choice can be a bit much. When you need something specific, like an AI tool for customer support, digging through all those options can be a real time-sink. Sometimes, a dedicated tool designed to integrate easily is a much quicker way to solve your problem.

Who uses Jira? Common use cases and limitations

Jira is used by all kinds of teams, but their experiences (and frustrations) can be pretty different.

Jira for software development teams

This is Jira’s home turf. Software teams use Jira Software for everything related to agile project management. They plan work in sprints, track bugs, manage new feature releases, and use Kanban boards to see their entire development pipeline. For developers, it’s the standard for good reason.

Jira for business teams (marketing, HR, and finance)

With Jira Work Management, business teams can get the same structured approach without all the developer-focused jargon. Marketing teams plan campaigns, HR teams track employee onboarding, and finance teams can build workflows for approvals. It brings a lot more visibility than a tangled web of spreadsheets.

Jira for IT and customer support teams

IT and support teams use Jira Service Management as their help desk. It’s a solid tool for logging, prioritizing, and resolving everything from internal IT problems to external customer tickets. But this is also where some of Jira’s cracks begin to show.

The limitations:

• It can be complicated. Setting up simple automation rules or customizing workflows in Jira Service Management can feel like you need an engineering degree. It often requires a dedicated admin to get things running properly, which is tough for teams that just want to get work done.

• The AI is walled off and generic. Atlassian has its own AI features, but they’re only available if you’re on a paid plan. More importantly, it’s a general-purpose AI. It’s not specialized for the nuances of high-quality customer support, so the answers can sometimes miss the mark.

• Knowledge gets trapped. Jira’s AI works best if all your documentation is neatly stored inside Confluence. But what team works like that? Most of our knowledge is scattered across Google Docs, internal wikis, and, critically, the conversations in past support tickets. Jira’s native AI often can’t access or learn from all of it.

To get around these issues, many teams add a dedicated AI layer that plugs right into their existing setup. For instance, a tool like eesel AI integrates directly with Jira Service Management to deliver smart automation without the setup headaches.

Instead of fighting with complex settings, you can get:

• A fast, self-serve setup. You shouldn’t have to book a sales call just to get started. You can connect to Jira and start building an AI agent yourself in minutes.

• Knowledge from everywhere. You can train your AI on everything, not just Confluence. eesel AI learns from past Jira tickets, Google Docs, your help center, and more to give customers complete and accurate answers.

• A way to test safely. Before the AI ever interacts with a customer, you can simulate its performance on thousands of your past tickets. This shows you exactly how it will perform and lets you make adjustments in a risk-free environment.

• Automation that takes action. The AI can do more than just answer questions. You can set it up to perform actions like creating a new Jira issue, escalating a ticket to a human, or routing it to the right team, truly automating your workflows.

Understanding Jira pricing

Jira’s pricing is mostly based on how many users you have, so the cost can climb as your team grows. The features also change quite a bit from one tier to the next. Here’s a quick look at the standard cloud plans for Jira Software in 2025.

First up is the Free plan. It’s a great starting point for very small teams, but it’s limited to 10 users and only comes with 2 GB of storage. You don’t get access to Atlassian’s AI, and you have limited control over user permissions.

The Standard plan is where most growing businesses land. At about $7.53 per user per month, it supports up to 100,000 users and gives you 250 GB of storage. This tier unlocks Atlassian AI and proper user roles and permissions. Support is limited to local business hours.

Next is the Premium plan, at around $13.53 per user per month. It includes everything in Standard plus unlimited storage, advanced features like cross-project planning, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and 24/7 premium support.

Finally, there’s an Enterprise plan with custom pricing for very large organizations that need the highest level of security and support.

This per-user pricing is standard, but it’s not the only way. For things like support automation, a different model can make more sense. Tools like eesel AI have transparent pricing based on AI interactions, not user seats. This means you don’t pay more just because your team is growing; you only pay for the work the AI is actually doing.

Is Jira the right tool for you?

So, should your team use Jira? It really depends on what you need it to do.

Jira is an absolute powerhouse for structured project management, especially in the software world. It’s customizable, reliable, and has a massive community behind it. If you need a solid system for tracking work from A to B, it’s one of the best choices out there.

Jira is an absolute powerhouse for structured project management... It's customizable, reliable, and has a massive community behind it.

Reddit

But all that power comes with complexity. There’s a definite learning curve, and the per-user pricing can add up. For teams that want to provide fast, intelligent support without getting bogged down in configuration, adding a dedicated AI platform on top of Jira is often the smartest move. You get to keep Jira as your system for tracking work while adding a layer of smart automation that’s easy to manage and built for the job.

If you want to get more out of Jira Service Management without the heavy lifting, see how eesel AI can help automate your support and bring all your knowledge together.