Jira has no offer left for keeping your data in Europe

For fifteen years, Jira was an honest answer for a small organisation that wanted its records on its own servers. A council's technical department, a manufacturer's quality unit, a laboratory: those are the three profiles I come across most often. Each bought a twenty-five user tier, installed it in-house, and the question of which law its supplier answered to never came up.

That answer no longer exists. It disappeared in three steps, spread over two years. The need, though, has not moved.

What Jira Server offered

Until 2024, Jira was sold as Server, in tiers of 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 or 500 users, on a perpetual licence. You installed the software on your own hardware, in your own server room or at the host of your choice.

For a sovereignty requirement, that is the simplest form there is: the data never leaves your perimeter, there is no subprocessor to list, no transfer clause to negotiate, no foreign parent company to question. A data protection officer signs in ten minutes. I am joking, that never happens. What I have seen, though, is more than one of them take to this route and baulk at the others.

Anyway. Atlassian ended support for Jira Server on 15 February 2024. The tiers below 500 went with it, and so did the perpetual licence.

The door that stayed open until March 2026

After Server died, Jira Data Center remained, and it too installs on your servers. On the data question, that edition holds up: your supplier holds nothing, and nobody can compel it to produce what it does not have. That is why we called it, in the first episode of this series, the last way to host your tickets out of reach of American law.

It does not, however, answer the question from the previous episode: under which country's law does your supplier operate? Atlassian answers "American", and that answer governs the licence, the updates, the Marketplace and the roadmap. Your data is with you; the calendar stays with them. Which is exactly what is being borne out right now.

And above all, Data Center is sold from 500 users up. That is its smallest tier. Atlassian's position for organisations below that threshold has been stated clearly: the tiers start at 500 to serve large organisations best, and below that the cloud is what it recommends.

What the 500-user floor cost

That floor is not a symbolic barrier. At list price, the 500 tier costs $59,000 a year as of 17 February 2026. It was $51,000 before that date, and around $42,000 before 2025.

At 500 people, that works out at $118 per person per year, an unremarkable figure for professional software. At twenty people, the same $59,000 works out at $2,950 per person per year, twenty-five times the nominal rate, for 480 seats nobody will ever open.

And the licence is only the visible part. Data Center is self-hosted: you supply the servers, you size and tune the database, you test the backups and the restores, and the updates arrive on Atlassian's schedule to consume a weekend of yours. Above all you need one specific person who knows your workflow schemes and knows what will break; the day they leave, you find out how much of the system was living in their head.

Between February 2024 and March 2026, in other words, the answer was in the catalogue without being within anyone's reach at that scale.

Since March 2026, only the cloud is left

On 30 March 2026, Data Center stopped being sold to new customers. The date is part of the end-of-life calendar announced on 8 September 2025, which we set out in the first episode. It has passed.

A team of twenty discovering today that it has to get out of the American cloud can therefore no longer buy Data Center, whatever its budget. What is left to it, at Atlassian, is Atlassian Cloud: billed per user, so perfectly affordable at twenty people, and rid of the servers, the database, the backups and the update weekends. If budget were the only constraint the discussion would stop here, and that is in fact what Atlassian recommends.

But it is a service operated by an American company, whatever the address of the servers. If you stuck to self-hosting because of a regulator, a procurement rule, an air-gapped network or a data protection officer doing their job, that door does not answer your question.

There is still extended maintenance, paid and time-limited, granted case by case. A reprieve, and you have to be a customer already to qualify.

Why it is a shame

Atlassian's decision makes perfect sense from the inside. Maintaining an installed edition is expensive, the small tiers bring in little, and the cloud is a better product for the vast majority of their customers. Jira remains an excellent issue tracker, and the development teams using it in the cloud have probably come out ahead.

Then again. A council, a laboratory, a regulated SME have not stopped existing because they are small, and their obligations have not shrunk to match. They find themselves facing a choice they did not ask for: give up a requirement that was imposed on them from outside, or change tools.

Hence the question worth asking: not "what does it cost?" but "am I still the customer this is built for?" If the answer is no, Data Center going dark in 2029 is not a surprise but a strategic decision by Atlassian, and a regrettable one for Europeans.

What exists instead

The hole Server left is occupied elsewhere, fortunately. The next episodes in this series survey what remains self-hostable and the European suppliers who have settled on that ground.

Our own answer is a dedicated instance: your environment, in European data centres or on your servers, billed from ten users and then in blocks of five.

We are not Jira and we do not claim to be: if your teams live in sprints and Bitbucket, stay where you are. If what you were tracking in Jira is files, worksites, inspections and internal requests, the door that has just closed opens another one.

Jira, Confluence and Atlassian are trademarks of Atlassian. Klaro Cards is not affiliated with Atlassian.

Sources: end of support for Jira Server, 15 February 2024, and the Server tiers (10 to 500 users, perpetual licence); Atlassian's Q&A on the end of Server, including the 500-user minimum on Data Center and the cloud recommendation below it; the Data Center end-of-life calendar announced on 8 September 2025, including the end of sales to new customers on 30 March 2026; Data Center list price, 500-user tier, $51,000 then $59,000 as of 17 February 2026. Klaro Cards prices are the public prices from klaro.cards/pricing, excl. VAT. The dollar and euro amounts are not converted: each is quoted in the currency its supplier publishes.