Self-hosted Jira alternatives, now that Data Center is going

When Atlassian switches Jira Data Center off in March 2029, it will remove the only self-hostable Jira there is. Server went in 2024. Data Center goes in 2029. After which Jira is a cloud product and nothing else.

If you are reading this, you probably did not end up on Data Center by accident. Somebody chose it, on purpose, for a reason that has not gone away.

Why it was chosen in the first place

It is worth being precise about your own reason, because it determines which of the options below is actually open to you.

A regulation. A rule that says where the data resides, who may hold it, or that it has to be auditable on your premises. Careful not to confuse location with jurisdiction: hosting in Ireland does not settle the second.

An air-gapped network. Networks that do not reach the internet, because of what is on them.

Public procurement. A public body or a large contract whose clauses cannot be satisfied by American SaaS, whatever the address of the server. The clauses in question are worth reading before you go looking for a replacement.

Control. You wanted to own the update schedule, the backup policy and the data, and you were prepared to pay team time for it.

The first three are requirements. The fourth is a preference, and preferences are negotiable. Knowing which one is yours saves a great deal of time.

The option that looks like an answer

Atlassian offers three paths, and all three are the cloud. The first episode of this series sets them out with the calendar. Only one of the three is worth repeating here, because it is the one you will be offered if you say "self-hosted": the cloud in an isolated edition, on the upper plans.

It delivers exactly what it says: stricter boundaries inside a service still operated by Atlassian, on infrastructure chosen by Atlassian, under the law Atlassian answers to. If your requirement is about network isolation, that may be enough. If it is about jurisdiction, or about a network that does not reach the internet, it is not.

What self-hosting actually commits you to

Before going off to find a replacement you will run yourself, it is worth re-costing what you are already doing.

Self-hosting in 2026 means servers you patch, a database somebody sizes, backups somebody tests, and an update cadence you keep because security advisories do not wait. The expensive part comes next: one specific person who knows how your instance is put together.

This migration is where I see the most organisations discover they were paying for all of that without ever having put it on a line. If your reason was control rather than regulation, now is the moment to check whether you still care about it.

What is actually left

For genuinely self-hosted, the open source offering is real. The established names are OpenProject (German, GPL v3), Redmine (old, open source, the ancestor of much of the category) and Tuleap (French, open source, solid on traceability and regulated work). All three run on your hardware, all three have commercial support available, and all three will ask the same operational effort as Data Center. Two of them have an identifiable European publisher, which matters for support and for patches: how to check.

That is the point the comparison articles forget: moving to self-hosted open source software, you change licence and you keep the load. The servers, the database, the backups and the person who holds it all together stay exactly where they were.

There is also a middle ground most organisations end up preferring once the first option is costed honestly: a dedicated instance, operated by the supplier. Your environment, your data, your domain name; but the servers, the database, the backups and the updates are somebody's job, and that somebody is not you. It answers a jurisdiction requirement, it does not answer an air-gapped network, and it costs a good deal less than team time.

Where we sit

Klaro Cards offers all three, which is why we are writing this article.

A European cloud, in European data centres (Scaleway in France, Hetzner in Germany), on infrastructure we manage ourselves and have since 2017. A dedicated instance, your own environment, for the stricter requirements. And on-premise, on your servers, when that is the requirement rather than the preference.

The company is Belgian, and that is what counts for a jurisdiction requirement: the address of the server moves, the nationality of the supplier does not.

We are not Jira either. If what you run on Data Center is software development with sprints and Bitbucket, none of the above is for you and Atlassian Cloud probably is. If it is an operational work register (files, worksites, inspections, requests), the migration is a chance to stop using an issue tracker as a database, and the criteria are then not remotely the same: we set them out here.

The countdown page lays out the dates, the options and the prices.

The question to settle first

Not "what replaces Jira", but: is self-hosting a requirement, or a habit?

If it is a requirement, name it: the regulation, the clause, the network. The answer follows from the name, and there are few enough candidates left to evaluate them properly.

If it is a habit, you have more options than you think, and most of them cost less than the one you have.

Jira, Confluence and Atlassian are trademarks of Atlassian. Klaro Cards is not affiliated with Atlassian. The other products are cited as examples; check their licences and support terms yourself before deciding anything.