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Jira Data Center end of life: the dates for Jira and Confluence, what read-only means, and your options

Atlassian ends Jira and Confluence Data Center on March 28, 2029, when they turn read-only. The dates, every product's status, exports and your options.

Stride Team· Engineering13 min readUpdated

Atlassian is ending most of its Data Center products. On March 28, 2029, every Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence Data Center subscription expires and the product turns read-only, and two earlier dates already limit what you can buy. If you run Jira on your own servers, the question is no longer whether to move, but where to, and how much of your Jira comes with you.

This guide covers the dates, what read-only will mean, the status of every Atlassian Data Center product, what changes for Confluence, how to get your data out of Jira Data Center, and how to choose between Atlassian's cloud and another tool. Every fact about Atlassian's plans was checked on Atlassian's own pages on October 20, 2026, and the dates, the product list and the Confluence details again on October 25; the sources are listed at the end.

Recent changes

  • Bamboo is off the list. In early October 2026, Atlassian took Bamboo Data Center out of the end of life. Bitbucket and Bamboo Data Center both continue, through the Bitbucket Hybrid License, which Atlassian now expects in early 2027 rather than mid-2026.
  • Extended maintenance has a program. Atlassian now documents an Extended Maintenance Program: paid support after March 28, 2029, including fixes for critical security vulnerabilities, for customers it approves by exception. It publishes no price.
  • Prices rose twice in 2026. Data Center list prices went up on February 17, 2026, for renewals as well as new purchases, and cloud list prices went up on October 13, 2026.
  • Connect apps lose support on January 31, 2027. Marketplace apps built on Atlassian's older Connect framework get only critical security fixes after that date, so check that each cloud app you plan to rely on has moved to Forge.

Is Jira being discontinued?

No. Atlassian is ending Jira Data Center, its self-managed edition, not Jira. Jira Cloud continues, and Jira Data Center keeps working, with support and security fixes, until March 28, 2029.

Jira Server and Data Center: the on-premise end-of-life dates

Jira Server, the older on-premise edition, has already reached its end: Atlassian stopped supporting it and its other Server products on February 15, 2024 (Fisheye and Crucible are the exception: Atlassian stopped selling them on May 13, 2025 and supports them until May 15, 2028). A Server instance still runs, but it has had no bug or security fixes since, which leaves Data Center as the last way to run Jira on your own servers. These are the dates that end it.

Each change takes effect at 23:59 Pacific time on the date shown.

DateWhat changes
December 16, 2025Atlassian stopped accepting new Data Center apps in its Marketplace.
March 30, 2026New customers can no longer buy Data Center subscriptions or Data Center apps.
March 30, 2028Existing customers can no longer buy new Data Center subscriptions, expand the ones they have, or buy Data Center apps. Renewals continue, prorated so they end on March 28, 2029.
March 28, 2029Data Center subscriptions for the affected products and their Marketplace apps expire, and the products turn read-only. Support and bug fixes stop.

An existing customer, in Atlassian's terms, is any organisation that paid for a Data Center subscription before March 30, 2026, including subsidiaries whose parent did.

Atlassian Data Center end of life: every product

End of life covers Jira Software Data Center, Jira Service Management Data Center, Confluence Data Center, Crowd Data Center, the Data Center mobile apps, and the Atlassian and third-party Marketplace apps built for them. A few products sit outside it.

ProductWhat happens
Jira Software Data CenterRead-only from March 28, 2029
Jira Service Management Data CenterRead-only from March 28, 2029
Confluence Data CenterRead-only from March 28, 2029
Crowd Data CenterEnds on March 28, 2029; Atlassian names Atlassian Guard Standard as its closest cloud equivalent
Data Center mobile apps and Marketplace appsEnd with the products they serve
Bitbucket Data CenterNot ending: continues beyond 2029, with a Bitbucket Hybrid License for existing customers from early 2027
Bamboo Data CenterNot ending: continues beyond 2029, available only through the Bitbucket Hybrid License
Jira Align Data CenterNot included in the end of life
Fisheye and CrucibleServer products: no new sales since May 13, 2025, supported until May 15, 2028
CompassA cloud product, outside the end of life: sales ended May 13, 2026, and support is planned to end on December 31, 2027

Bitbucket and Bamboo are the exceptions because, Atlassian says, source code and CI/CD pipelines are mission-critical and may need to stay self-managed. Existing Bitbucket and Bamboo Data Center customers get the Bitbucket Hybrid License, one subscription covering Bitbucket Data Center, Bamboo Data Center and Bitbucket Cloud, with its AI features and Pipelines, available from early 2027. After March 28, 2029, Bamboo Data Center is available only through that licence.

Compass is the other product people ask about. Atlassian announced in April 2026 that it is phasing Compass out and delivering its core capabilities through DX Fabric, after buying DX, an engineering-intelligence company. Customers keep access until their contract ends or until Compass support ends, planned for December 31, 2027, with a month of access to both products to finish moving.

Confluence Data Center end of life

Confluence Data Center follows the same timeline as Jira: no new customers since March 30, 2026, no new subscriptions or expansions after March 30, 2028, and end of life on March 28, 2029. Confluence's own licence documentation is explicit about what follows: when the subscription expires, Confluence turns read-only, and you can view pages but not create or edit them.

Moving to Confluence Cloud. The Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant, pre-installed in newer Confluence versions, moves spaces (including personal spaces, blogs, page restrictions and trashed items), pages with their history, labels, comments and shared drafts, tasks, attachments, users and groups, and app data where the app's vendor provides a migration path. It does not move global settings and permissions, passwords (users reset them unless you use single sign-on), personal drafts, custom emojis, analytics data or audit logs. User-created macros have to be rebuilt as cloud apps, some legacy and deprecated macros do not carry over, and Team Calendars data migrates but needs Confluence Cloud Premium or Enterprise to use.

Archiving before you leave. A space exports to HTML, PDF or XML, which needs the Export Space permission. The HTML and PDF exports leave out blog posts and some comments and attachments; XML carries every page, comment and attachment. For the whole site, Atlassian recommends your database's native backup plus a copy of the home directory, where attachments are stored by default, over Confluence's own XML backup.

Plan the move as one-way. Atlassian is ending XML site and space export in Confluence Cloud on December 1, 2026, and a Data Center site restore accepts XML only, so content you move to the cloud cannot come back to Data Center that way.

If you are leaving Confluence rather than moving it to Atlassian's cloud, our Confluence migration playbook covers deciding what to move, what to archive and what to retire.

What read-only will mean

Atlassian's end-of-life FAQ says that after expiry you can still view your data but cannot add new data or perform new actions, and it states no time limit on that access. Until March 28, 2029, Atlassian keeps providing technical support, fixes for critical security vulnerabilities, and the connectors from Data Center to its cloud. After that, fixes stop, and Atlassian strongly advises against keeping a read-only instance connected to the internet, and recommends backing it up for long-term access to its history.

There is one open question. Atlassian's current article on expired Jira Data Center licences describes a softer state than the FAQ: users can still comment on and transition existing issues, administrators can still administer, and only creating new issues is blocked. Atlassian has not said which behaviour applies at end of life. Plan for the stricter reading.

Extended maintenance beyond March 28, 2029 now has a name, the Extended Maintenance Program: paid support, including fixes for critical security vulnerabilities, for customers Atlassian approves by exception. Atlassian publishes no price or criteria for it, so treat it as a contingency, not a plan.

Your options

There are two real paths: Atlassian's cloud, or another tool. Which one fits depends mostly on why you chose Data Center in the first place.

Move to Atlassian Cloud

If your team can move to the cloud, this is the least disruptive route, because the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant carries more across than any other route: projects and issues, active and archived, with attachments, comments, work logs, issue history, links and watchers; boards, sprints, versions and epics; workflows, filters, schemes and dashboards; Automation for Jira rules; and Marketplace app data where the app's vendor supports it. It does not carry users' passwords (users reset them unless you use single sign-on), global permissions, some workflow functions, custom fields that come from some apps, or a few other settings, so read Atlassian's list before you plan.

Atlassian's cloud comes in several forms:

  • Standard, Premium and Enterprise plans. Jira allows up to 100,000 users per site on paid plans, with Enterprise allowing up to 150 sites. Data residency lets you pin data to one of 11 locations, among them the EU, Germany, India, Japan, Switzerland and the United States.
  • Government Cloud. A separate environment for US government agencies and their partners, authorised at FedRAMP Moderate (which FedRAMP now calls Certification Class C), at 25% more than Cloud Enterprise.
  • Isolated Cloud. A dedicated environment that Atlassian runs for you, which Atlassian announced as generally available in June 2026. Atlassian says plainly that it does not support data sovereignty, and it leaves out Rovo AI, Bitbucket and Atlassian Analytics.

Two costs to plan for: Atlassian itself says the per-user price of cloud is higher than Data Center, and its cloud list prices rose again on October 13, 2026; and you lose direct access to the database that many Data Center teams report from, which Atlassian replaces with its own analytics tools, data lake and APIs.

Move to another tool

If you chose Data Center to keep data on your own servers, the cloud is the one thing you cannot accept, and Isolated Cloud does not change that. The self-managed options are YouTrack Server, Azure DevOps Server, GitLab Self-Managed, Plane and OpenProject, and their Jira importers differ more than their feature lists: YouTrack's brings links, attachments, custom fields, work logs and history, while GitLab's skips comments and assignees, OpenProject's is a beta its vendor recommends only for test setups, and Azure DevOps Server has no Jira importer of its own.

We rank all of them, with Jira Cloud and our own product, in the best Jira Data Center alternatives, with what each importer brings across.

If you are leaving Jira itself rather than only its Data Center edition, cloud trackers are options too, and the best Jira alternatives ranks them for product-led engineering teams.

What Atlassian offers to help you move to its cloud

  • Cloud Migration Trial. A free cloud trial that runs for the rest of your Data Center subscription (or 60 days if it has expired), for up to 20,000 users, covering Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence and Bitbucket. One Atlassian page excludes Starter licences of 10 users or fewer and Social Impact licences, so check eligibility.
  • Step-up credits. A credit for unused Data Center maintenance, applied to an annual cloud plan, for migrations of 201 or more users or 51 or more agents.
  • Dual licensing. Up to six months of Data Center at no cost while you migrate, for large Premium or Enterprise cloud purchases (for example, 1,000 or more Jira or Confluence users).
  • A first-year discount. Customers who buy Cloud Enterprise by June 2027 may be eligible for 10 to 20% off the first year.

Atlassian describes step-up credits and dual licensing as limited-time programmes, so confirm the terms before you plan around any of these.

How to get your data out of Jira Data Center

Whichever way you go, export early, while the instance is fully licensed.

CSV exports stop at 1,000 issues by default. Atlassian caps them on purpose, to protect the server's memory. To export more, raise the limits in Administration, under Advanced Settings: jira.search.views.default.max sets the default, and jira.search.views.max.limit the ceiling, which Atlassian says is safe to raise from Jira 8.2. You can then add tempMax to the export URL, export in batches with pager/start, split exports with JQL (by created date, for example), or page through the REST API with startAt and maxResults.

Choose "CSV (All fields)". It includes every field, comment and attachment reference; "CSV (Current fields)" includes only the columns on screen.

The change history is not in the CSV. Take it from the REST API (?expand=changelog on each issue) or from the data pipeline, which exports issues, custom fields, history, links and users as CSV files. Two of its settings decide whether that export is complete. It includes only data from the start date you choose, which Atlassian says is usually 12 months or less for scheduled exports, and it leaves out archived projects and archived issues by default. For an archive, set the start date back to the instance's first day and include the archived data. The data pipeline also needs a valid Data Center licence, which is the strongest reason to run it before March 28, 2029.

Attachments live in the home directory, not in the database. A complete backup needs both, and for large instances Atlassian recommends your database's native backup tools over Jira's built-in XML backup, which can be inconsistent while Jira is in use.

A plan that works back from 2029

  1. Take inventory now. Projects with activity in the last 90 days, users, Marketplace apps, integrations, custom fields and automation rules, and the version you run: Jira 11.3 and Confluence 10.2 are Atlassian's current long-term support releases, each supported for two years. Most instances hold far more history than live work.
  2. Decide where your data must live. Self-managed or cloud splits the options in half, so settle it first.
  3. Price both paths at your 2029 headcount, including apps, and remember that cloud costs more per user than Data Center.
  4. Check every Marketplace app. Does it have a cloud version and a migration path, or a native equivalent in the tool you are moving to? On the cloud side, check that it runs on Forge, because apps on the older Connect framework lose support on January 31, 2027.
  5. Export what you must keep while you are licensed: the history through the data pipeline, with its start date set back to the beginning and archived data included, and a full backup of the database and home directory.
  6. Pilot with one team, through the Cloud Migration Trial or the other tool's trial, then move the rest in waves.
  7. Finish before March 30, 2028 if you may need to grow, because Data Center expansions stop then.
  8. Retire the old instance properly: take it off the internet, keep the backup, and cancel the apps at renewal.

Where Stride fits

Stride is our product, so weigh this section accordingly. Stride runs as a hosted service, and its Enterprise plan lists private-cloud deployment through sales. If your reason for Data Center was keeping data on your own servers, Stride is not the answer, and the self-managed tools above are.

If it was not, Stride can take a Jira Data Center project directly: the import wizard reads a CSV export, up to 20,000 rows and 25 MB per import, shows a preview before anything is written, and brings across epics, stories, sub-tasks, sprints, comments, story points, issue links and dates. Attachments come across as links back to Jira, not as files, so copy any files you need before you retire the instance. The 30-day two-way sync that keeps a team working in both tools during a move works with Jira Cloud only. Single sign-on is on the Enterprise plan only.

Seven options for teams leaving Data Center, ours included, ranked by how much of your Jira comes across and where each one can run.

Compare the Jira Data Center alternatives

Sources

Atlassian's pages, checked on October 20, 2026, and on October 25 for the product list and Confluence:

Defined in our glossary
Strangler fig patternEpicStory points