Jira's free plan: what ten users get and what stays locked
Jira's free plan is unusually generous, which is why the way it ends catches people by surprise. Ten users, unlimited projects, and every view including timeline and calendar are all there at no cost. Nothing about the first few months feels constrained. Then a contractor needs access to one project and not the others, or an automation rule stops firing halfway through the month, and it becomes clear that the limits were never about volume.
This is worth mapping properly, because the free tier is a legitimate long term option for some teams and a trap for others. The difference comes down to three things that are not obvious from the feature list. The figures below come from Atlassian's Jira pricing page as published in September 2026.
What the free plan includes
Jira Free is described as free forever for up to ten users on a single site. What is included is close to the full product:
- Unlimited goals, projects, work items and forms
- Backlog, list, board, timeline, calendar and summary views
- Reports and dashboards
- Customizable workflows and custom fields
- Templates
- Apps and integrations from the Marketplace
- iOS and Android apps
- 2 GB of file storage
- 150 automation steps per subscription per month
- Support from the Atlassian Community
Two items on that list deserve attention. The timeline view, which is what most people mean when they say Gantt chart, is on the free tier. So are customizable workflows, which is the feature Jira is actually known for. Neither is held back, and that is not the norm among project tools of this size.
Where it differs from most free tiers
Plenty of tools give away unlimited tasks and then charge for the schedule view. Jira does the opposite. It gives away the planning views and the workflow engine, and charges for the administrative layer around them: who can see what, how much automation runs, how much can be stored, and who answers the phone when something breaks.
That design decision is what makes the free plan viable for a single team working on shared, non sensitive projects, and unworkable for almost anything else.
The three limits that actually end the free plan
Permissions
This is the one that surprises people. Atlassian lists user roles and permissions among the things the Standard plan adds on top of Free. On the free tier there is no meaningful way to give one person access to one project and not another.
For a five person in house team this is irrelevant. Everyone should see everything anyway. The moment a client, a contractor or a second department is involved, it stops being irrelevant. Anyone invited to the site can see the whole site. The usual workaround, creating a separate free site for the outside party, breaks down quickly because free is limited to one site per plan and the work then lives in two places.
External collaboration is also listed as something Standard adds. A team whose work routinely involves people outside the organization will run into this long before it runs into the user cap.
Automation
Free includes 150 automation steps per subscription per month. Note the unit carefully. It is per subscription, not per user. Standard moves to 400 steps per user per month, which for a ten person team is 4,000 steps rather than 150.
One rule that fires on every status change in a moderately busy project can consume 150 steps in a few days. When the budget runs out, rules stop running until the month resets, which produces the confusing situation where an automation that worked last week does nothing this week and reports no error to the person who relied on it.
Storage and support
2 GB of file storage sounds like a lot until designs, recordings or exports start being attached to work items. Standard raises this to 250 GB, and Premium removes the cap. Free also has 100 email notifications per day for the whole site, which a busy week can exceed.
Support on Free comes from the Atlassian Community, meaning other users. Standard adds 9 hours a day, 5 days a week regional support from Atlassian. Premium adds 24/7 support for critical issues and a 99.9 percent uptime commitment. For a team whose delivery depends on the tool being up, that difference is the product, not an extra.
What each step up costs and adds
| Free | Standard | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listed price | $0 | $7.91 per user per month | $14.54 per user per month |
| Users per site | 10 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| Sites | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Storage | 2 GB | 250 GB | Unlimited |
| Automation | 150 steps per subscription per month | 400 steps per user per month | 750 steps per user per month |
| Email notifications | 100 per day | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| User roles and permissions | Not included | Included | Included |
| External collaboration | Not included | Included | Included |
| Dependency management | Single project | Single project | Cross project |
| Support | Community | 9/5 regional | 24/7 for critical issues |
| Uptime SLA | None | None | 99.9 percent |
Atlassian recalculates the per user figure as the team size selector on its pricing page changes, and it shows the price in the currency of the billing country, so the exact number on an invoice may differ from the figures above. The shape of the jump is what matters: Standard roughly doubles the automation available per person and multiplies storage by more than a hundred, and Premium buys cross project planning and a support commitment.
The AI line
Rovo, Atlassian's AI layer, is not on the free tier at all. Standard includes 25 Rovo credits per user per month and 100 indexed objects per user, Premium 70 credits and 250 objects, Enterprise 150 credits and 625 objects. Teams evaluating whether AI features change how they work cannot do that evaluation on Free.
The single site constraint
Free and Standard both include one site. Enterprise allows up to 150. A site is the whole Jira instance, so everything on it shares one set of users, one set of projects and one storage budget.
For a small team this is invisible. It becomes visible the moment someone tries to solve the permission problem by separating work. On a paid plan with permission schemes, separation happens inside one site by controlling access per project. On the free plan the only available separation is a second site, which means a second login, a second set of automation budgets, and no way to see both halves of the work in one board or one report. Teams that go down this route usually end up consolidating within a few months, having lost the history that accumulated in whichever site they abandon.
Who the free plan genuinely fits
Three profiles get real, long term value from Jira Free without ever paying:
A single engineering team of up to ten, working in the open. Everyone sees everything, work is internal, and the automation needs are light. This is the case the free tier was designed for and it holds up for years.
A solo developer or a pair running side projects. Unlimited projects on one site, full workflow customization, no expiry.
A team evaluating Jira properly before committing. Because the planning views and workflows are all present, the evaluation is real rather than a demo. Only the administrative layer is missing, and that layer is easier to reason about than a feature you have never seen.
The profiles it does not fit are equally clear. Any team that needs to keep one project separate from another, any team that works with clients or contractors inside the tool, and any team whose automations carry real operational weight will hit a wall that no amount of tidy usage can avoid.
How this compares with other free tiers
Free plans differ mostly in which axis they restrict. Putting the common ones side by side makes the trade visible.
| Tool | People on the free plan | What the free plan restricts most |
|---|---|---|
| Jira Free | 10 users | Permissions, 2GB storage, 150 automation steps per month for the whole site |
| Trello Free | 10 collaborators per Workspace | 10 boards per Workspace, calendar and timeline views are paid |
| Asana Personal | 2 users | Timeline and Gantt views, custom fields, forms all paid |
| ClickUp Free Forever | Unlimited members | 60MB file storage, 5 Spaces |
| Zoho Projects Free | 5 users | 3 projects, 5GB storage |
| monday.com Free | 2 seats | 3 boards, timeline and Gantt views are paid |
Jira and Trello are the two that allow ten people. Trello restricts the views and the board count instead. Asana and monday.com cap at two people, which makes their free tiers personal rather than team tools. ClickUp allows unlimited members and restricts storage severely.
For a small team, the honest question is not which free plan has the longest feature list. It is which restriction the team will hit first, and whether hitting it means paying a small amount or restructuring how the team works. A tool whose free tier includes the schedule views, chat and permissions and only counts people and boards removes the second kind of surprise, which is the expensive one. The feature list and the pricing page are the places to check that on any candidate, and the side by side comparisons cover how the common tools draw the line.
Practical ways to stay inside the free plan longer
If the intention is to stay free for as long as the work allows, three habits extend the runway:
Attach links, not files. Storing designs and recordings in a drive and linking to them from the work item keeps the 2 GB budget for things that genuinely belong in Jira.
Audit automation rules monthly. Rules that fire on every transition consume steps fast. Rules that fire on a schedule or on a specific status consume very few. The audit log in the automation section shows which rules are eating the budget.
Keep outside collaborators outside. A shared document with an exported status is not elegant, but it is better than inviting a contractor to a site with no permission controls and discovering later what they could see.
None of these fix the permission gap. They buy time.
Counting to ten honestly
The ten user cap counts accounts, not activity. A former colleague who left three months ago and a stakeholder who logged in twice both occupy a place. Before assuming the cap has been reached, it is worth opening the user list and removing accounts that are no longer active, because a surprising proportion of teams that believe they have outgrown the free plan are carrying two or three dormant accounts.
The related question is whether everyone currently invited needs to be. A person who only wants to know when something ships does not need a seat on any plan, free or paid. Deciding this deliberately, rather than inviting everyone who asks, is what keeps a small team inside a free tier for years rather than months.
What to change first
Work out which of the three limits is closest: the ten user cap, the permission gap, or the automation budget. If it is the user cap and everyone genuinely needs full access, Standard is a modest step. If it is the permission gap, compare Standard against tools where per project access and a Gantt view come without a per user charge at small sizes, such as Pinateca, before renewing.
Q1. How many users can Jira's free plan have?
Ten users on a single site. Atlassian lists the free plan as free forever for up to ten users, with one site included. Standard raises the cap to 100,000 users per site.
Q2. Does Jira's free plan include Gantt charts?
Yes, in the form of the timeline view. Backlog, list, board, timeline, calendar and summary views are all listed on the free plan. What the free plan lacks is cross project dependency management, which starts on Premium.
Q3. Why did a Jira automation rule stop working mid month?
The free plan includes 150 automation steps per subscription per month, counted across the whole site rather than per user. Once that budget is used, rules stop executing until the next month. Standard provides 400 steps per user per month.
Q4. Can outside contractors be given access to only one Jira project on the free plan?
Not reliably. Atlassian lists user roles and permissions, and external collaboration, among the features the Standard plan adds on top of Free. On the free tier, people invited to the site can see the site.
Q5. Does Jira's free plan expire after a trial period?
No. It is described as free forever for up to ten users. The constraints are on people, storage, automation volume, permissions and support, not on time.
