Jira vs Monday.com: Software Tracker or Work OS? Prices, Limits and When to Switch

Jira vs Monday.com at a glance

Jira Cloud is free for up to 10 users, then billed per user at a rate that depends on team size: $9.70 a user a month on Standard for a 15-person team, billed monthly. monday dev, monday's product for software teams, has no free plan and starts at $9 a seat a month billed annually, with a 3-seat minimum. Checked 21 October 2026.

Every row comes from the vendors' own pricing pages and help centers, in USD. Jira here means Jira Cloud. On the monday side we compare monday dev, the product monday sells against Jira, and show monday work management where its prices differ. We don't use either vendor's comparison page as a source about the rival; what those get wrong is in the last section.

Is Monday.com a real alternative to Jira?

For cross-functional work, yes. For an engineering team that lives in sprints, only partly. monday dev has sprints and a two-way GitHub sync from its Standard plan, and epics, subtasks and agile reporting on Pro. But it has no importer for Jira Cloud, while Jira imports monday boards directly. Checked 21 October 2026.

Jira starts from the work item. Each item has a type, moves through statuses along a workflow, and sits in a space. Atlassian doesn't pitch it as a developer-only tool: the menu lists marketing, engineering, design, operations and IT, and the comparison page says it's "built for every team". In our own work it's strongest where a software team ships in sprints.

monday dev starts from the board: rows are items with columns, plus sprints, a backlog, releases and story points. monday's FAQ says it is "adopted as a full replacement" for legacy issue tools. Read the migration section below before you count on that.

monday work management, sold "for projects & tasks", has no sprints. When someone asks for monday, check which product they mean.

Our position is on our own Monday.com implementation page: sprint-level dev tooling belongs in Jira or Linear, not Monday. Where monday wins is everything around the engineers: content, marketing, operations, client delivery, and the roadmap other teams need to see.

How much do Jira and Monday.com cost?

For 15 people, Jira Standard is $9.70 per user a month billed monthly, or $1,450 a year billed annually. monday dev Basic is $12 a seat billed monthly, $9 billed annually. Jira's per-user price depends on the team size you enter: at 300 users the same page shows $8.48. Both pricing pages read on 21 October 2026.

The $8.48 Standard and $15.56 Premium prices you see first are the page's default of 300 users. AI answers, and monday's comparison blog, quote a single Jira price without saying which team size it belongs to. The table below uses 15 users.

Annual Jira billing isn't per user at all. It's a flat price for a user tier: "we'll charge you for the tier that most closely matches your user count". For 11 to 15 users that's $1,450 a year on Standard and $2,950 on Premium. Jira Enterprise is sold only on annual plans, from 801 users.

monday dev and monday work management share their Basic prices but not the rest: Standard is $14.50 vs $14 billed monthly, and Pro is $25 vs $24 billed monthly ($20 vs $19 billed annually). monday's plans "start from 3 users", and its prices "do not include tax". Atlassian's pricing page doesn't mention tax.

The tiers don't line up one to one, so the table pairs them by their place in each price list. That pairing is ours, not either vendor's.

Sources: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing and https://monday.com/pricing, both read on 21 October 2026.

What does a 15-person team pay in a year?

Jira costs less for 15 people at every pairing we checked. On the plans a team that needs sprints and automations would compare, Jira Standard is $1,450 a year and monday dev Standard is $2,160, both billed annually. This is our arithmetic at list price, before tax, Marketplace apps, AI credits and setup work, with prices checked on 21 October 2026.

Why 15: monday sells seats in fixed sizes and 15 is one of them, so a 12-person team pays for 15. Jira bills monthly plans by exact user count and annual plans by tier, and 11 to 15 is one tier. Neither free plan fits: Jira Free stops at 10 users, monday work management Free at 2 seats.

Which monday plan to compare matters more than the price per seat. monday Basic lists no automations and no Jira integration, and monday dev puts sprints on Standard. So the fair match for Jira Standard is monday Standard, not Basic.

Neither price list covers the setup. What that work costs is broken down in what an AI automation agency costs.

Is Jira end of life? What actually ended

No, Jira Cloud has no end date. What ended is self-hosting. Atlassian stopped supporting Jira Server on 15 February 2024. Jira Data Center stopped selling to new customers on 30 March 2026, and on 28 March 2029 Data Center subscriptions expire and the product turns read-only. These dates are from atlassian.com, read on 21 October 2026.

Server: "As of February 15, 2024 PT, Server products are no longer supported. Support and bug fixes are no longer available".

Data Center: existing customers can keep buying subscriptions and apps until 30 March 2028. On 28 March 2029 the subscriptions expire, "making Data Center products and apps read-only", with extensions "by exception only". This covers Jira Software and Jira Service Management Data Center.

That deadline is often what starts the comparison. If self-hosted Jira has to move anyway, the question becomes which cloud tool.

Automations: run limits on each plan

Jira gives automation steps per user and pools them across your organization: 400 a user a month on Standard, 750 on Premium. monday gives actions per account, whatever the seat count: none on Basic, 250 on Standard, 25,000 on Pro. For 15 people that's 6,000 Jira steps against 250 monday actions on Standard. Checked 21 October 2026.

Jira Free gets 150 steps a month for the whole subscription, Enterprise 1,000 per user. A step is any executed part of a flow, "including triggers, conditions, actions, branches, and loops", and a trigger that finds nothing to act on still costs one. Atlassian no longer counts rule runs, so an article quoting "rule runs per month" for Jira Cloud is out of date.

Going over: from 3 December 2026, extra Jira usage is billed at $0.50 per 1,000 steps. With extra usage turned off, flows stop at 100% until the allowance resets.

monday meters automations and integrations separately: 250 of each a month on Standard, 25,000 on Pro, 250,000 combined on Enterprise. Adding seats doesn't raise the quota. One automation can use several actions: creating an item with Status, People or Dropdown columns mapped uses one per column plus one for the item.

Steps and actions are different units, so don't divide one by the other. But note that a monday Standard account syncing with Jira spends its 250 monthly integration actions on that sync.

When a workflow outgrows the quota, or has to reach a system neither tool connects to, an external tool like Make, n8n or Zapier can take it over and bill on its own terms. We compare those three in Make vs n8n vs Zapier.

Can you connect Jira and Monday.com instead of choosing?

Yes. monday's Jira Cloud integration syncs issues into monday, into Jira, or both ways, chosen field by field, including status, assignee, sprint and story points. It only picks up issues created or changed after setup, and Jira lets it update 100 to 150 issues every 5 minutes. On monday dev it's listed from the Standard plan. Checked 21 October 2026.

Setup runs on OAuth and needs no Jira admin, but "only the individual who connected their Jira account with monday.com can edit the recipe(s)". Connect it from a shared team account, not one engineer's login.

From Jira, monday can pull status, priority, assignee, labels, sprint dates, story points, epic, fix version and time spent. monday's Formula, Timeline, Tags and Mirror columns don't go back to Jira, and status changes still follow Jira's workflow rules.

A newer Jira Cloud Two-way sync app is in beta. It polls every 3 minutes, doesn't sync Jira comments or deletions, and maps Jira sub-tasks to monday items rather than subitems. Its help page names no plan.

For Jira Server and Data Center, monday lists separate apps, which we didn't check. If you need something the native options don't do, the usual route is an automation tool such as Make, n8n or Zapier. Somebody on your side then owns that workflow.

Moving from Jira to Monday.com: what moves and what doesn't

monday has no one-click importer for Jira Cloud. Its Jira Server importer is Enterprise-only and marked for deprecation. In practice the move runs through the Jira integration: issues come over as they're touched, about 100 to 150 every 5 minutes. The reverse is easier: Jira imports a monday board directly. Checked on both help centers on 21 October 2026.

monday's own help center says: "While there is no direct way to import data from Jira into monday.com, starting a recipe will trigger an import." Because the integration doesn't work retroactively, old issues only come over once they change in Jira. monday's migration guide for monday dev (Standard plan and up) works around that: add a "migration" label, then go project by project and bulk-edit about 100 items at a time to trigger the sync. The guide is written for the Server and Data Center integration. How it applies to Jira Cloud, it doesn't say.

The older Jira Server importer is "Available on the Enterprise plan only" and "will be deprecated in the near future". It needs Jira Global Admin credentials and brings fields such as status, priority, story points and time spent into matching columns. Components become separate items, subitems aren't used, and team-managed projects aren't supported. Assignees map only when the email matches in both tools. Comments, attachments and history aren't on its supported list.

Going the other way, Jira's monday importer takes a board in one pass. Groups become a status, epic or category, items become work items and subitems become subtasks. Files come in as attachments, and dependencies become work item links. Formula, Mirror, Board relation and a few other columns don't come across.

Our view from migration work: whichever direction you move, the workflows, permissions and automations get rebuilt by hand. Neither vendor's import docs list them. We've written up what breaks in a data migration from our own projects.

Jira Service Management and monday service are separate help-desk products with their own prices. We haven't compared them here.

Jira or Monday.com: which one to choose

Choose Jira if a software team runs sprints and releases in it, and Monday.com if the work is shared across content, marketing, operations or clients. If you run both kinds of team, keep Jira for the engineers and connect it to monday rather than forcing one tool on everyone.

• Choose Jira if your engineers plan in sprints and releases, and the rest of the company doesn't need to work in the same tool. For 15 users, Standard is $1,450 a year billed annually.
• Choose monday work management if the team is marketing, content, operations or client delivery and doesn't run sprints.
• Choose monday dev if you want developers and the rest of the company on one platform, and you've read the migration limits above.
• Up to 10 people? Jira Free covers you. monday dev has no free plan, and monday work management's free plan stops at 2 seats.
• Heavy automation? Jira Standard gives 400 steps per user a month, pooled. monday Standard gives 250 actions per account, so a busy team ends up on Pro.
• Still on Jira Server or Data Center? Server lost support in February 2024 and Data Center turns read-only in March 2029, so you're choosing a cloud tool either way.

What the vendors' own comparison pages get wrong

Both vendors' comparison pages misstate the other's product. Atlassian's says monday has no comprehensive agile reporting, but monday dev lists agile reporting on Pro. monday's blog says you can "seamlessly and instantly migrate" from Jira, which monday's own help center contradicts. We checked every claim on 21 October 2026 against the other vendor's pricing and help pages.

The pages: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison/jira-vs-monday and https://monday.com/blog/rnd/monday-com-vs-jira/ (marked "Updated on May 20, 2025"). Each claim sits next to what the other vendor's own page says.

• Atlassian's table gives monday no check for "Comprehensive agile reporting". monday dev's pricing page lists "Agile reporting" on Pro and Enterprise. It's true only for monday work management.
• Atlassian's page says monday has "200+ apps and integrations". monday's integrations page says "850+ integrations and apps". monday's own blog still says 200, so monday contradicts itself too.
• Atlassian's page prices Jira Premium at "$17 per user / month", with a footnote that it may be lower depending on team size. Its own pricing page shows $19.60 for 15 users billed monthly, $15.56 for 300 users, and $2,950 a year for 11 to 15 users. We couldn't reproduce $17 at either size.
• monday's blog says Jira Standard starts at "$7.53/user/month" and Premium at "$13.53". Atlassian's pricing page shows $9.70 and $19.60 for 15 users, $8.48 and $15.56 for 300, billed monthly.
• monday's blog says Jira has "Limited AI functionality" and needs third-party apps "for most automation". Atlassian's pricing page includes Rovo Search, Chat and Agents on every paid plan, and automation steps on every plan, Free included.
• monday's blog says you may need to buy Advanced Roadmaps as an add-on. Jira Premium includes cross-team planning ("Advanced planning") in the plan.
• AI answers add their own Jira prices. Asked on 21 October 2026 whether Jira or Monday.com is cheaper for 15 people, ChatGPT (through its API) and Perplexity both priced Jira Standard at $7.91 a user, or $118.65 a month. Atlassian's page gives $9.70, which is $145.50 a month, or $1,450 a year on annual billing.

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