Jira's free plan is the whole tracker, for ten people

Jira scores 69, at the top of our Usable band and a point short of Strong. Feature depth at 82 is the highest of any free plan in this category that you can sign up for today, beaten only by OpenProject's self-hosted Community Edition at 86. Scrum and kanban boards, backlogs, customisable workflows, agile reports and the Atlassian Marketplace, none of it held back.

Generosity at 72 reflects the hard 10-user ceiling, which is the highest hosted seat cap here even so, and 2GB of storage, which is over thirty times ClickUp's 60MB. The pillar that keeps the total under 70 is user sentiment at 52, and we should be honest that this is thin evidence rather than a judgement: we hold one rating, Capterra 4.4 from 24 July 2026, and nothing at all from people living specifically on the free tier. Jira's reputation problem is about admin overhead on the paid product, which is a different question.

The seat cap is the one that ends the arrangement: 10 users, and the eleventh means Standard at about $7.91 per user per month billed annually (as of July 2026). Ten is generous by this category's standards, five times what a new Asana account gets, but it is a hard number rather than a soft one.

The rest of the free limits are mild:

• 2GB of storage, which is not a constraint for issue tracking with the occasional attachment
• 100 automation rule runs a month, an order of magnitude below Trello's 250 and enough for a handful of simple rules
• Community support only, so there is nobody to escalate to

The clause worth knowing is different in kind. Atlassian states it may deactivate inactive free sites, which means a dormant project is not guaranteed to still be sitting there when you come back to it. Export anything you would miss.

The real cost of free Jira is not on this list, and we would rather say it than pretend. Jira asks for configuration work that ClickUp, Linear and Plane do not, and on a 10-person team that work usually lands on somebody who did not ask for it. People leave Jira over that, not over the bill.

Standard runs about $7.91 per user per month billed annually (roughly $8.15 monthly) and buys 250GB of storage, audit logs, and user roles and permissions. That is an administration and compliance upgrade rather than a capability one, which is the tell: the free plan already has the tracker, so what you pay for is running it at size.

Premium at about $14.54 per user adds advanced planning, unlimited storage and 24/7 support. Advanced planning is the closest thing Jira has to a portfolio-level Gantt view, and it is a long way up the ladder.

One quirk to plan around: Atlassian prices per exact user count through a calculator, so the per-user rate shifts with team size rather than sitting at a flat number. Budget from a quote, not from this paragraph. The trigger for almost every upgrade is the eleventh person, not a feature, which makes the cost of growth easy to forecast: crossing from 10 to 11 users takes you from nothing to roughly $87 a month at the annual rate.

Yes. A score of 69 would normally point at a with-limits answer, and we are going above it because nothing here counts down: the free plan is the full tracker, the ceiling is team size at 10, and a team of ten can run scrum on it indefinitely without a card on file. That is a different proposition from a plan that meters your work.

Who genuinely pays nothing: a 6-person engineering team running two-week sprints with backlogs and agile reports, a startup that needs enforceable workflows and permissions, an open source project tracking its issues properly. Who cannot: any team past ten, since the cap is hard, and anyone who needs advanced planning or more than 100 automation runs a month. Add one caveat for everyone, which is that free sites can be deactivated if they go inactive.

The honest closing advice is unusual for this site: if you are under ten people and Jira works for you, switching saves you complexity, not money. If the complexity is the problem, free Jira alternatives ranks the lighter options, and Plane's free plan is the closest structural match with far less to configure. The full category is at best free project management tools.