Atlassian splits up JIRA, launches JIRA Software and JIRA Core

Atlassian, the company behind software like HipChat, JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket, is today announcing that it’s breaking the JIRA issue and project tracking software into two separate products. The new JIRA Software will be intended for software development teams, while JIRA Core brings a similar interface for non-technical users who work in areas like finance, human resources, and marketing.

The news comes a couple of years after Atlassian created the standalone JIRA Service Desk product for IT and business service teams. The thinking behind that product was to come out with something that matched the way some customers were actually using JIRA, with purpose-built features and a dedicated service-level agreement (SLA).

The creation of JIRA Software and JIRA Core is similar. JIRA Core is designed to help users get going fast, without all of the complex tooling inside of JIRA Software.

“JIRA is being pulled into so many different parts of the organization and so this is really a response, to make it simpler and more accessible for all those different teams inside of companies that are already using JIRA, to adopt it for things they would want to use it for,” Atlassian president Jay Simons told VentureBeat in an interview.

Of course, non-technical teams within companies can use other tools to keep on top of their projects, including Asana and Trello, while groups of programmers can track issues and work in GitHub and Microsoft Team Foundation Server, or open-source MantisBT or Trac. But Atlassian provides several common elements across all three of its JIRA products.

Atlassian first released JIRA in 2002 as an issue and bug tracker. At the time, it faced competition from Fog Creek Software’s FogBugz. JIRA has since become a fixture not only inside of companies, but also at the core of open-source software projects. Now more than 35,000 organizations use JIRA.

Based in Sydney, Atlassian has been profitable for many years and is backed by Accel Growth. The company is said to have filed confidentially for an initial public offering. Simons declined to comment.

Both JIRA Software and JIRA Core cost $10 a month, according to a statement.