Your Jira exit solution: The OpenProject Jira Migrator

Caution

Atlassian has announced that Jira Data Center will reach end of life on March 28, 2029. After this date, Data Center licenses and apps will expire and become read-only, leaving cloud hosting as the only supported option.

Teams around the world are looking for alternatives to Jira, whether due to changing project requirements, a preference for open source solutions or rising costs. However, switching tools is often easier said than done – especially if a seamless migration solution is not readily available. We at OpenProject are currently developing a Jira migration tool to meet this need.

Note

Update Mai 2026: With version 17.4 in Mai 2026, the Jira Migrator has been released in Beta – meaning it is ready to be tested by users, but will still be updated in the following releases.

The challenge: Migrating from Jira to OpenProject

For many teams, Jira has long been the project management tool of choice. In many cases, simply out of habit and a lack of time to start over. Especially since Atlassian continues to raise prices and “lock-in” users into their cloud offering, more and more organizations are rethinking their options and looking for cost-effective open source alternatives that are trustworthy and feature-rich.

However, switching from Jira to OpenProject presents challenges:

• Time constraints – teams often don’t have the resources to manually migrate their projects.
• Technical complexity – a migration tool must be able to handle issues, work logs and custom fields.
• Lack of ready-made solutions – until now, there was no specific importer tool that guides the user through a migration process.

The solution: The Jira Migrator, official migration wizard from OpenProject

In current beta version, the Jira Migrator is able to import the following basic data:

• Projects
• Issues
• Issue description, history, comments and attachments
• Involved users and groups (name, email, project membership)
• Statuses
• Types
• A subset of custom fields

Coming soon:

• Project identifiers
• Issues identifiers
• Relations between issues
• Sprint assignments

Planned for later:

• Project-level workflows
• Permissions
• Schemas

Currently, we only support Jira Server/Data Center versions 10.x and 11.x. Cloud instances are not supported at this time.

See our documentation to learn how to experiment with the Jira Migrator in beta version. You might also take a look at our best practices for Jira migrations.

Watch this video to learn how the OpenProject Jira Migrator will support teams in their Jira exit:

We at OpenProject want to help finding migration solutions

At OpenProject, we want to support solutions that make migration easier. Many teams want to make the switch but don’t have the time or technical skills to do so. Which is why, in the past months, the OpenProject core team was quite busy working on a Jira Migrator.

To support the development of the official migration tool, we are collecting anonymized data samples. This data helps test and validate import capabilities across different Jira and Confluence configurations. Please reach out to us if you want to donate your data, we will sign an NDA to ensure confidentiality.