A Community-driven solution for your Jira exit: The OpenProject Jira importer

Achtung

Atlassian hat angekündigt, dass das Jira Data Center am 28. März 2029 ausläuft. Nach diesem Datum laufen die Data Center-Lizenzen und Anwendungen aus und werden schreibgeschützt, sodass Cloud-Hosting die einzige unterstützte Option bleibt.

Teams auf der ganzen Welt schauen sich nach Alternativen zu Jira um, sei es aufgrund von veränderten Projektanforderungen, dem Wunsch nach Open Source Lösungen oder steigenden Kosten. Doch ein Wechsel der Plattform ist oft leichter gesagt als getan – vor allem, wenn keine passende Lösung für eine nahtlose Migration zur Verfügung steht. This is where the strength of open source and Community-driven development comes into play. A developer recently faced this exact challenge — needing to migrate from Jira to OpenProject but finding no suitable tool. Instead of giving up, he developed his own open source Jira migration tool using the OpenProject API and made it available to others – helping not only himself but the entire open source Community.

“Since I’m a developer, and to a hammer, everything is a nail — I wrote my own migration script.”
Emad Ibrahim, developer of the OpenProject Jira importer

Die Herausforderung: Migration von Jira nach OpenProject

Für viele Teams ist Jira seit langem das Projektmanagement-Tool der Wahl. Oftmals einfach aus Gewohnheit oder weil die Zeit fehlt, um noch einmal von vorne anzufangen. Doch Atlassian hebt die Preise weiter an und bindet Nutzer:innen an sein Cloud-Angebot. Vor allem aus diesen Gründen überdenken immer mehr Unternehmen ihre Optionen und suchen nach kostengünstigen Open Source Alternativen, die vertrauenswürdig und funktionsreich sind.

Der Wechsel von Jira zu OpenProject ist jedoch mit Herausforderungen verbunden:

• Zeitmangel – Teams haben oft nicht die Ressourcen, um ihre Projekte manuell zu migrieren.
• Technische Komplexität – ein Migrationstool muss in der Lage sein, Probleme, Arbeitsprotokolle und benutzerdefinierte Felder zu bearbeiten.
• Lack of ready-made solutions – until now, there was no open source Jira to OpenProject migration tool.

A member of the open source Community developed a solution

In the face of these challenges, a member of the open source Community who wanted to migrate from Jira to OpenProject took action: Developer Emad Ibrahim created his own Python-based migration script to streamline the process – and, in the true spirit of open source, made it available to others. He shared his experience on Hacker News, explaining:

“Migrating thousands of JIRA tasks (projects, comments, attachments, etc.) was a challenge. OpenProject provided an Excel Macro written in Visual Basic, which didn’t work for me. So, I wrote a Python script to automate the migration. In a few hours, I had all our data moved over, and we’ve been happily using OpenProject ever since.”

The open source community quickly took notice of this post. Users quickly recognized the value of this migration tool and expressed their appreciation:

• “This is awesome. JIRA migrations are a massive headache, and the fact that you are providing a working solution as open-source software is solid.”
• “Perfect for people who want to ditch proprietary tools.”
• “I have been thinking about using a tool other than Jira for so long, but since you have already shared your experience, I could use your script and switch to OpenProject.”

[Source: Comments on this reddit post]

This positive response highlights how challenges can be solved together when developers share their solutions and open source them. 💙

OpenProject unterstützt Sie bei der Suche nach passenden Migrationslösungen

Wir bei OpenProject möchten Lösungen entwickeln, welche die Migration erleichtern. Viele Teams möchten wechseln, haben aber nicht die Zeit oder die technischen Ressourcen dazu. This Community-developed migration tool is a step in the right direction and helps lower the hurdle for those looking to migrate.

Tipp

This story also reminds us of another recent Community success: The GitLab integration for OpenProject. Similar to this migration tool, the GitLab integration also started as a Community initiative before becoming an official OpenProject integration.

Thanks a lot to Emad Ibrahim for open-sourcing your development and helping others migrate, too! It’s really great to see success stories like this in our open source Community and we are very happy to be a part of it.

If you want to use the OpenProject Jira importer, you can find it here on GitHub. Please note that even though we really appreciate this tool, it is a Community-developed tool and not part of the official OpenProject offer, so we cannot provide support related to using it. If you are interested in other OpenProject Community-developed plugins as well as official integrations, see this list in our documentation.