Atlassian launches free tiers for all its cloud products, extends premium pricing plan

At our TC Sessions: Enterprise event, Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar today announced a number of updates to how the company will sell its cloud-based services. These include the launch of new premium plans for more of its products, as well as the addition of a free tier for all of the company’s services that didn’t already offer one. Atlassian now also offers discounted cloud pricing for academic institutions and nonprofit organizations.

The company previously announced its premium plans for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud. Now, it is adding Jira Service Desk to this lineup, and chances are it’ll add more of its services over time. The premium plan adds a 99.9% update SLA, unlimited storage and additional support. Until now, Atlassian sold these products solely based on the number of users, but didn’t offer a specific enterprise plan.

As Harsh Jawharkar, the head of go-to-market for Cloud Platform at Atlassian, told me, many of its larger customers, who often ran the company’s products on their own servers before, are now looking to move to the cloud and hand over to Atlassian the day-to-day operations of these services. That’s in part because they are more comfortable with the idea of moving to the cloud at this point — and because Atlassian probably knows how to run its own services better than anybody else. 

For these companies, Atlassian is also introducing a number of new features today. Those include soon-to-launch data residency controls for companies that need to ensure that their data stays in a certain geographic region, as well as the ability to run Jira and Confluence Cloud behind customized URLs that align with a company’s brand, which will launch in early access in 2020. Maybe more important, though, are features to Atlassian Access, the company’s command center that helps enterprises manage its cloud products. Access now supports single sign-on with Google Cloud Identity and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, for example. The company is also partnering with McAfee and Bitglass to offer additional advanced security features and launch a cross-product audit log. Enterprise admins will also soon get access to a new dashboard that will help them understand how Atlassian’s tools are being used across the organization.

But that’s not all. The company is also launching new tools to make customer migration to its cloud products easier, with initial support for Confluence and Jira support coming later this year. There’s also new extended cloud trial licenses, which a lot of customers have asked for, Jawharkar told me, because the relatively short trial periods the company previously offered weren’t quite long enough for companies to fully understand their needs.

This is a big slew of updates for Atlassian — maybe its biggest enterprise-centric release since the company’s launch. It has clearly reached a point where it had to start offering these enterprise features if it wanted to grow its market and bring more of these large companies on board. In its early days, Atlassian mostly grew by selling directly to teams within a company. These days, it has to focus a bit more on selling to executives as it tries to bring more enterprises on board — and those companies have very specific needs that the company didn’t have to address before. Today’s launches clearly show that it is now doing so — at least for its cloud-based products.

The company isn’t forgetting about other users either, though. It’ll still offer entry-level plans for smaller teams and it’s now adding free tiers to products like Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core. They’ll join Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie, which already feature free versions. Going forward, academic institutions will receive 50% off their cloud subscriptions and nonprofits will receive 75% off.

It’s obvious that Atlassian is putting a lot of emphasis on its cloud services. It’s not doing away with its self-hosted products anytime, but its focus is clearly elsewhere. The company itself started this process a few years ago and a lot of this work is now coming to fruition. As Anu Bharadwaj, the head of Cloud Platform at Atlassian, told me, this move to a fully cloud-native stack enabled many of today’s announcements, and she expects that it’ll bring a lot of new customers to its cloud-based services.