Atlassian is renaming Jira Projects to Jira Spaces across Jira Cloud, a purely naming change that leaves your data and workflows unaffected. The term "project" now refers to Atlassian Projects, formerly known as Atlas, a high-level tracking hub in Atlassian Home that shows initiative progress across multiple teams and tools.
Atlassian is once again updating its terminology and introducing a new concept to the Cloud platform. Jira Projects are being renamed to Jira Spaces across Jira Cloud products, and at the same time Atlassian Projects is emerging as a new high-level project tracking tool. If that sounds a bit confusing, don’t worry. In this post, we’ll break down exactly what’s changing, what isn’t, and why it matters for your team.
The term "Jira Project" is being phased out in favor of "Jira Space". This change is already rolling out gradually and is expected to complete by the end of 2025. In practical terms, what we used to call a Jira project is simply being renamed a Jira space. It still contains the same issues such as tasks, user stories, and bugs as before. Only the label is changing in the Jira interface.
The good news is that this is purely a naming change. None of your data or workflows will be affected. All your issues, fields, and configurations remain exactly the same inside each space. Jira Query Language, commonly known as JQL, and even your automation rules will continue to accept the term “project” as they always have, so your saved filters and scripts won’t break. Atlassian has indicated that “project” will remain supported behind the scenes for the foreseeable future, and that eventually “space” will be recognized in places like JQL searches as well for consistency. Essentially, Atlassian is just changing the wording to call the container what it is: a space to work, and reserving the term “project” for an entirely different use.
Why the new name? Atlassian wants to align Jira with the rest of its product family and reduce confusion. In Confluence you have Spaces for knowledge content; now in Jira you’ll have Spaces for issue tracking. More importantly, this change clearly separates the everyday work container in Jira from the newly introduced Atlassian Project concept at the portfolio level.
Alongside the Jira Spaces update, Atlassian has launched Atlassian Projects as a platform-wide project overview hub. Think of Atlassian Projects as an executive’s dashboard for major initiatives. It lives in Atlassian Home, Atlassian’s central hub where cross-product features like Goals reside, and it provides a bird’s-eye view of work across multiple teams and tools.
Key features of Atlassian Projects include:
Cross-Tool Visibility: Connects work from various Atlassian apps, such as Jira issues and Confluence pages, into one unified project status view.
High-Level Tracking: Lets you monitor stakeholders, project ownership, timelines, and overall health for each initiative. It’s designed to answer the question, “How are we doing on this project across the organization?”
Consistent Updates: Team members can post progress updates that roll up into the project’s status, ensuring everyone from individual contributors to C-level executives stays informed.
Admin Control & Permissions: Administrators can manage who has access to create or view Atlassian Projects, maintaining governance over these high-level overviews.
Data Residency Compliance: Atlassian Projects and their related Goals support data residency settings. This means you can pin your project and goal data to a specific region, just as you can with Jira or Confluence data, to meet compliance requirements.
In essence, Atlassian Projects, formerly known as Atlas, give organizations a way to communicate the big picture of their work. They sit above the day-to-day issue tracking that happens in Jira Spaces, providing context and visibility across teams. For example, a “Migration to New Platform” Atlassian Project might link epics from multiple Jira Spaces, key design pages from Confluence, and regular status updates from each team involved.
It’s important to understand that Jira Spaces and Atlassian Projects serve different purposes. Here’s how they compare at a glance:
Scope and Purpose: A Jira Space is the day-to-day working container for a single team or product, holding all the issues and tasks for that effort. An Atlassian Project is a high-level container meant to track the progress of an initiative across multiple teams or tools.
Where They Live: A Jira Space exists within Jira Software Cloud, essentially serving the same role that a Jira project did previously. An Atlassian Project lives in Atlassian Home, outside of any individual Jira application, giving a cross-product view of work.
Users and Audience: Jira Spaces are used by the teams actually doing the work, such as developers, product owners, and support staff. Atlassian Projects, on the other hand, are geared toward leadership and stakeholders who need a high-level overview rather than detailed issue-by-issue status.
Data and Configuration: Jira Spaces have configurable issue types, workflows, and permission schemes for managing day-to-day work. Atlassian Projects are more about aggregating information; they don’t replace Jira’s configurations but instead pull data from Jira, Confluence, and other sources to report on overall progress.
Terminology Shift: After this change, the term “project” in the Atlassian world refers to the portfolio-level Atlassian Projects, whereas “space” refers to what we used to call a Jira project. This separation in naming helps avoid confusion when discussing strategic initiatives versus everyday team spaces.
Atlassian began rolling out the Jira Spaces renaming and the Atlassian Projects feature in the second half of 2025. The deployment is staggered across subscription tiers:
September 1, 2025: The transition from “Projects” to “Spaces” in Jira Cloud started for customers on Free and Standard plans. These users were the first to see the new terminology in their Jira UI.
October 20, 2025: The renaming rolled out to sites on Premium and Enterprise plans. Organizations on these tiers began seeing “Space” instead of “Project” within Jira.
By November 10, 2025: The terminology update was released to all remaining Jira Cloud customers, unless a site had opted into a deferred release track.
By December 9, 2025: For customers on Atlassian’s release track program, which allows them to delay cloud updates for stability, the Jira Spaces update and Atlassian Projects availability were fully applied by this date.
In summary, by the end of 2025 all Jira Cloud users will be on the new naming convention and will have Atlassian Projects enabled in their Atlassian Home.
Since “Jira Spaces” is fundamentally a rebranding, your team’s day-to-day operations in Jira should continue as usual. Nonetheless, a change in terminology can raise questions. Take the opportunity to reinforce that nothing about how your team uses Jira has changed. They will simply refer to their project areas as “spaces” now. Consider sending a brief internal announcement explaining that Jira projects are now called spaces, so everyone is on the same page. It’s also a good idea to update any internal documentation or training materials to reflect the new terminology.
If your company uses multiple Atlassian tools, introduce the concept of Atlassian Projects to your leadership and project managers as well. Demonstrate how an Atlassian Project provides a quick snapshot of progress across Jira, Confluence, and other tools. This can help break down silos by making cross-team initiatives more transparent. The key is communication: let your teams know why Atlassian made this change and how it benefits the organization by clarifying the distinction between working spaces in Jira and high-level projects in Atlassian Home.
From a governance perspective, you may want to review who can create Atlassian Projects in your organization. By default, many users have access to view and create these projects and the associated Goals. You might decide to limit creation to certain roles, such as program managers or administrators, to maintain consistency in how high-level projects are tracked. Fortunately, Atlassian provides admin settings for Projects and Goals in the Atlassian Home interface, so you can adjust access as needed.
What if your organization is primarily using Jira and isn’t ready to adopt Atlassian’s new Projects feature? Perhaps you need better project portfolio visibility within Jira itself. In that case, you might consider an app like Projectrak for Jira, a popular project-tracking add-on, to bridge the gap. Tools like Projectrak introduce additional project-level data and reporting capabilities right inside Jira.
Some benefits of using an app to enhance project tracking in Jira include:
Project-Level Metadata: Define custom properties for each project or space, such as project status, budget, or deadlines, that aren’t available in Jira out of the box.
Portfolio Views in Jira: Get aggregated views of all your Jira Spaces in one place. For example, you can visualize projects on a timeline, see high-level status boards of multiple projects, or pull up list views of projects, all without leaving Jira.
Reporting and Insights: Generate reports on project progress, upcoming deadlines, or risk areas across multiple spaces. This helps stakeholders stay informed without needing to jump into a separate portfolio tool.
Templates and Consistency: Apply project templates to standardize how new Jira Spaces are set up, ensuring consistency in fields and workflows across teams.
Seamless Integration: Connect Jira project data with other tools or dashboards as needed so that your current way of working isn’t disrupted by the terminology change.
Using an app like Projectrak can be a convenient workaround if your teams prefer to work entirely within Jira. It retains the familiar concept of a “project” for users, even though Jira’s interface now labels these containers as “spaces”. This way, you gain portfolio management capabilities without requiring everyone to switch over to Atlassian’s separate project overview in Home.