Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps): what it is and what you need

Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) is the cross-team planning feature in Jira: it combines work items from boards, spaces, and filters into one plan that can span many teams. You need a Jira Premium or Enterprise subscription; Free and Standard get the timeline view, which covers one space at a time.

For cross-team scheduling, capacity, and dependencies, Plans is often enough on its own. When leadership also wants strategy, people, and funding in one place, Focus and Talent add that layer, and you may still have no reason to implement Align (formerly Jira Align). This post covers Jira Cloud. Prefer to watch? Our video walkthrough shows Plans in action.

Which subscription includes Jira Plans

The word "plan" does double duty here. In this post, "subscription" means Free, Standard, Premium, or Enterprise, and "plan" means the thing you build in Jira.

Atlassian's Jira pricing page lists "Advanced planning (Plans)" for Premium and Enterprise only. Timeline view is listed on all four subscriptions.

Atlassian uses several names for this feature. Its guide says "Jira Plans," the pricing page says "Advanced planning (Plans)," and the support docs say "plans." Its timeline guide confirms that Plans was formerly known as Advanced Roadmaps. Jira Data Center documentation still uses the Advanced Roadmaps name.

What Jira Plans does

• Cross-space planning. A plan pulls work items from boards, spaces, and JQL filters, in any mix, into one view. Teams keep working the way they already do.
• Hierarchy levels. By default, epic sits at level 1, story at level 0, and subtasks below that. On Premium and Enterprise, a Jira administrator can add levels above epic, such as initiatives, to track larger work across spaces.
• Scenarios. Scenarios are "what if" versions of a plan, and you turn them on in plan settings. A plan is a sandbox, so changes stay in the plan until you review them and save them to Jira. If you later turn scenarios off, you choose one version to keep and the others are lost.
• Capacity. Capacity is what a team can complete in one iteration. Velocity is its average over time. Scrum teams can use time or story points. Kanban teams use time only, in one-week iterations.
• Dependencies. A plan shows dependencies that can affect your timeline, even ones that live outside the plan. A dependency turns red when the first work item puts the second at risk.
• Releases. Single-space releases are the same ones your spaces already use. Cross-space releases line up several of them to one date, but they exist only inside the plan.
• Program board. Each team has its own swim lane, and a board spans 7 to 16 weeks. Atlassian's docs say it is designed for Program Increment Planning rituals in the SAFe methodology.
• Sharing. You can share a view by direct link, embed it in a Confluence page, or export it as a CSV file or PNG image.

Jira Plans vs. the free timeline

Both show work on a schedule, but they answer different questions. The timeline shows how one space is doing. A plan shows how many teams fit together.

Use the timeline when one team plans inside one space. Use Plans when work crosses teams or spaces, or when you need scenarios and capacity.

Limits to check before you build a large plan

Atlassian's limits on plan size page lists up to 10,000 work items per plan and up to 200 spaces, counting spaces brought in through boards and filters. There is no enforced limit on teams, but Atlassian recommends no more than 50. Past that, some teams won't display on the Teams tab.

That page opens by saying these limits apply to Jira Plans Enterprise, and it gives no separate numbers for Premium. Atlassian's performance recommendations page states the 10,000 figure without naming a subscription. If you are on Premium and your plan will be large, check the limits page and confirm with Atlassian Support before you rely on those numbers.

For any large plan, Atlassian's advice is to review your work sources, exclude work you don't need to plan, and split a large plan into smaller, more focused ones.

Jira Plans only shows what your Jira data holds

Turning on Plans doesn't fix your data. Planning tools can only report on data that means the same thing everywhere, so hierarchy, estimates, and team fields need to be consistent before the plan is worth reading.

• Hierarchy. Agree on your levels first. Atlassian warns that hierarchy changes apply to all existing plans and company-managed spaces using that work type scheme, and that they can affect existing parent and child relationships.
• Estimates. A plan estimates in hours, days, or story points. Story points are only an option when every team in the plan is a scrum team. Switching between points and time erases unsaved estimates, and unestimated work items can make progress less accurate.
• Teams. Capacity depends on connecting each team to its work source, and Atlassian says to use boards as sources if you intend to use capacity planning. Work assigned to a team that isn't set up in the plan shows as an External Team.
• Team-managed spaces. You can include them, with limits. Their fields apply only within the same space, and rules that remove work items from a plan don't apply to them.

Statuses and fields matter too. If one team's done is another team's ready for review, a roll-up is just a sum of numbers that don't match. Our guide on why capacity planning in Jira starts with cleanup walks through the order: define the teams, simplify workflows, consolidate fields, agree on estimating, then build the plan.

Not sure where your site stands? The free Jira health check reviews your accounts, permission schemes, custom fields, workflows, and governance, and gives you a written scorecard.

Is Jira Plans enough without Align?

Often, yes. It depends on the job. Plans handles cross-team scheduling, capacity, dependencies, and releases inside Jira. It doesn't give you a strategy hierarchy with funding, or positions synced from your HR system. Focus and Talent do, and that is often what people are after when they ask about Align.

Focus and Talent, plus Jira Plans, Jira Product Discovery, and Insights (formerly Atlassian Analytics), give you the capabilities people buy Align for; they are easier to implement and don't need a rigid Jira environment. They do not match Align feature for feature. Our guide on whether you need Align maps each job in detail.

• Focus holds strategic priorities as a hierarchy of focus areas and links the epics and higher-level work you already have on Premium and Enterprise sites.
• Talent shows how people are staffed against those priorities.
• Jira Plans does the cross-team planning described above.
• Jira Product Discovery captures and prioritizes ideas, then connects them to delivery in Jira.
• Insights is the app formerly called Atlassian Analytics. Atlassian's pages differ on which subscriptions include it: the Insights support page says Standard, Premium, and Enterprise, and the Jira pricing page also lists Free. Both put the Atlassian Data Lake on Enterprise only.

When the lighter set is enough

• You plan across teams, but you don't run program increments across many teams under a scaled framework.
• Your delivery work lives in Jira.
• Leadership wants priorities, people, and progress in view before anyone restructures Jira.

When Align is still the right call

• You run SAFe or a similar model, with shared increment planning across programs and portfolios. The Program board helps with that planning, but it is a view on top of Jira, not a framework.
• Delivery is split between Jira and Azure DevOps. Align coordinates both.
• Your program office works to a named framework, such as SAFe, LeSS, or Scrum@Scale, and wants the tool built around it.
• You already run Align well. In that case, keep it and connect it to Focus with help from Atlassian Support.

One buying detail changes the question. Focus, Talent, and Align are sold together only, as the Strategy Collection, and the collection requires Jira Cloud Premium at minimum. If you buy it, you already have Align, so the decision is whether to implement it. Jira Plans comes with the Jira subscription you already need. Jira Product Discovery is a separate subscription.

Atlas Bench, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, implements Focus, Talent, and the Jira around them as our Strategy Collection implementation.

Start with a free Jira health check

A plan is only as good as the data under it, so check the data before you build one or buy more on top of it. The review takes about a week, and we walk you through the scorecard in 30 minutes and tell you what to fix first. There is no charge or commitment, and we don't change your configuration.

Get a free Jira health check.