Atlassian, the makers of JIRA and Confluence, give you a choice: host on your own hardware, or let Atlassian host the apps for you: Should you self-host, or go with Atlassian Cloud hosting? |
It is worth considering for a moment how unique this is. The industry has moved strongly to a SaaS, subscription model. Companies love it when they have your data, a steady income stream, and lower support costs from supporting essentially just one environment. Virtually every new product management app these days is SaaS-only. SaaS is often good for customers too. No more hassle of maintaining and upgrading software.
So why do we strongly recommend self-hosting? A few reasons.
JIRA and Confluence have a thriving plugin ecosystem, visible at https://marketplace.atlassian.com.
Plugins are why you can't go wrong with JIRA and Confluence: you're not just buying a product, you're buying into a platform upon which hundreds of companies are madly building and making lots of money.
The dirty secret is this: most plugins don't work on Atlassian's Cloud-hosted version. Here are logarithmic graphs showing plugins by popularity (as per marketplace.atlassian.com stats), excluding unmaintained plugins incompatible with the past 3 releases.
Blue plugins are self-hosted only, red are cloud-ready, and yellow are cloud-only.
There is not a lot of red.
Things are improving for Cloud customers. Atlassian is pushing it's new cloud-compatible 'Connect' plugin framework, and in the 2015 Summit, Mike notes that Cloud-compatible plugins have grown from 50 to 300 in a year. If you consider only the top 50 plugins, the situation looks better:
However, given that:
it seems likely that outside the money-making top 50, the "long tail" comprising the vast majority of plugins will never be Connect-enabled.
This applies especially to Confluence. Your wiki does not exist in a vacuum.
With self-hosted, your data is yours:
Note that it is possible (with some effort) to move from self-hosted to cloud, and cloud to self-hosted.
All these limitations are itemized on the Restricted functions in JIRA Cloud applications page (and children), but the implications are not spelled out. Essentially, new Atlassian customers don't know what they're missing. They get the product without the extensibility and ecosystem that makes the product great. Frustrating limitations are encountered one by one, by various users, and a desire for change never overcomes corporate inertia.
If your company wants the full flexibility of self-hosted, the costs come at four levels:
Red Radish offers services which we like to think gives you the best of both worlds:
For instance, Fixing JIRA graph gadgets broken by JRA-59364.