Atlassian set the dates. The decision is which estate you land on.
Data Center subscriptions and their Marketplace apps expire on 28 March 2029 and go read-only. Existing customers have until 30 March 2028 to buy new subscriptions, expansions or Marketplace apps — and whether a flat renewal is still available after that is the one thing Atlassian’s own pages do not agree on. Three paths are open, two of them are somebody else's product, and all three have to be decided inside the current planning cycle rather than the next one.
Every date on this page is Atlassian's, published at atlassian.com/licensing/data-center-end-of-life and at atlassian.com/migration/bitbucket-hybrid-license, both read on 25 August 2026. Timelines for third-party products belong to their vendors and can change without reference to us. Nothing here represents the views of Atlassian Pty Ltd.
The 2029 date is the easy one. 2028 is the one nobody agrees about.
Most plans are built against the end-of-life date. The date that actually constrains an enterprise is the one before it — and it is also the one where Atlassian’s licensing page and Atlassian’s own community post say different things.
Both are Atlassian’s. We are not going to resolve it for you and we are not going to pick the reading that suits us: the safe planning assumption is the harsher one, and the safe commercial step is to get your renewal position confirmed in writing before you build a 2028 to 2029 plan on it. What is not in dispute is that new purchases, expansions and new Marketplace apps stop on 30 March 2028, and that multi-year Data Center terms were withdrawn before any of this was announced, so there is no long term left to lock.
For most estates the apps are the migration, not the platform. An inventory of which apps have a destination on each path is the first piece of work, and it is usually the one that decides the answer.
That distinction matters to a risk function. An unpatched read-only system holding live business records is a finding, and it is a finding with a date already attached to it.
So the exemption runs through a license that Atlassian still describes as coming mid-2026, and we have found no confirmation it has shipped. Source control and work management are still two decisions on two timetables, and that is the useful part — but “Bitbucket is fine” is a stronger sentence than Atlassian’s own page supports. What we run for Bitbucket Data Center →
Dates and license mechanics on this page are Atlassian's published position, not our characterisation of it.
Five dates. Three of them are already behind you.
Nothing here is our forecast. Each row is Atlassian's published position, and the last column is what the row closes off rather than what we think you should do about it.
| Date | What Atlassian published | What it closes |
|---|---|---|
| September 2025 | End of life announced for the Data Center product line. | Nothing yet. It starts the planning clock, and it is the point after which "we did not know" stops being available. |
| 16 December 2025 | New Data Center apps can no longer be submitted to the Marketplace. | The app inventory. Anything not already listed is not arriving, which bounds the app-substitution work this page calls the decisive piece. |
| 30 March 2026 | New customers can no longer purchase Data Center subscriptions or Marketplace apps. | The path in. If you do not already hold a license, Data Center is not an option you can still choose. |
| 30 March 2028 | Existing customers can no longer purchase new subscriptions, expansions or Marketplace apps. | Growth for certain. Renewal in dispute: the licensing page says a flat renewal at today’s size runs to 2029, the community post says all new sales cease here. The app set you hold on this date is the one you finish on either way. |
| 28 March 2029 | Data Center subscriptions and any associated Marketplace apps expire. Products and apps become read-only. | Support, security patches and any vendor path back. The data remains readable. |
| 28 March 2029 | Bitbucket Data Center, conditionally. Atlassian excludes it from the end of life, but says existing standalone Data Center licenses remain available only until this date, after which Bitbucket is sold exclusively through a Hybrid License it still describes as coming mid-2026. | The standalone Data Center license. Bitbucket stays a separate decision, but it is not a decision without a date. |
Atlassian has also published what does not change before then. Through 28 March 2029 it continues technical support, security bug-fixes for critical vulnerabilities, and the connectors from Data Center products to Atlassian Cloud. What the dates above close is the ability to buy, not the ability to run.
Times are stated by Atlassian as 23:59 PST on each date. Atlassian also offers “extended maintenance for certain Data Center customers by exception” after 28 March 2029, with no published criteria, no price and no application process — a real escape hatch with nothing behind it you can plan against. We publish no price figure for any of these steps: Atlassian’s end-of-life page states no increase, partner sources report one, and an unattributed market number is the same class of problem as an unattributed customer quote.
Two of these are not ours, and we will say so first.
Atlassian Cloud is a real path and staying put is a real choice. We have a direct offer on exactly one of the three, and this page is more useful to you if it is obvious which.
Run Data Center to the deadline
Hold the licenses you have, reassess later. This is a legitimate short-term choice rather than a mistake, and it is the right one for estates with a bigger fire this year. It is a choice with a fixed expiry: decided before March 2028, executed before March 2029.
Migrate to Atlassian Cloud
Atlassian’s own path forward, and a real one. Cloud carries their continued investment and roadmap, and for most estates it is the lower-risk migration with the bigger ecosystem. Since July 2026 it also includes Atlassian Isolated Cloud, generally available: single-tenant, in an Atlassian-managed VPC, covering Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence and Guard. That answers the data-residency objection directly, and we would rather name it than leave it for you to find.
Migrate to Plane on Reign Ops
For estates that need work management inside their own authorization boundary, Plane is the other real option. iTmethods operates it as a single-tenant dedicated instance and runs the Jira migration with your team, on your change process.
Delivered as a single-tenant dedicated instance. That is the only deployment model available today, and the FAQ below states what the other three are and are not.
Whichever tracker you land on, agents will be reading it.
The work tracker is where the backlog, the incident history and the change record live. Atlassian Intelligence, Jira's own agents, MCP servers and whatever your engineers wire up next all read and write that surface at machine pace. Reign Gateway governs them at the call layer, which is the one place a policy can apply to all of them at once, whoever built them.
Who holds what, on the way across.
Written down before anything moves, so the boundary is a document rather than a discovery halfway through a cut-over weekend.
| Who | What they hold | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Reign Ops, automated | Decisions closed inside the substrate without human intervention, once the estate is live. | Operate the instance inside your authorization boundary. Enforce your identity provider at the platform edge. Stream audit logs to your SIEM. Apply hardening as policy-as-code. Patch on an upstream-matched cadence. |
| Customer authored | Decisions you own under the shared-responsibility model. You are the author here rather than the approver. | Which projects move and in what order. Workflow and field decisions that were never right in the first place. Which Marketplace apps have a destination and which are retired. The change window. Sign-off on each cut-over. |
| Operating partner engagement | The work that needs a named engineer rather than a runbook, done with your team rather than to it. | The app and workflow inventory. Migration scoping and phased cut-over. Data mapping and the dry runs before it. The decisions that change the design rather than the configuration. |
iTmethods makes no compliance, certification or accreditation claim under any framework. What each framework asks for is set out on regulatory alignment.
The questions that arrive every time.
When does Atlassian Data Center reach end of life?
Can we still buy Data Center licenses?
Is Bitbucket Data Center affected?
Where would Plane actually run?
Do you have a view on Atlassian Cloud?
How long does a Jira to Plane migration take?
Tell us what your Data Center estate actually looks like.
Which products, roughly how many projects, and which Marketplace apps you cannot lose. We will come back with which of the three paths we would take in your position — including the two we do not sell — and what the first phase would involve.