Invite guests to Jira

What is guest access?

Not all teamwork happens inside a single organization. Sometimes you need to partner with other companies and external collaborators to progress and complete your projects, and this is where guest access can help.

Use guest access to invite external collaborators to a single Jira space as a guest with limited permissions. Guest access in Jira follows a similar model to guest access in Confluence and is designed for scenarios where external collaborators (such as contractors, consultants, or clients) need temporary access for a specific engagement or project. These guests need to view or lightly collaborate on work, but don’t need full access to your Jira site. Guest access is not intended for managed users internal to your organization.

Who is considered a guest?

A guest is anyone outside your organization, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or related entities. Examples of guests include clients, vendors, freelancers, or external consultants.

To qualify as a guest, the user’s email domain must not match any domains associated with your organization, affiliates, or subsidiaries. Guests cannot join using an email domain that belongs to the organization’s account.

Atlassian reserves the right to restrict your access to the feature if you’re not using it in compliance with this purpose and the guidelines outlined in Atlassian documentation. Atlassian also reserves the right to change the ratio of guests to paid users.

What guests can and can’t do in Jira

Guest access uses a dedicated guest role inside a space, with permissions tuned for light collaboration. What guests can do depends on how you configure the guest role in that space, but here’s what they typically have access to in Jira.

Guests can:

• Log in with their Atlassian account and open the single Jira space they’ve been added to

• Browse and view work items in that space

• Create, edit, transition, and resolve work items

• Be assigned to work items and assign them to others

• Comment on work items, and edit or delete their own comments

• Add attachments, and delete their own attachments

• Log work and manage their own worklogs

• Link work items together within the same space

• View watchers (and manage watchers in company-managed spaces)

• View combined and summarized project data, development information, and read-only workflows

• Participate in boards, backlogs, and other views within the space, as allowed by the guest role and space configuration

Guests can’t:

• Access any other Jira spaces on that site (they’re limited to one space per site)

• Administer spaces or manage space configuration (including workflows, layouts, people, and permissions)

• Archive work items, or restore them

• Edit or delete other users’ comments, attachments, or worklogs

• Move work items to other spaces (and can’t move work items at all in team‑managed spaces)

• Manage sprints

• Act as a service project agent

• Use any Jira global permissions (for example, administer Jira, browse users and groups, share dashboards or filters, make bulk changes, or create team‑managed spaces)

• Access platform‑wide objects or experiences (such as site‑level home, dashboards, or goals) unless explicitly supported for guests

• See work that hasn’t been shared with the space, or that is otherwise restricted by permissions

For a detailed list of guest permissions across company-managed and team-managed spaces, see What guests can and can’t do in Jira.

How guest access works

Guest access uses a two-step permission model:

1. Site admins add guests to a site

   • A site admin invites or approves a user to access Jira and selects Guest as the user’s role.

   • This step controls who is allowed into the site as an external collaborator.

2. Space admins add guests to a space in the site

   • A space admin adds that guest to a specific Jira space and assigns their space role.

   • This step controls where the guest can collaborate and what they can do there.

Guests must be external to your organization and can only be added to a single Jira business or software space per site. The same person may be a guest on multiple Jira sites, but is limited to one space per site. Guests can access Marketplace apps that support guest access, but only for the data and features available in the space they’ve been added to.

How to manage guest access in Jira