Does Jira Work in China?

Is Jira blocked in China?

No, but access is patchy. GreatFire, a censorship monitor that checks sites from inside mainland China, answers “Sometimes” for atlassian.net, the domain Atlassian’s network guide says Jira and Confluence use. Its latest check of that address, on October 3, 2026, got through.

Individual company sites did better in GreatFire’s recent checks. Most of the companies’ Jira and Confluence sites it has tried, such as Autodesk’s Jira and Autodesk’s Confluence, answered “Yes” in their latest tests, between August and October 2026. Many of them had read blocked or partly disrupted until GreatFire stopped counting refused connections, which it has seen since late August 2026 on routes with no other interference. Its summary for the whole atlassian.net domain still reads mixed.

Atlassian’s own addresses get mixed results. Its main website, atlassian.com, also gets “Sometimes”, and GreatFire says the firewall silently drops its packets, so requests time out; the latest check was on October 18, 2026. The sign-in page, id.atlassian.com, answered “Yes” on October 11, 2026.

Atlassian acknowledges the slowdown. A bug report in its public issue tracker, opened in October 2018 and still unresolved, says users in China get slower performance because the Great Firewall blocks or restricts content from outside China. Customers have kept adding comments: one wrote in September 2024 that Jira “still does not work reliably and stably in China”, and another asked for an update in March 2026. The workaround listed is a VPN, preferably based outside China, with “No guarantees on how much is expected.” Because the tests and reports point in different directions, we list Jira as unreliable.

Jira Cloud in China

Jira Cloud isn’t sold in mainland China, Atlassian staff have said, and Atlassian’s cloud has no data location there. In February 2021, an Atlassian staff member wrote on the Atlassian Community forum that “Mainland China customers cannot buy cloud products from Atlassian”, because of China’s strict rules on keeping data onshore. In January 2022, the same staff member added that the firewall makes cloud connections unreliable unless user data is held inside China, which Atlassian’s global cloud can’t do. Atlassian’s data residency list for Jira and Confluence, checked on October 25, 2026, still has no location in China; its Asian options are India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.

Instead, Atlassian pointed users in China to Data Center, its self-managed edition, and offered Data Center tiers under 500 users there. A Data Center pricing page Atlassian published for a February 2024 price change still mentions a China pricing plan with lower user tiers. That route is closing: Atlassian stopped selling Data Center to new customers on March 30, 2026, and Jira and Confluence Data Center turn read-only on March 28, 2029. Its end-of-life page doesn’t mention China, and we found no Atlassian statement on what happens to the China plans.

Set up new sites before you travel. In April and July 2026, two users in mainland China reported on the Atlassian Community forum that creating a new site failed with a generic error. The July poster, in Chengdu, said switching networks and trying a VPN didn’t help. A Community Champion on the forum replied that similar reports had come from other users in China.

Confluence in China

Confluence Cloud shares Jira’s situation in China, because both run on the same Atlassian Cloud sites. Confluence pages on company sites mostly loaded in GreatFire’s checks in October 2026, though a Confluence space on one company’s site answered “Sometimes” on October 9, after a timeout. Atlassian’s documentation site, confluence.atlassian.com, answered “Sometimes” in GreatFire’s latest check, on August 22, 2026.

Apple’s China App Store lists both Confluence Cloud and Jira Cloud for iPhone. How either app behaves on Chinese networks is not confirmed.

How to use Jira and Confluence in China

Sort out your connection before you fly: a roaming eSIM whose data leaves mainland China, a VPN, or both. Our guide Do I need a VPN in China if I have an eSIM? compares what each one covers on a work trip.

Jira on roaming data or a travel eSIM

A frequent visitor’s foreign phone kept them working. In October 2025, a Reddit commenter who had been to China half a dozen times in the past year wrote that their Dutch phone worked anywhere with almost any app, including Google and WhatsApp. They guessed the network recognized the phone as foreign. Their business laptop couldn’t get online anywhere, through the phone or on the company Wi-Fi, so they stopped bringing it and used Confluence on the phone with a small keyboard.

Travel eSIMs vary. Salil Kanhere, a UNSW cybersecurity expert, said in a July 2026 Bega District News report that only certain travel eSIMs bypass mainland filtering, by routing traffic through offshore gateways. Check each plan’s routing on our eSIM page. For login codes, he suggested keeping your home number active for texts and installing an authenticator app; our guide to 2FA codes in China explains the options.

The bypass stops at mobile data. MyChinaGuide, which promotes its own free China travel app, notes that a roaming eSIM gets around the firewall only on its own data connection. It advises installing the eSIM profile a day or two before you leave.

Jira over a VPN

Atlassian’s bug report offers a VPN as a workaround, without promising results. A VPN also covers a laptop on hotel Wi-Fi, where MyChinaGuide calls it the only way to reach blocked sites. Expect dropouts. Eric Liu, a censorship analyst quoted by ABC News in June 2026, said April brought a new round of VPN crackdowns. He said telecom carriers in parts of China were asked to comb through their networks and block all VPN services. The Dutch traveler on Reddit wrote that a VPN connection usually dropped within minutes. Our October 2026 VPN status report tracks which services users say still connect.

If your employer issues a work VPN, ask IT whether it’s set up for China; our guide to corporate VPNs in China explains what makes one usable there. The UK government’s China travel advice notes that the country’s cybersecurity laws require a government license for online products and services, VPNs included. Our page on whether using a VPN in China is legal explains what the rules say and who has been penalized.

Jira alternatives in China

Chinese companies make their own tools for tracking software work. A March 2025 roundup on sspai, a Chinese tech site, compared 16 development management tools, and its disclosure says the vendors provided the products. Its Chinese entries include:

• Feishu Project (飞书项目): the project module of Feishu, which its App Store listing calls ByteDance’s AI work platform. The roundup says it brings requirements, bugs, versions and iterations together, for agile or waterfall teams.
• TAPD: Tencent’s platform for agile product development. The roundup says it covers the whole cycle, from product planning and requirements to testing, release and user feedback.
• Alibaba Cloud Yunxiao (云效): a one-stop DevOps service, from requirements through to operations. Alibaba Cloud calls it its enterprise platform for R&D collaboration.
• PingCode: its China App Store listing describes agile development management that supports Scrum and Kanban, plus a team knowledge base.

In December 2023, as Atlassian wound down Jira Server, Mydrivers, a Chinese tech news site, called Feishu Project the top migration choice for Jira users, in an article that promoted it.

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