Why Your Team Should Ditch Jira for Taiga

Your project management tool shouldn't cost more than some of your team members. But if you're running Jira for a growing team, you've probably noticed the bills climbing faster than your sprint velocity.

Here's the uncomfortable math: Jira Standard runs $7.91/user/month for teams over 100 people. Premium jumps to $14.54/user. For a 50-person team, that's roughly $400/month just to track tasks. And those costs scale linearly as you hire.

There's another way.

What Taiga Actually Does

Taiga is a free, open-source project management platform built specifically for agile teams. It handles everything Jira does for Scrum and Kanban workflows, but without the per-seat licensing model that makes finance teams nervous.

You get:

• Full Scrum support: Backlogs, sprints, user stories, tasks, and subtasks
• Burndown charts: Track sprint progress without installing plugins
• Kanban boards: Drag-and-drop cards with WIP limits
• Sprint planning: Estimate story points, assign work, plan capacity
• Epics and milestones: Organize work across multiple sprints
• Wiki and documentation: Built-in, not a separate product

The interface is clean and fast. Your team won't need a two-week onboarding course to figure out where things are.

The Real Cost Comparison

Let's break down what a 50-person team actually pays:

That's not a typo. Self-hosting Taiga on Elestio costs roughly $29/month for a 4-CPU instance that comfortably handles 50+ users. No per-seat fees. No surprise invoices when you hire.

The savings compound as you grow. Add 20 more people? Jira charges you $158 more per month. Taiga charges you nothing.

Features You're Not Losing

Teams hesitate to leave Jira because they assume open-source means feature-poor. Taiga proves that wrong.

Sprint management works the same way. Create a sprint, drag stories from the backlog, assign point estimates, track daily progress. Your burndown chart updates automatically.

Integrations exist. Taiga connects to GitHub, GitLab, Slack, and Mattermost out of the box. Webhooks let you build custom integrations with anything else. The REST API is well-documented and actually usable.

Permissions are granular. Set roles for product owners, scrum masters, developers, and stakeholders. Control who can modify the backlog, close sprints, or just observe.

Mobile access works. The web interface is responsive, and there are mobile apps if your team needs them.

What You're Actually Gaining

Beyond cost savings, self-hosting gives you advantages Jira Cloud can't match:

Data stays yours. Your project history, velocity metrics, and team communications live on infrastructure you control. No vendor lock-in. No worrying about Atlassian's next privacy policy update.

Performance is predictable. No shared infrastructure slowdowns during peak hours. Your instance runs as fast as your server allows.

Customization is unlimited. Taiga is open source. If you need a specific workflow or integration, you can build it. Or hire someone to build it. Try doing that with Jira.

When Jira Still Makes Sense

Being honest: Taiga isn't for everyone.

If your organization runs the entire Atlassian stack and needs deep Confluence integration, switching costs might outweigh savings. If you're a 5-person startup using Jira's free tier, you're probably fine staying put.

But if you're a 20+ person team watching Jira bills grow every quarter, or an agency juggling multiple client projects, or a company that takes data ownership seriously, Taiga deserves a serious look.

Getting Started Without the Hassle

The traditional self-hosting objection is valid: "We don't have time to manage servers."

That's where managed hosting changes the equation. Deploy Taiga on Elestio and they handle the infrastructure: updates, backups, SSL, monitoring. You get self-hosting benefits without hiring a DevOps engineer.

Setup takes about 10 minutes:

1. Pick your cloud provider (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, whatever you prefer)
2. Select Taiga from the app catalog
3. Choose your instance size (4 CPU / 8GB RAM handles most teams)
4. Click deploy

Your Taiga instance comes pre-configured with HTTPS, automated backups, and admin access ready to go.

Migration Path

Moving from Jira isn't as painful as Atlassian wants you to think.

Taiga has built-in importers for Jira, Trello, and Asana. Export your projects, run the import wizard, and your stories, epics, and attachments come along. Historical data transfers too.

Budget a few hours for your first migration. Test with a non-critical project before moving everything.

The Bottom Line

Project management tools should help teams ship better software, not drain budgets. Jira is a capable product, but the per-seat pricing model punishes growing teams.

Taiga offers the same agile workflow management without the scaling tax. For teams serious about Scrum or Kanban, the feature set competes directly with Jira Standard. The 90%+ cost savings let you invest in what actually matters: your product and your people.

Your backlog isn't going to manage itself. But it doesn't need to cost $400/month either.

Thanks for reading!