Atlassian is officially renaming the naming of Jira Projects a Jira Spaces across all Jira Cloud products. Starting October 2025, Jira will begin rolling out this major terminology update. It is worth noting that this is not a feature change; this is a language shift that Atlassian is welcoming alongside a unified Cloud Platform. It’s a strategic move to reduce confusion, create consistency to better reflect how teams actually use Jira. In this blog post, we'll break down the origin of this change, the reasons, the timeline, and what the future looks like.
The announcement of this change has already sparked some debate, praises, concerns, and, yes, confusion. Which is totally understandable, and that’s why we will keep explaining forward.
As we already went through a similar change this year, from “Issues” to “Work items,” all of these modifications, answers to a common vision that Atlassian is building in the Atlassian Cloud Platform, a unified System of work composed by a series of apps, collections, and solutions that allows to adapt any method or practice to the solution, and not the other way around.
As we're going to share some light about the different aspects and common doubts about this particular change, let's start from the beginning:
A Jira Project, in Atlassian’s terms, is a configurable container for work, which comprises a collection of work items (stories, bugs, tasks, etc.) that a team uses to organize and track work for a product or service.
Each Project has a name and a key, and those work items belong to that one project; that key becomes the first part of each work item’s identifier (for example, ABC-123).
As Jira Projects are highly customizable, teams can adapt fields, workflows, and settings to their needs.
By understanding the function and value this collection of Work items brings to work, we can automatically realize why the change from Project to Space is obvious. It doesn't fit with the traditional conception of what a project actually is. Let's dig into more reasons:
Atlassian’s shift from Jira Projects to Jira Spaces naturally makes it fit better and eases cross-product navigation, another reason why this change is happening. Let's go through them all:
We have mentioned collections, which are a series of Atlassian Apps packaged for a specific intended use. At the beginning of the year, it was announced that the Teamwork Collection (Jira, Confluence, Loom, Rovo).
Simultaneously, another change Atlassian has been making is moving the concept of Projects to another layer, outside of Jira, into other apps.⚠️It's important not to mix things⚠️. This blog post is about the name change of Jira Projects to Jira Spaces, specifically. We will talk more about this other change in upcoming blog posts.
As it has also been announced, something called Atlassian Projects (previously Atlas) are accessible via Atlassian Home, which are cross-team, high-level units with defined goals, updates, and timelines, across all Atlassian apps, including Jira.
As this term has been coexisting with Jira Projects, it has been causing a name overlap and even more confusion. With this rename, Atlassian is making a clear separation between these two.
Demonstrating that Atlassian listens to customer feedback, this change also comes as a response from non-software teams adopting Jira, as these teams have felt the word "Project" was too tied to formal projects and software terminology, and “Space” feels more open-ended and flexible, broadening the range of teams working with the Atlassian Cloud Platform.
Another naming change Atlassian has introduced is calling their software tools as apps (Jira, Confluence, Jira Product Discover, Jira Service Management, Loom, etc). So when you hear the term “Atlassian Apps,” it's related to those, and the term Marketplace Apps refers to the ones created by third-party companies, like us.
As we have already teased, you should think about these changes as a UI text update across Jira Cloud. As simple as that. Atlassian will automatically apply this change, and there’s nothing you technically need to install or reconfigure. Let’s go through these changes:
Atlassian is rolling out the terminology change in stages over the second half of 2025. The expected timeline is as follows:
Worth noting that these changes are subject to adjustments on the go, in case anything else changes. As a system administrator, this might be a good moment to communicate with your users about the upcoming changes. If you need help on this or other matter, we’re glad to help.
For PMOs, project managers, and Jira administrators, the key takeaway is that Jira’s concept of a project is getting a new name: Welcome Jira Spaces. It’s just a language change that brings benefits in consistency and clarity across Atlassian Apps in the Cloud Platform.
While there may be some short-term confusion (by distinguishing Jira spaces from Confluence spaces), the fundamentals remain unchanged. You’ll still plan, track, and report on work the same way tomorrow as you did yesterday.
In practical terms, make sure your stakeholders know about the change, update your materials, and embrace the new terminology once it arrives. After the initial adjustment period, your users might find it refreshing that they no longer have to clarify what’s what: A Jira Space is clearly a working container, leaving the word “project” to real-world projects.
This change finally leaves it clear that Jira is an app not just for projects, but for teams and work of all kinds, and if you’re looking for a simple and light solution to manage your project portfolio in Jira, you might want to keep reading the following:
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