The Best Ways To Share Jira With Guest Access

Do you need to provide guest access to Jira and are struggling to find a solution?

Granting guest access to your Jira Cloud projects isn’t possible via Jira itself. Which is a real drag. 

You might have stakeholders or people from other teams who just need to dip into Jira now and then, or you may have customers to whom you want to provide temporary access.

But, don’t despair! There are two methods you can use to share Jira projects with external users, such as your customers, or with internal stakeholders who don’t have access to Jira.

Some of these are static representations of work in Jira. In contrast, others offer a live portal to your Jira projects in ways non-Jira aficionados can understand and easily operate.

In this article, I’ll explain those methods, how to apply them, and which scenarios they are best for. 

After reading, you’ll be able to overcome the lack of guest access to your Jira projects and start sharing them with customers or internal and external stakeholders in the best way possible.

We’re experts on this. We’re Visor, and we’re an app on a mission to help project managers get their data in one place – even when their people aren’t. Try it for free!

Does Jira include guest access?

In short, no. Jira Cloud does not include guest access in a manner most users would understand. 

This means there is no specific guest user type, which on most platforms would be temporary and restricted in terms of which projects can be accessed and what actions a guest user can take.

Therefore, as a Jira user seeking to provide access to internal or external guests, you’re faced with buying additional licenses for guest users, which probably isn’t an attractive option for you. 

I’m sure you already know how to buy more licenses if that’s the route you want to take, so let’s get straight to the best alternative ways to facilitate Jira guest access for your stakeholders, customers, or anyone else. 

Method 1: Anonymous Jira Access

It’s possible to make your Jira cloud projects accessible to anyone without a login or password. This option is only available if you are using a paid Jira plan. Free Jira cloud users cannot control project-level permissions or roles, or issue-level security. 

Allowing your Jira project to be accessed anonymously by anyone is obviously an approach that comes with a number of risks.

Depending on the settings you choose, it could enable malicious actors to sensitive or competitively valuable information. If you enable anonymous users to create issues it could also allow them to directly tamper with your Jira projects, or to clog up your system with junk issues. 

There are practical drawbacks too. Often you are giving guest access to Jira to facilitate collaboration with external or internal partners. Anonymity makes this very messy as you don’t have details on who added which comment, added or updated issues and so on. 

All that considered, if you still think anonymous access best fits your needs, here’s how to set it up:

1. In Jira, go to Settings
2. Select Issues
3. Then click Permission Schemes
4. Then select the project you want to enable anonymous access to

Now you then have the choice of whether to allow anonymous users to just view and search for issues in a project, or to allow them to create issues in a project too.

If you just want to allow anonymous users to search and view issues in projects, add Public under the Browse Project permission settings. 

To allow anonymous users to create issues, add Public under Create Issue permission.

Method 2: Use Visor

Visor is the best way to share Jira projects with customers, external partners, and internal stakeholders in formats they can understand. It displays the information you want to share with them. It’s also free and gives you unlimited viewer-level users. 

This means you don’t have to spend hours teaching people how to find their way round Jira, and you don’t eat away at your budget either.

Now, of course, you might expect someone from Visor to say this. But our Atlassian Marketplace rating speaks for itself, as do the abundance of positive reviews on Atlassian, other review sites like G2, and from expert Jira commentators. In short, you don’t just have to take my word for it!

How it works

Visor has a robust two-way integration with Jira and full syncing controls that you can access anytime. The integration pulls in your Jira projects (you can filter out anything you don’t want to import) and then keeps Visor and Jira in sync with one another.

The in-app sync controls allow you to choose and change when to sync and whether to use the two-way sync or opt for a one-way sync if needed.

Once integrated, you can use Visor to represent your live project data in Jira Gantt charts, spreadsheets, timelines, and boards. These can be formatted with colors and customized to fit different guest users. You can then share them easily using email or a reusable sharing link.

This is great for sharing Jira projects in formats that are clearer, more consumable, and easier for your guest users to interact with. At its most basic, it enables you to share Jira boards with external partners. Beyond that, it’s a massive upgrade on the project visualization and presentation options available natively in Jira. 

For example, many different commentators have praised Visor’s timeline view as offering a superior alternative to Jira’s own Advanced Roadmaps. Here’s one overview from Alex at ApeTech Tutorials:

Control and Curate Information

Another brilliant feature is that you have full control over permissions and the information seen by different individual users or groups of users. So instead of always sharing your project as it is, you can choose not to include or hide certain fields or details that you don’t want or need specific people to see.

This is useful in keeping sensitive information hidden from the wrong people, and it helps you create different views of projects for different people or purposes. For example, you could create a view for specific customers, teams, or themes. You could also choose to show initiatives and epics if that is a view your C-suite would find easier to digest.

This is what makes Visor stand out from other collaboration and visualization tools that integrate with Jira. It is not just a way of sharing projects in Jira with people; it’s a way of curating different views of those projects for all the people you interact with. 

You may already create multiple views of your Jira projects using exports, presentations, screenshots, etc. But that’s a bad way of approaching stakeholder updates. It’s time-consuming and tedious. It also means the data in those updates becomes stale fast.

With Visor, each view of your project stays in sync with all the other views of that project, and with the project in Jira too. This means views update with one click, rather than one day of work. 

Method 3: Rotate Jira Licenses

A simple option is to set aside a selection of licenses for guest-type users. This only works when you have a relatively consistent and low number of guest users at any one time. For example, if you work on discrete projects with a handful of cross-functional partners outside of your team. 

All you need to do is create a user permission that matches what you want guests to be able to do. Give these accounts generic usernames, and then pass them on from users that no longer need guest logins to new guest users, updating the user email and password as you do. 

This is obviously far from perfect, but it may work best in a small number of circumstances.

Jira Guest Access – Pick the Right Approach For You

Although Jira guest access is not a native feature, there are excellent methods of letting internal and external partners and customers view and collaborate with you on projects in Jira.

In my opinion, Visor is the best way to provide guest access to all your Jira projects. Not only does it enable you to share and work together on projects, but it does so in a much more attractive and user-friendly way, especially for people who have never or seldom used Jira. 

In fact, Visor would still be a better option even if you were able to provide guest access directly to Jira.

It gives you much greater freedom and flexibility, with many options to present your projects in different formats, and you can add filters to create tailored views for different customers, stakeholders, and colleagues. Check out the video that goes into Visor Jira Guest Access below. Once you’re ready try Visor for free.

James Taylor

James Taylor

Senior Digital Marketing Manager

James Taylor is Visor's Senior Digital Marketing Manager. Originally from the UK, he has 8+ years experience writing about all things software and technology, project management and organizational processes. When he's not working you'll find him hiking a hill, attempting to cook ambitious recipes, or gorging on hours of history podcasts and documentaries.