What is the difference between a jira-administrator and an administrator?

[James Bonello]

On our JIRA Cloud implementation, we have three administration groups: site-admin, jira-administrator and administrator. What is the difference between jira-administrator and administrator?

Thanks!

[Michael Partyka]

Hi James,

here you have useful information:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/managing-global-permissions-185729559.html

The difference is in global administration permission.

[James Bonello]

So a jira-administrator is a user with JIRA Administrator and JIRA System Administrator permissions and an administrator only has the JIRA Administrator permission. But I thought the JIRA System Administrator permission group is not accessible in JIRA Cloud instances, and this means that it doesn't really make a difference which is which. I am not sure I understand how this works!

[Akhil_vs]

JIRA admins will have the overall access from application perspective, i.e they can perform health checkup using support tools, Create support.zip,support requests etc which are actually restricted to a administrator.

[Trevor Sok]

ANOTHER Case of the most convoluted way of answering any question on here. NO documentation for what permissions a BASIC user, TRUSTED, or SITE-ADMIN......so far the help has been NO help. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

<sigh> Wrong, the doc covers the question asked.

[Nick Lee]

The most helpful page I've found on this topic is https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/manage-groups-744721627.html, which discusses the default groups for Cloud.

To answer the original question, it seems that the administrators and jira-administrators groups are equivalent for Jira Cloud. The administrators group seems to only be useful if you also have Confluence Cloud.

The site-admin group has additional permissions around user management and billing.

The other answer links to Jira Server documentation which talks about Jira System Administrators, which just confuses the issue if you ask me! (To be fair, the page I link to may not have existed when the question was asked, so perhaps the other answer had the best information available at the time...)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You've understood it correctly.  It is possible to add and rename groups, and you could easily set up your system so that the JIRA admins belong to a group called "Banana" instead of "JIRA administrator".  Or have multiple groups with admin access.

As you say, the Cloud system does not let anyone but Atlassian have system administrator, so my best guess is that you have added another "administrator" group for some other reason.  Some add-ons will do things like that when they are installed too.

[Martin Böhme]

(Unlike Confluence, where confluence-administrators group has more power than any other group/user with System Administrator privilege. More Info)

[Tracy Walton]

@Trevor Sok I wrote up this article to help shed some light on the topic. I hope you find it helpful. Cheers.