What is the Project Management Functionality between Jira and Confluence?

[Rachel Castellanos]

I'm trying to determine the project management capabilities of using Jira and Confluence together.  Can an actual project plan and work breakdown structure be built in Confluence and utilized in Jira?

[David Nickell]

If I were "snarky", my answer would be "It depends" and I'd leave it at that.  :-)   Dpending on you needs, team size, etc...  I suppose in certain situations - maybe?

But my experience is that the advanced roadmap / plans feature available with Jira Premium is an excellent "built in" project planning tool.  (https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/get-started-with-advanced-roadmaps/).   But it comes at a premium price (literally).  Still, a premium license also gives you Issue Type Hierarchy capabilities and an increase in automation rule executions -- so I'd spend the money if you can.

My go to non-Atlassian Project Planner is SmartSheet.   The trick is not to try to keep the details un synch between two tools (Jira and Smartsheet).

From my experience - confluence is a great display / presentation tool.   Data manipulation like dates / assignees / % complete - go with the advanced roadmap.

hope this helps.

[Dario Chincha _Seibert Group_]

Great question! You can build basic project plans in Confluence using templates and pages, but for true work breakdown structures, you might need to look beyond native features. David's suggestion of Advanced Roadmaps is indeed the go-to solution for structured project planning within the Atlassian toolset.

A challenge many teams face is the handoff from planning to execution. Confluence now has great native features that let you highlight text to create issues, including populating fields with AI (Atlassian Intelligence). However, you'll still need to manually route tickets to the correct project and select fields each time, which can lead to inconsistency and make tracking difficult.

Full disclosure - I'm with Seibert Group, and we built Viable Issues specifically to solve this workflow gap with pre-configured issue creation buttons for Confluence and easy reporting. There's probably also other approaches worth exploring depending on your exact needs.