We’ve always believed in building solutions that set you and our customers up for long-term success. As your partner, we’re committed to keeping you informed and supported through every change. Since Jira and Confluence Cloud launched in 2011, we’ve seen the way cloud unlocks the full potential of teams. And now, as entire industries are reshaped by AI, the benefits of cloud are even more undeniable. That’s why we are shifting our full focus to the cloud and announcing that Atlassian Data Center apps and products will reach end of life on March 28, 2029.
Today, 99% of Atlassian customers are in cloud or on a path to cloud, including 75% of enterprise and regulated customers. Along with reporting faster time to value and reduced costs, these customers are benefiting from AI-enabled teamwork that has quickly become essential to staying competitive.
We understand that source code is particularly sensitive, and customers may have concerns about moving it to the cloud. In order to give customers maximum flexibility, we are offering a new license that provides both Bitbucket Data Center and Bitbucket Cloud access, giving customers the flexibility to operate in whichever environment their business prefers going forward beyond March 2029. In addition, Bitbucket Data Center apps will continue to be sold through the Marketplace.
We know this transition will take time and require careful planning for many customers and partners, so changes related to EOL will happen in stages over three years.
Here is what is changing and when:
December 16, 2025, new DC apps can no longer be submitted to the Marketplace.
March 30, 2026, DC license sales and app sales will end for new customers.
March 30, 2028, DC license expansions, sales, and app sales will end for existing customers.
March 30, 2029, DC subscriptions will expire and the environment will reach end of life.
The Atlassian Marketplace has long been pivotal to our customers’ success, and this will not change as we make the journey to a cloud-first future. We are here to support our partners, and our priority is to work closely with you to address your concerns, minimize disruption, and provide the resources and guidance for a successful transition. Please reach out to your Atlassian Partner Manager to discuss options and questions, and visit the Partner Portal for additional information.
I guess that explains the lack of effort in building a migration path from Forge apps back to DC now.
One of our main concerns with Forge was that due to the storage format differences, customers migrating from our P2 (server/DC) or Connect apps would go through a one-way migration to the new format, but there was no way to go back.
Despite Atlassian’s constant messaging that Cloud is the future, we have (and do) see enterprise customers occasionally going the other way, and with seemingly no automatic conversion back to the old format we were worried about how to continue supporting these customers.
I guess ending support for DC is one way to sidestep that problem entirely.
On the plus side, Java was never our strong suit anyway, and the pointless annual DC performance testing regime won’t be missed.
I imagine this had to have been a long time in the planning, and obviously had to be kept under confidentiality until ready to announce.
But it certainly would have made the hard-sell on Forge a bit easier to take if there had been some hint of this coming (or maybe I’m just very bad at reading between the lines).
Atlassian, what does this mean for maintenance of existing DC apps? Will you still churn out new major releases which bring lovely infrastructural changes, like you did for confluence 10? Or do we at least have a safe baseline to stay with until DC EOL? If not, we’re likely out because the effort to make the apps compatible is just not worth it.
The Atlassian team will release the next major version of the platform (Platform 9) in 2026, as well as major product releases and their corresponding LTS versions - and it’s official
Don’t think for a second they are going to back out. The cash cow Data Center has been milked dry (didn’t they just introduce new pricing tiers for the very largest installations???)
Of course we all know that the claimed 99% cloud migration rate is just a joke - good job comparing gazillions of 5-10 user instances with 10k and larger DataCenter installations.
I didn’t like the DataCenter environment from a developer perspective - sticking to age old frameworks and lacking any kind of serious documentation wasn’t fun at all. But at least everything will be better with the stable and reliable cloud environment. Not.
TBH I’m not even disappointed, just sad and tired because we wasted so many developer resources for a platform “that is not going away any time soon”.
Atlassian, can you clarify what the roadmap will be from there from an app developer’s perspective? Will DataCenter remain on platform 9, or do we still have to expect major incompatible changes until EOL?
I need some clarification on these points from Atlassian (CC @ChrisHemphill1) since there has been some confusion about them lately:
March 30, 2026, DC license sales and app sales will end for new customers. March 30, 2028, DC license expansions, sales, and app sales will end for existing customers.
In other communications from Atlassian we have already received contradictory information.
Essentially the above is up to interpretation and could mean any of these two:
Existing Atlassian customers (customers who already have a DC subscription) can purchase plugins from partners (new, renewal, upgrade) after march 2026
Only existing customers of partners can purchase the plugin, in other words the only possibilities are renewal and upgrade
When speaking with the MPAC booth on Team '25 Barcelona, they told us after march 28 2026 only renewals are possible, contradictory to someone else who told us the “new” thing only applied to the Data Center instance itself, and not plugins. The difference between items 1. and 2. is significant and must be clarified. In scenario 1 there is still possibilities for partners to gain market shares for example if a competitor ends support of the platform prematurely, whereas scenario 2 removes all possibility for “new to partner” customers to emerge when purchasing through Atlassian.
Also, I wish some of the other questions above could be addressed by Atlassian, like the roadmap question.
Where did you find this official FAQ, @adam.labus? In other words this phrasing is unnecessarily vague (especially seeing as Atlassian’s own employees have misunderstood this phrasing). Only people who have a Data Center subscription, can buy Data Center plugins (and also additional DC host subscriptions). It’s kind of obvious by its own respect. Since new customers cannot enter the platform, neither can they buy plugins.
my company and myself would like to express the most sincere displeasure and would like to be clear we dislike this maneuver.