Established in 2002, Jira is Atlassian’s proprietary issue tracking product that enables bug tracking and agile project management. However, while there have been some tools on the market to enable spreadsheet views of a company’s projects in Jira or connect it to services like Google Sheets, it’s the latest offering, JXL that’s making waves.
Atlassian Ventures invested in JXL earlier this year, which was founded by two former Atlassian employees, Daniel Franz and Hannes Obweger.
JXL is a spreadsheet app that enables users to manage work in one place. It offers highly customizable sheet views inside of Jira without the need to export data.
“Project and product managers, Jira administrators, engineers, designers, IT professionals, support staff, and all kinds of knowledge workers use JXL to create tailored views for their jobs,” the company wrote in its announcement. “They enjoy the freedom to arrange every last detail of a sheet to fit their team’s or individual way of working. By updating and assigning tasks all in-line in one place, they save time, work smarter together, and supercharge their workflow.”
What makes JXL such an exciting addition to Atlassian’s marketplace is that none of the customer's data sits on JXL’s servers. Instead, it sits right on top of Jira’s APIs, which in turn also means that changes are synced back and forth in real time.
It’s also reasonably priced. Pricing for JXL starts at $1 for teams with up to 10 users. Larger teams pay per user/month, with prices that go down to $0.45/user/month for licenses with over 5,000 seats. There is also a free trial.
Additionally, Atlassian has announced that it has acquired Australia-based ThinkTilt, the company behind the popular Jira-centric no-code/low-code form builder ProForma.
The move pushes Atlassian's focus further beyond IT and DevOps into enterprise service management (ESM) for business buyers such as marketing, legal, and HR departments. This strategy began in earnest with Atlassian's launch of Jira Service Management in November.
