Atlassian is cutting jobs because no new sane company wants to use their products. Confluence was once innovative but now has gone stale. Jira is a nightmare and is most ripe for the AI based replacement. Bitbucket is a neglected product that has lost ground to GitHub and GitLab. The writing has been on the wall for Atlassian for years.
The peak was right before they launched marketplace in my opinion (2013?). After that they had no incentive to improve Jira/Confluence, easier to take the marketplace cut. I could never understand why they couldn’t solve the speed issues though. It just got worse and worse.
I tested out Atlassian Rovo last year. I tried to get it to list all of the Confluence articles I had written in 2025 so I could use that information for my performance review. It found three, regardless of how I queried it. I had actually written over sixty. I tried, but never did found a good use case for it. Too unreliable.
I tried to pin my comment. It turned out after we migrated to the cloud version, this option disappeared and the ticket is flooded with commit messages making it essentially useless for humans. Rovo obviously faked a solution:
Atlassian Rovo is considered utterly dangerous on my team (as we are still encouraged to use it…), the first time I did it erased a whole page - it couldn’t get the most basic instruction correct, would leave out 80% of what I input, respond to corrections with the same problem. It’s just a liability.
i agree that their products are quite stale, but a lot of that is cuz they're so deeply entrenched in enterprise workflows in a way that's incredibly hard to displace. switching costs for jira alone across a large org are brutal.
could an AI native competitor eventually eat their lunch? sure. but "no new sane company wants to use their products" is a stretch when their customer count is literally still growing double digits.
I just started using Linear, it is AI native/friendly and a million effing times less bloated than Jira. So long Jira. And I say that as an old shit who migrated from Bugzilla to Jira a long time ago and I remember how refreshing Jira felt at the time.
As digital post-it notes, I’m not sure how I would replace Trello with AI. But otherwise I think your going to get mass agreement that Atlassian is running into the ground.
It went cloud-only and Atlassian discontinued the self-hosted version of Bitbucket. Not strictly neglect, likely just a business decision, but even still the cloud version of bitbucket remains a subpar UX.
