# Atlassian

> The Australian company behind Jira and Confluence, tools teams use to plan and document work.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, Software
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/atlassian/
- In Spanish: [Atlassian](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/atlassian/)

**Atlassian** was founded in Sydney in 2002 by two university classmates, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, who started it with credit card debt instead of investors. It makes software for teams to organize their work, and its best-known products are everywhere in tech offices even if the company name is not.

**Jira** is a tool for tracking work as **tickets**: each bug, feature or task gets a card with a description, an owner, a priority and a status, and moves across a board from "to do" to "done". Software teams use it to run agile sprints, and support, marketing and legal teams use it for their own requests. **Confluence** is a shared wiki where teams write and keep their documentation, meeting notes and plans, linked to the Jira tickets they talk about. Atlassian also owns **Trello**, simple card boards, and **Bitbucket**, a place to host code with git, among others.

It sells mostly through subscriptions priced per user, and for years was known for selling online without a big sales team. It went public on the Nasdaq in 2015. Like many software companies, it has pushed customers from installing its products on their own servers to using its cloud versions, and it now adds AI features, such as summarizing long tickets or pages.

## An analogy

The office whiteboard full of sticky notes (Jira) plus the shared binder where everyone writes down how things work (Confluence), both moved online so the whole company can see them.

## Keep in mind

- Founded in Sydney in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.
- Jira tracks work as tickets moving across a board.
- Confluence is a team wiki for documentation and notes.
- Also owns Trello and Bitbucket; sells per-user subscriptions.

## Go deeper

- [Atlassian (official site)](https://www.atlassian.com/)
- [Atlassian on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian)

## Related terms

- [Bug](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/bug/): A mistake in software that makes it behave differently from what was intended.
- [Git](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/git/): A time machine for code: every change saved, by whom and why.
- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.