Jira builds a roadmap three separate ways, and each one needs a different plan. The Timeline view lays out one project's epics on a calendar and ships free on every tier. Plans, sold on Jira Premium, combines several projects into one cross team view. Jira Product Discovery lays out ideas rather than tickets, on every plan, and its Premium tier adds roadmaps that span several spaces. Only Product Discovery can show a customer the result without an Atlassian account, as a read only page they can filter and sort but cannot vote on.
The Timeline view, free on every plan
Open a software space (Jira's current word for a project) and select Timeline from the sidebar. It lays out the space's epics and the work items under them against weeks, months or quarters, each bar colored by status, and an epic with no dates of its own takes its span from the work under it. It ships on every Jira plan, Free included, and anyone with product access to that Jira site, meaning an Atlassian account and a seat, can open it. Nobody outside the company can see it, because a Jira site has no page for people without a login.
Atlassian's own troubleshooting page sets its limits. The timeline shows at most 5,000 work items at once, no more than 500 of them at the parent level, and only from the backlog of one space. Work moved to done more than a year ago drops off it. A roadmap across several spaces needs Plans.
How do you build a roadmap on the Timeline, step by step?
Five steps, each taken from Atlassian's help pages on 3 October 2026. You need permission to create work items in the space.
- Open the space and select Timeline in the sidebar.
- Select Create Epic at the bottom of the work items column, name it and press Enter. Each epic is one row of the roadmap.
- Hover over an epic and select + to add a child work item under it.
- Drag either end of a bar to set its start and end dates, or right click it and choose Change dates. An epic left without dates takes its span from its children.
- Hover over a bar to show a dot at each end, and drag a dot onto another item to link the two. Jira decides which one blocks the other from the order they are scheduled in.
Everybody who opens the result still needs a login to that Jira site.
Plans, on Jira Premium or Enterprise
Select Plans (Atlassian's current name for what used to be called Advanced Roadmaps) on a Jira Premium or Enterprise site to pull work from several boards, spaces and filters into one timeline. It is built for a program manager who needs to see across teams: dependencies between spaces, who has capacity, and a release date that spans more than one team's backlog. The account rule is the same as the Timeline view. Anyone added to the plan inside your Jira site can open it. Nobody outside it can.
A roadmap in Jira Product Discovery, on its own meter
Jira Product Discovery is billed per creator, separately from Jira Software, and every plan, Free included, can show a space's ideas as a board or a timeline. Premium adds Roadmaps: select Roadmaps in the sidebar, name it, and choose which Product Discovery spaces feed it, so one view consolidates ideas across all of them. A creator builds and edits the views. A contributor, free on every plan, can read and vote inside them, but needs their own Atlassian account to do that.
On Standard and Premium a creator can also publish a view to anyone with the link, once a site admin has switched that on. Atlassian calls the published version read only. Somebody outside the company can open it, filter it and sort it, and that is all they can do with it.
Atlassian's own product roadmap template
Atlassian publishes a free product roadmap template that lays out ideas rather than epics. It opens on a board view and switches to a timeline or a list. Its page suggests three fields to start with: Roadmap, with the values Now, Next and Later, to place an idea on a horizon before it has dates; Team, to assign it to a squad; and Theme, to group it by priority. Group by, Sort and Filter then turn one set of ideas into a different view for each audience.
The template's votes are for people inside the company. Its page describes Comments, Insights, Votes and Reactions as the way to collect feedback "from cross-functional teams and leadership."
A Jira roadmap, as an example
Here is one quarter for Kettlebox, a fictional habit tracking app, laid out first on the Timeline view. Kettlebox is not a real product.
| Epic | Child work items | Bar on the timeline | Linked to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly summary email | Email layout, opt in setting, send job | Weeks 1 to 4 | |
| Habit folders | Folder model, drag into a folder, folders in the CSV export | Weeks 3 to 8 | |
| Offline mode | Local cache, sync conflict rules, retry queue | Weeks 7 to 13 | Blocked by Habit folders |
The same three as a Now, Next and Later board, the way the template above sets it up:
| Now | Next | Later |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly summary email, theme Retention | Habit folders, theme Organization | Offline mode, theme Reliability |
The timeline commits to dates and shows that offline mode cannot start until folders exist. The board commits only to an order, which makes it the easier one to show outside the engineering team. Neither one records that, say, forty customers asked for offline mode and three asked for folders.
What each way costs
| Way | What it is | Plan and price, read 2 October 2026 | Who can view it | Can someone outside the company see it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timeline view | One space's epics and work items against a calendar, up to 5,000 at once | Free on every Jira Software plan; Standard $7.91 a user a month, Premium $14.54 a user a month | Anyone with product access to that Jira site | No, needs an Atlassian account |
| Plans | Several spaces and boards combined into one cross team timeline | Jira Premium, $14.54 a user a month, or Enterprise, custom priced | Anyone added to the plan on that Jira site | No, needs an Atlassian account |
| Jira Product Discovery view | Ideas as a board or timeline, one space on every plan, several spaces in a Premium roadmap | Free for 3 creators, Standard $10 a creator a month, Premium $25, contributors free | Creators and contributors on that Jira site | Yes, as a read only published view on Standard or Premium, once a site admin allows it |
A fourth option, a downloadable product roadmap template, skips Jira entirely and is worth a look if what you actually want is the columns, not the tool.
What none of these three give you
All three lay out work items: epics, stories, ideas with fields already filled in. A work item is internal by construction, carrying an assignee, a status and often a story point estimate, and it has no field for how many customers are asking for it. A request twelve customers asked for and a request one engineer thought of once look identical once they are both tickets.
That is the gap a customer facing roadmap has to fill: a plain description of the request, a count of who is asking, a status that can move backwards, and a place to record what got declined and why. None of the three ways above has those columns. The one view a customer can open, a published Product Discovery view, is read only, so the customer can see the plan but cannot add a request to it or vote on one.
Atlassian's own public tracker shows what a status that never moves looks like at scale. Of the 49,752 suggestions still open there on 4 October 2026, 45,849 sat in the first status, Gathering Interest, with a median age of 1,089 days. The whole read, 179,402 suggestions, is open data.
What connects to what is worth saying plainly. There is no Jira sync here: no outgoing webhook that pushes a vote count onto a ticket, no import that pulls a Jira roadmap in. VoteFirst is a public roadmap and voting board that sits beside Jira, not inside it, at $9/mo or $39/mo, a 14 day trial, a card at signup. Moving something from the board into a ticket, or marking the board once a ticket ships, is a person doing it by hand, or a script against the API. That is slower than a sync would be, and it is the whole of what is true today.
14 days, a card at signup, then $9 or $39 a month.