Known vs Jira

Jira is Atlassian's configurable tracker for work items, built for teams that need custom workflows, permissions and planning at scale. Known is a shared model of your company, where issues are one kind of record next to your customers, decisions and conversations. Choose Jira for deep configuration, portfolio planning and the Atlassian suite. Choose Known when a small team and its agents need issues that carry their context.

Facts about Jira come from Atlassian's own docs and pricing page, read on 27 October 2026.

When to choose Jira

• You need custom workflows, work types and fields per space, with permission schemes and item-level security.
• You plan across teams: Jira's Plans (Premium) adds capacity planning, scenarios and cross-project dependencies.
• You're regulated or large: approvals, sandboxes, uptime SLAs and audit logs.
• You already use Confluence or Jira Service Management.
• You want agents in the tracker: Jira lets you assign work items to Rovo or MCP agents and keeps their changes in the item's history.

When to choose Known

• Your agents need the context around a work item: the customer, the decision, the last call. In Known these are records linked to the issue; in Jira they're in other tools.
• You're a small team and want a model you define in minutes, not a tracker to administer.
• You track more than software work in one place: sales, a fundraise, hiring, each a table with a schema you write.
• You want every change versioned with who made it, person or agent, on every plan.

Set it up in one sentence

Connect Known to your agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and others) and paste:

Known: set up issue tracking from https://github.com/future-unknown/skills/blob/main/skills/issue-tracking/SKILL.md

The agent asks which wiki to use, your issue prefix and how your team groups work, shows you what it will create, and waits for your OK. Then it creates the issues table with its schema and rules, and publishes an issues site in Known: a list and a board in your workflow's order, each issue with its links and history, updating live as people and agents change issues. The site shows issues; you change them through your agent or in Known. To set it up by hand instead, see Set up issue tracking in Known.

Side by side

	Jira	Known
What an issue is	A work item in a space	A record in a table you define
Configuration	Workflows, work types, fields, screens, schemes	A JSON Schema per table, and the table's page for rules
Views	Backlog, list, board, timeline, calendar, summary	Table (sort and filter), record pages, backlinks; with the issue-tracking skill, an issues site with a list, a board, each issue's history and live updates (it shows issues; changes go through your agent or Known)
Planning	Sprints on boards; Plans on Premium	None built in
GitHub and GitLab	Development panel, Smart Commits, automation	None built in; agents add commit and deploy links
Notifications	Notification schemes, email, Slack	None
Agents	Rovo MCP server (Standard and up; delete and admin tools off until enabled); agents assignable to work items	MCP server for the whole wiki; agents act as the person who connected them
History	Work-item history; user-activity audit log on Enterprise	Every record versioned with who changed it, on every plan
Export	CSV and Excel up to 10,000 items per export; full site backup	Records as JSON over the CLI and API

Using both

Keep sprints and boards in Jira and the context in Known. Connect both MCP servers to your agent; ask it to read the related customer and decision in Known before it works a Jira item, and to record the outcome in Known when it's done.

Moving from Jira

Set up issue tracking first, in one sentence (above). Export the work items to CSV from a search (up to 10,000 per export; split larger sets with JQL). Give the CSV to your agent and ask it to create one record per row in your issues table, following the table's schema; they show up on the issues site as they arrive.

Sources

Atlassian: Jira pricing and plans, Rovo MCP server, supported tools, agents in Jira, Smart Commits, notification schemes, exporting over 10,000 items. Read 27 October 2026.