Last autumn, a client messaged me in a quiet panic. "ALL of our projects are GONE. The menu says Spaces now. Did we lose something? Did I break something?" I've since fielded a dozen versions of that exact message, and the answer never changes: nothing's broken, nothing's lost, and no, it wasn't you. Atlassian simply renamed one of the most fundamental ideas in Jira — and the change has been quietly rolling across every Cloud site on the planet.

If you've logged into Jira lately and done a double-take at the navigation, this one's for you. Welcome to part one of a three-part series on creating and managing spaces in Jira. We'll start where the confusion starts: what actually changed, why it's more than a find-and-replace, and how to stand up your very first space without second-guessing every click.

So what happened to "projects"?

Here's the headline, minus the drama: Jira "projects" are now called "spaces." That's the whole change. It applies across every Jira Cloud product — Jira, Jira Service Management, and Jira Product Discovery — and Atlassian has been refreshingly blunt that this is purely a terminology shift. The functionality, behavior, and scope of those containers are identical to what they were. Your boards, workflows, automation rules, and saved filters all work exactly as before. Projects got a new name. Everything else stayed put.

The rollout is already behind us, too. Atlassian started with Free and Standard plans in September 2025, moved Premium and Enterprise in October, and wrapped up the stragglers — including the slower, stability-first release tracks — by early December. By the time you're reading this, "spaces" is simply the language of Jira Cloud. One note for the on-premise crowd: Atlassian has said it has no plans to bring this change to Jira Data Center, so if you're self-hosted, your projects are staying projects.

Why rename something this central?

This is the part I think deserves more credit than the eye-rolls it earned in a few corners of the community. The word "project" carries baggage. Ask ten people what a project is and most will describe something with a start date, an end date, a defined scope, and a tidy finish line. But that's almost never how a Jira container behaves. A support queue doesn't "finish." A marketing team's space runs for years. A product backlog is gloriously, permanently open-ended.

Moving to "space" matches the word to the reality: these are flexible, ongoing hubs for organizing work, not time-boxed initiatives. It also lines Jira up with Confluence, where "spaces" have always been a team's home base, and it reinforces the broader Teamwork Collection vision — Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo speaking one shared vocabulary instead of four dialects.

There's one more reason, and it's a clever one. Atlassian also introduced Atlassian Projects — a genuinely separate feature that lives in Atlassian Home and gives leaders a high-level view of work across tools, complete with goals, timelines, stakeholders, and status updates. If Jira had kept calling its containers "projects," you'd have "Jira projects" and "Atlassian Projects" meaning two completely different things in the same breath. Renaming the Jira container to "space" untangles that knot: spaces are where work gets done, and Atlassian Projects are how you narrate that work across the organization. We'll come back to this in part three, because it trips people up constantly.

Creating your first space

Enough backstory — let's build something. Creating a space uses the same muscle memory as creating a project did, just with updated labels. From the side navigation, hover over Spaces and select Create space (you can also reach it via Settings → Spaces → Create space). From there:

• Pick a template. Templates are grouped by use case and by app. Scrum and Kanban for software teams, IT and customer service desk templates if you run Jira Service Management, and ready-made starting points for business teams in marketing, HR, and legal. The templates you see depend on the Jira apps you're subscribed to.
• Choose company-managed or team-managed. This is the single most consequential decision in the whole flow, and it's worth slowing down for — more on it below.
• Name it. Give the space a clear name and key. Future you, and every teammate searching for it later, will thank you for a naming convention that actually means something.
• Create. That's it. Your space is live and ready for work items.

A couple of conveniences worth knowing: you can create a space that shares its configuration with an existing one — borrowing its permissions, workflows, and schemes rather than rebuilding from scratch — and you can import a space and its work items from another tool if you're migrating in. We'll spend all of part two on exactly this, because reuse is where space creation stops being a chore.

Company-managed vs. team-managed: the fork in the road

Jira gives you two flavors of space, and the difference comes down to who holds the keys. Company-managed spaces are configured by Jira admins using shared schemes for permissions, workflows, and fields. They're the right call when you need consistency and governance across many teams — standardized processes that have to look the same everywhere. Creating one requires the Administer Jira global permission.

Team-managed spaces hand control to the team that owns them. Whoever creates the space becomes its administrator and configures it themselves, no central admin ticket required. They're ideal for autonomous teams that want to move quickly. By default, any user can spin up a team-managed space, though admins can gate that behind the "Create team-managed spaces" global permission.

Neither is "better." The honest answer — the one we give every client — is that the right choice depends on your appetite for autonomy versus standardization, and the two can absolutely coexist in the same Jira site. We'll dig into how to choose well in part two.

"But what about my JQL and automation?"

This is the question that keeps admins up at night, so let me put it to bed. Your existing JQL clauses, saved filters, automation rules, REST APIs, and Forge apps all keep working. Behind the scenes, "project" still functions as a term in JQL for backward compatibility, and Atlassian has said it will add a "space" alias over time. In plain English: you don't need to rewrite anything to keep working today. Years of custom logic didn't evaporate overnight — which is exactly how a terminology change ought to be handled.

The Avaratak Take

It's tempting to file this under "much ado about a noun" and move on. I'd push back, gently. Words shape behavior. For years, the term "project" quietly told non-technical teams that Jira wasn't really for them — it was for engineers running time-boxed deliverables. "Space" sends a more inclusive signal: this is a home for your team's work, whatever shape that work takes. That's not marketing gloss; it's the kind of small language shift that lowers the barrier to adoption for the marketing, HR, legal, and operations teams who were always welcome but never quite felt invited.

So here's our advice: don't treat the rename as a cosmetic nuisance to grumble through — treat it as a prompt. Update your internal documentation and training so your language matches the tool. Use the moment to revisit whether your space naming conventions still make sense. And start drawing the line in your own head between a Jira space (execution) and an Atlassian Project (oversight), because getting that mental model right now will spare you a lot of confused Slack threads later. A rename is cheap. The clarity it unlocks, if you lean into it, is not.

Next up in part two: how to stop building every space from scratch — templates, shared configuration, and the custom-template trick that turns space creation from a bottleneck into a self-serve system.

Wrestling with how to structure your spaces, or whether company-managed or team-managed is right for your teams? That's the kind of thing we untangle every day as an Atlassian Solution Partner at Avaratak Consulting. Find us at avaratak.com — we'll help you make the call with your best interests first.