A Community-driven solution for your Jira exit: The OpenProject Jira importer

Teams around the world are looking for alternatives to Jira, whether due to changing project requirements, a preference for open source solutions or rising costs. However, switching tools is often easier said than done – especially if a seamless migration solution is not readily available. This is where the strength of open source and Community-driven development comes into play. A developer recently faced this exact challenge — needing to migrate from Jira to OpenProject but finding no suitable tool. Instead of giving up, he developed his own open source Jira migration tool using the OpenProject API and made it available to others – helping not only himself but the entire open source Community.

“Since I’m a developer, and to a hammer, everything is a nail — I wrote my own migration script.”
Emad Ibrahim, developer of the OpenProject Jira importer

The challenge: Migrating from Jira to OpenProject

For many teams, Jira has long been the project management tool of choice. In many cases, simply out of habit and a lack of time to start over. Especially since Atlassian continues to raise prices and “lock-in” users into their cloud offering, more and more organizations are rethinking their options and looking for cost-effective open source alternatives that are trustworthy and feature-rich.

However, switching from Jira to OpenProject presents challenges:

• Time constraints – teams often don’t have the resources to manually migrate their projects.
• Technical complexity – a migration tool must be able to handle issues, work logs and custom fields.
• Lack of ready-made solutions – until now, there was no open source Jira to OpenProject migration tool.

A member of the open source Community developed a solution

In the face of these challenges, a member of the open source Community who wanted to migrate from Jira to OpenProject took action: Developer Emad Ibrahim created his own Python-based migration script to streamline the process – and, in the true spirit of open source, made it available to others. He shared his experience on Hacker News, explaining:

“Migrating thousands of JIRA tasks (projects, comments, attachments, etc.) was a challenge. OpenProject provided an Excel Macro written in Visual Basic, which didn’t work for me. So, I wrote a Python script to automate the migration. In a few hours, I had all our data moved over, and we’ve been happily using OpenProject ever since.”

The open source community quickly took notice of this post. Users quickly recognized the value of this migration tool and expressed their appreciation:

• “This is awesome. JIRA migrations are a massive headache, and the fact that you are providing a working solution as open-source software is solid.”
• “Perfect for people who want to ditch proprietary tools.”
• “I have been thinking about using a tool other than Jira for so long, but since you have already shared your experience, I could use your script and switch to OpenProject.”

[Source: Comments on this reddit post]

This positive response highlights how challenges can be solved together when developers share their solutions and open source them. 💙

We at OpenProject want to help finding migration solutions

At OpenProject, we want to support solutions that make migration easier. Many teams want to make the switch but don’t have the time or technical skills to do so. This Community-developed migration tool is a step in the right direction and helps lower the hurdle for those looking to migrate.

Consejo

This story also reminds us of another recent Community success: The GitLab integration for OpenProject. Similar to this migration tool, the GitLab integration also started as a Community initiative before becoming an official OpenProject integration.

Thanks a lot to Emad Ibrahim for open-sourcing your development and helping others migrate, too! It’s really great to see success stories like this in our open source Community and we are very happy to be a part of it.

If you want to use the OpenProject Jira importer, you can find it here on GitHub. Please note that even though we really appreciate this tool, it is a Community-developed tool and not part of the official OpenProject offer, so we cannot provide support related to using it. If you are interested in other OpenProject Community-developed plugins as well as official integrations, see this list in our documentation.