Concurrent Licensing and How it Can Benefit your Atlassian Instance?

What is Concurrent Licensing?

In software, concurrent usage is the amount of users logged into an application at the same time.

Concurrent licensing, also known as floating licensing, it's an alternative licensing model which determines how users are authorised to access a particular software application. There are two main licensing models; named and concurrent licenses.

• With a named license model, a license must be purchased for each user, and is fixed to them, regardless of how often they use the application.
• A concurrent (or floating) license model holds licences in a generic group. Upon user log in, a licence is simultaneously assigned to the user, granting them application access. When the user becomes inactive, the licence is revoked and returned to the holding group.

The typical Atlassian user is active in Jira, Confluence, JSM or Bitbucket for less than 20% of the day. This makes the traditional named user license model inefficient and expensive compared to a concurrent license model. By sharing licenses between users, you can reduce the license tier that you subscribe to and significantly reduce your license cost.

Concurrent Licensing & License Cost Reduction

In the world of Atlassian, suppose:

• You are subscribed to a 2,000 Jira licence user tier
• Your concurrent usage is 20% of your total users

Therefore, only 400 users will be active concurrently. Say you wanted a 100 user buffer for precaution (this is completely flexible for your instance needs), you can subscribe to a 500 licence user tier.

Based on Atlassian's RRP pricing

• Cloud customers can save $139,500 on licence costs
• Data Centre customers can save $107,000 on licence costs
  (Last updated March 2025)

In an environment of ever rising business costs, it quite literally pays to be efficient. Tackle your budget from the root, and see how we can optimise your Atlassian licences with concurrent licensing.

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