Plenty of guides explain how to get your issues out of Jira. Fewer mention what gets left behind in the process.
Jira exports fine. Everything built around it doesn’t
Issues, statuses, comments, attachments. That part exports cleanly enough. The trouble is everything layered on top of it over the years. Marketplace apps keeping their own data outside Jira’s tables. Automation scripts nobody’s touched since whoever wrote them left the company. A handful of other tools quietly wired into your instance that you won’t notice until they stop working.
We wrote up the full version on our Jira migration gotchas page. This is the short one.
What actually breaks
App & add-on data
Zephyr/Xray, Tempo, Assets/Insight, eazyBI and their like keep data in their own proprietary structures, outside Jira’s tables. No standard export path for any of it.
Custom logic
ScriptRunner Groovy scripts, JMWE extensions, Automation for Jira rules. None of it moves. Somebody ends up reverse-engineering what it does before it can be rebuilt.
Reporting structures
Advanced Roadmaps hierarchies, JSM portals with SLAs, cross-project Gantt plans. Most tools don’t have a real equivalent for any of it. You end up redesigning the process rather than importing it.
Everything quietly pointing at Jira
Confluence macros that embed live issues, commit messages referencing old ticket keys, Slack or Teams integrations, SSO and directory sync. Most people forget any of this exists until it breaks.
Apps and scripts, at least you know to look for them. This last category is the one that catches teams off guard, usually a few weeks after cutover, when something stops syncing and nobody remembers why it was ever connected in the first place.
None of this is a reason not to migrate
It’s a reason not to migrate blind. Run a dry-run on one live project first, so whatever’s specific to your instance shows up while it’s still cheap to deal with. Go through your Marketplace apps and separate the ones holding data you’d actually miss from the ones nobody’s opened in a year. Leave time to document what your automation is doing before anyone tries to rebuild it. That step alone tends to run longer than people plan for.
The full migration guide walks through the process step by step, including the parallel-run window most off-the-shelf importers skip.
Want the full breakdown before you plan a migration?
See every category of what doesn’t survive, or get a cost and complexity estimate built around your own instance.