What Project Commander is and how to use it, answered by the people who make it.
No. Project Commander is an add-on for Jira and cannot be used without it. It installs into your own Jira site as a Forge app, reads the projects, sprints, issues, people, time tracking and dependency links you already keep there, and leaves Jira as the place the work lives. Nothing is copied out and no second system of record is created.
The only Atlassian products it stands in for are Jira Premium — its planning and capacity features — and Rovo, whose delivery reporting it replaces with arithmetic. On Jira Standard you keep Jira and add Project Commander on top. On Premium, plenty of teams keep the roadmap in Plans and use Project Commander to pressure-test it. See Project Commander vs Jira, Jira Premium and Rovo.
A Gantt chart nobody has to maintain. Every epic and issue is drawn as a bar on a calendar, for one project or every registered project at once, and each bar sits where Project Commander’s own scheduler says the work lands — from the size of the job, who has it, the hours they really have, their booked time off, the public holidays, and what blocks what. Change an estimate, a person or a date and the whole chart redraws.
Sprints across the top, dependency arrows between the bars, the critical chain on one tick, one lane per person across every project on one press, and the same target date and forecast date as every other screen. Bars can be dragged to set dates or resized to change the size of the work, and nothing reaches Jira until Update Jira is pressed. See the screens →
Ask is a sidebar that slides in beside the screen you are reading, shown and hidden by the last control in the tab bar, on every tab. You type a question about the project in plain words — when will we finish, which sprints are overcommitted, what would one more person do, who has more work than they can do — and get the answer as figures with labels. Every figure is worked out by the app, by the same calculations the tabs are drawn from, so the same question gives the same numbers every time.
A what-if changes nothing: an amber line stays on screen while one is in force, with Back to the plan as it stands beside it. Nothing is written to Jira, and no AI model is asked anything.
Ask is in the app inside Jira. It is not in the live demo or the web app. See what it answers →
Most Jira apps report on what has already happened — burndowns, dashboards, status. Project Commander answers the question those can't: is this plan actually deliverable? It weighs the work remaining against the team's real capacity through your target date and tells you whether you'll finish on time, which sprints are overloaded, and which dependencies threaten the date — with a forecast finish date and a confidence range.
Every number is arithmetic on data already in Jira, and no AI model is asked anything. And if scope grows faster than the team clears it, or the work does not fit the sprints you have planned, the forecast says so, rather than giving a comfortable date two quarters out.
It's a planning-intelligence tool, not a reporting tool, and it runs natively inside Jira as a Forge app, so your data never leaves your Atlassian instance and your own browser. It calls no AI service, and it declares no address outside Atlassian that it is allowed to reach.
Other tools give you one piece — a capacity view, a timeline, or a portfolio roll-up. Project Commander combines capacity, demand, dependencies, and progress into a single feasibility answer. It keeps that answer consistent across every screen — the same number means the same thing on the Dashboard, the Sprints tab, the Scope tab and the What-If tab.
The forecast walks the plan sprint by sprint and names the person who becomes the bottleneck; it does not work from a team average. It installs natively in about two minutes and runs on a real project immediately, includes a What-If view to test changes before you commit to them, and is free while in beta. For the detail, product by product, see Project Commander vs Jira, Jira Premium and Rovo.
Each comparison is its own page, built from the other product's own documentation, with sources listed: what it is for, where it is genuinely stronger, and where Project Commander is.
The short version of every one of them: those apps show you how the work is laid out and who is booked. Project Commander tells you whether the work in the sprints can be delivered by the date with the people you have, where it breaks, and what to do about it. For the field-by-field view, see the blog post Jira capacity planning apps compared.
It came from a recurring frustration: Jira tells you what's happening, but not whether the plan will actually land — so teams find out too late that a commitment wasn't realistic. Project Commander was built to answer that up front: can we deliver this in the time and capacity we have, and if not, where's the risk — and to make that answer something you can put straight in front of stakeholders.
The native Jira app is built on Atlassian Forge — a React user interface with Node.js resolvers, running entirely inside Atlassian's platform. A standalone browser version at projectcommander.app is built with React and hosted on Netlify. No AI service is used: every figure, and every sentence written around one, comes from the app's own code.
Delivery teams that plan their work in Jira and have to commit to a date. Project managers who need to know whether a commitment is realistic and what threatens it; scrum masters and delivery leads planning sprints that keep coming out overcommitted; engineering managers who need to see who is overloaded and where staffing has to change; and PMO and executive sponsors who need schedule confidence and portfolio-level risk they can put in front of stakeholders.
It suits teams running sprints on a Jira board, in story points or time estimates, on a single project or a program of several.
If you've configured a board, this usually means the board has no active or future sprints, or you lack permission to view it. Open the Projects tab, click Edit on the project, and:
If you're running a Kanban or ad-hoc workflow with no sprints, switch off Sprint Mode on the same Edit Project form and use a JQL filter instead — every tab (Dashboard, Scope, Alerts, Risks, Actions, Team & Capacity, What-If, Projects) works in the sprintless mode too.
Project Commander supports two estimation modes:
Choose your Estimation Mode per project in the Add/Edit Project form on the Projects tab. Both work with all features including auto-level and velocity tracking.
Auto-Level redistributes issues across sprints to balance capacity:
After Auto-Level runs, you'll see which issues were moved with color-coded badges. Click Undo to revert all changes, or Accept to save to Jira.
No. Every feature in Project Commander is available to every user — there's no premium tier, no per-feature upgrade prompt, and no behaviour change based on licence. Pricing applies to who pays, not what features they get. Beta users and post-beta paid customers see the exact same app.
Yes — two ways, depending on what you're after:
Project Commander tracks velocity when you complete sprints:
Set how many sprints to average in the Use last … sprints box — any whole number from 1 to 10, default 5. The box is on Projects → Edit and again behind the Delivery Forecast card's gear; both write the same setting.
Yes. Project Commander is built on Atlassian Forge, which provides enterprise-grade security:
See our Privacy Policy for details.
Every open risk carries a response strategy — your decision about how to handle the risk while it's open. Pick from:
The strategy chip shows under each risk title. The Dashboard's Top Open Risks widget summarises the mix and sorts Undecided / Escalate above Accept at the same severity so attention-demanding items surface first.
The Scope tab renders both on the same chart, so you can read whichever framing your team uses:
Both views come from the same data — every point burned down lifts the burnup line by the same amount.
No. Project Commander asks no AI model anything, and it declares no address outside Atlassian that it is allowed to reach, so nothing about your project can be sent to an AI provider.
Every figure is the app’s own arithmetic; the Ask panel’s answers are written by the app from those figures; and the risks the Risks tab offers under Suggested by the app come from rules over the project’s own data. There is no AI section on the Settings gear and no API key to add.
Yes. Open the Projects tab and click + Add Project to register additional projects. Once two or more are registered, a "Program view" option appears in the header selector. Switch to it and every tab — Dashboard, Scope, Alerts, Risks, Actions, Epics, Team & Capacity, What-If — unions data across every project you manage. You can declare cross-project dependencies, allocate people across projects via the Team Allocation Matrix, and test program-wide what-ifs (capacity, scope, velocity) in the What-If tab's All Projects view, which never writes to Jira.