Questions & Answers

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 button in the tab bar, on every tab, that opens a panel where 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 unless you say so — a change you ask for is described first, with what it does to the numbers, and made only on a second press. An AI key is optional and never supplies a figure.

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. Where AI is switched on, it explains and suggests; it never produces a figure. And if scope grows faster than the team clears it, the forecast says the work does not finish, 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. AI features, when you turn them on, use your own API key — Project Commander never stores or resells AI usage.

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.

• Jira, Jira Premium and Rovo — the timeline, the typed capacity view and the AI summaries, against a forecast with odds.
• Tempo Capacity Planner — planning people's hours by the day, against demand read from the sprints.
• Portfolio by HeroCoders — the portfolio table, Gantt and day-level bookings, against sprint verdicts and a forecast.
• ActivityTimeline — day-by-day scheduling and timesheets, against deliverability per sprint.
• Planyway — roadmap, team calendar and workload heat map, against a forecast with odds.

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. AI features connect to major providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) using the customer's own API key.

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.

1. Go to any Jira dashboard (or create a new one)
2. Click the Add gadget button
3. Search for "Project Commander"
4. Click Add to add it to your dashboard
5. Configure by selecting your board and typing the project's Sprint Capacity number

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:

• Check the Board ID (typing the project key finds the project's board for you)
• Make sure the board has active or future sprints
• Verify you have permission to view the board

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:

• Points Mode: Reads your issues' story points. Jira sites store these in different custom fields (team-managed projects use "Story point estimate", company-managed ones use "Story Points"), so each project has a Story Points Field setting in its Add/Edit form on the Projects tab — the app detects which field your issues actually use and warns if the configured field misses estimates another field holds. Best for teams using relative estimation.
• Time Mode: Uses the time tracking field (hours or days). Best for teams tracking actual work time.

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:

• Analyzes which sprints are over your configured limit
• Moves issues based on your chosen strategy: Priority, Size, Due Date, Balanced, or Compare All (runs every strategy and shows their delivery forecasts side-by-side)
• Respects issue dependencies (blockers stay in earlier sprints)
• Creates new sprints if needed (up to 10)
• Fills each sprint to whatever its Capacity source control on the Sprints tab says — the project's Sprint Capacity number, Team capacity, or Effective team 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:

• Multiple independent gadgets on one dashboard. Add several Project Commander gadgets, configure each one for a different board, and each one keeps its own settings and velocity data. Best when you want side-by-side views of unrelated boards.
• Register the boards as projects in a Program. Open the Projects tab → + Add Project for each board you want to track, then switch to Program view in the header selector. Every tab (Dashboard, Scope, Alerts, Risks, Actions, Epics, Team & Capacity, What-If) unions data across the projects, and you also get cross-project dependencies, shared team allocation, and program-wide what-if. See the "Can I run multiple projects as a program?" entry below for the full feature list.

Project Commander tracks velocity when you complete sprints:

• Completed Points: Sum of points for issues in "Done" status when sprint closes
• Average Velocity: Mean of completed points across recent sprints
• Expected Velocity: Weighted prediction based on trends
• Efficiency: Finished work as a share of committed work, averaged over the project's closed sprints. Committed work is everything that was in the sprint except work that was cancelled. It is not finished work divided by the team's available capacity.

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:

• No data is stored on any server outside Atlassian's infrastructure
• All API calls go through Atlassian's secure gateway
• Your Jira data is never copied to external servers; a copy of the issues you have read is kept only in your own browser, for speed
• API keys are stored with encryption
• Access follows your existing Jira permissions

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:

• Avoid — remove the source by changing scope, schedule, or approach
• Mitigate — reduce probability or impact with concrete actions (default)
• Transfer — move the risk to a vendor or partner team (requires an Accountable owner)
• Accept — absorb the risk; requires a rationale
• Escalate — needs portfolio or leadership decision; surfaces in Alerts under "Escalated risks awaiting decision"
• Defer — not enough information yet; requires a future review-by date
• Undecided — initial value; prompts you to pick a strategy on next edit

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:

• Burndown view — Scope, Remaining, Ideal Burndown. Teams that track "work left" read these lines.
• Burnup view — Burnup, Ideal Burnup, Burnup Forecast. Teams that track "work completed" read these.

Both views come from the same data — every point burned down lifts the burnup line by the same amount.

You can connect Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), or Google (Gemini). Configure your provider and API key in Settings → AI Features. The key is held in Atlassian Forge's encrypted secret storage and is only read server-side when an AI call fires — the request goes from the Forge backend directly to the provider you chose, never through a Project Commander server. AI features only run when you explicitly trigger them after a key is saved; there's no telemetry or background AI activity. Removing the key disables every AI feature and is wiped on uninstall.

Current AI features: the question box on the What-If tab, AI Review in Auto-Level on the Sprints tab, Chain Analysis in the Critical Chain section of the Projects tab, and the wording of answers in the Ask panel. The risk suggestions on the Risks tab, labelled AI Generated, are worked out by rules from the project's own data and call no AI service.

The prompt the provider receives includes: issue keys, summaries, statuses, story points, time estimates and time spent, priority, issue types, assignee display names, due/start/resolution dates, dependency links (blocks / blocked-by), epic links, sprint names, sprint states, sprint dates, sprint goals (free text), team-member display names, hours per week, utilization, average velocity, time-off entries (member name, dates, reason), holiday entries, and velocity history. For the What-If question box, the message you typed is also included. The Ask panel sends less: your question, and afterwards the figures the app has already worked out, to be put into a paragraph. The prompt does not include full issue descriptions, attachments, or issue comments. See the Privacy Policy §4 for details.

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.