Getting started

Last updated: 1 September 2026

Kanban+ is a Jira Cloud app built on Atlassian Forge. It adds a board that you configure yourself — your own columns, WIP limits, swimlanes, card rules, per-column time limits, automation rules and a dependency-aware timeline — on top of the Jira issues you already have. It stores its configuration inside your Atlassian installation and makes no network calls outside Atlassian.

How you get it today

Kanban+ is not yet listed on the Atlassian Marketplace. There's no install button and no price to quote yet.

If you want to run it in your own Jira site, write to hello@soverain.cz and we'll install a build for you. When the Marketplace listing goes live, this page changes and self-service install becomes possible.

What you need

• Jira Cloud. Kanban+ is a Forge Custom UI app and runs only on Jira Cloud. There is no Server or Data Center build.
• A Jira site admin to install it, and to approve the permission scopes at install time.
• Jira Software projects if you want the sprint-aware views (Backlog, Reports, Sprint Burndown). The Board, Timeline, List, Calendar and automation features work on any Jira project.

The app asks for these scopes at install:

There is no external-egress permission and no remote host in the app's manifest. See Data & privacy.

Where Kanban+ lives in Jira

One place: Apps → Kanban+ in the left sidebar. It's a single global page.

Everything Kanban+ does is a tab inside that one page, rather than a panel bolted onto native Jira. That means there is no Kanban+ project page, no issue panel, no board or backlog context action, and no dashboard gadget. If you're looking for a Kanban+ feature, it's on the Kanban+ page.

The tabs, left to right:

Create your first board

Open Apps → Kanban+. With no boards yet you'll see two choices.

Create a board from scratch. Give it a name and tick at least one project. That's the whole form — the board is created immediately and you're switched onto it.

Or import an existing Jira board. Pick one or more of your Jira boards; Kanban+ copies each board's name, projects, filter (JQL) and columns into a new Kanban+ board. Your original boards are never modified. If you don't have board-admin access on the source board, Jira won't hand over its columns and filter — the import still succeeds, but with project scope only, and the dialog tells you so.

Both options live in the board switcher in the page header afterwards, so you can add more boards at any time.

Your columns

A brand-new board starts with three columns — To Do, In Progress, Done — built from your projects' status categories. Every status in the "In progress" category lands in In Progress, and so on.

To change them, go to the Board tab and choose Configure columns. Drag statuses between columns; one column can hold several statuses. Statuses you leave in the Unmapped statuses list still show up on the board in a column called Unmapped, so nothing disappears silently.

Set a column's WIP limit and its SLA days in the same editor. WIP limits also appear in Settings; SLA thresholds only exist here, in the Board tab's column editor. That trips people up — see SLA tracking.

Scope the board

By default a board shows every issue in its projects that isn't Done, plus anything updated in the last 30 days. To narrow it, open Settings and use:

• Projects — the checklist you picked at creation.
• Board filter (JQL) — a fragment ANDed onto the project clause.
• Quick filters — named JQL fragments that become toggle chips above the board.

The board's query is assembled from those parts. A board scoped to two projects with a board filter of labels = frontend and the default board view produces:

(project in (10001,10002)) AND (labels = frontend) AND (statusCategory != Done OR updated >= -30d) ORDER BY updated DESC

If a board has neither projects nor a JQL filter, a banner tells you the board has no scope yet.

Who can change what

• Every user who can open the Kanban+ page sees every board on the site. Boards are app-scoped, not project-scoped. Only the "which board am I looking at" pointer is per-person.
• Editing a board — settings, columns, automation rules, deleting it — is limited to that board's administrators or a Jira site admin. The person who creates a board becomes its first administrator, and a board can never be left with none.
• The permission check runs on the server against your real Jira permissions, so a hidden button is not the only thing standing between a viewer and a change.
• One caveat worth knowing up front: the automation audit log has no permission check. Anyone who can open the page can read it, and it contains rule names and issue keys. See Data & privacy.

Add your own pages

The + tab (visible to board administrators) adds a subpage to the current board. Each is built from one of eleven templates:

A board can hold up to 50 subpages, each with up to 100 widgets.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? anywhere in the app for the overlay listing these.

One more that the overlay doesn't list: on the Board tab, / or Ctrl/⌘ + F jumps to the search box.

Number and letter shortcuts don't fire while you're typing in a field.

A note on preview mode

Opened outside Jira — a local dev server, say — the app can't reach the Jira APIs, so every view falls back to sample data behind a "Preview mode" banner. Those cards are fixtures, not your issues.

Where to go next

• Board & timeline — cards, columns, filters, bulk edits, the Gantt view
• Automation — triggers, conditions, actions, and how rules actually run
• SLA tracking — per-column time limits and what they do and don't measure
• Cross-board dependencies — blockers, critical path, the Portfolio view
• Data & privacy — what's stored, where, and for how long