[HN Gopher] We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulate...
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We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries
Author : viharkurama
Score : 91 points
Date : 2025-07-22 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plane.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (plane.so)
| viharkurama wrote:
| After a U.S. federal contractor told us they loved Plane but
| couldn't use it due to ITAR requirements, we spent 6 months
| building a truly air-gapped version. No external connections, no
| license pings, no telemetry, everything runs in complete
| isolation.
|
| The interesting part: our air-gapped deployment actually runs
| faster than our SaaS version. Turns out when you eliminate all
| network latency, things get snappy.
|
| This post covers the technical challenges we solved (supply chain
| trust, 2GB bundle size, offline licensing) and why regulated
| industries need alternatives to cloud-only tools like Jira.
| vosper wrote:
| > cloud-only tools like Jira.
|
| But Jira is not cloud-only?
|
| https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center
| magicalhippo wrote:
| They've removed it from their pricing page now, but when they
| announced the discontinuation of the regular on-prem server
| the minimum for datacenter was like 500 licensed users or
| something along those lines.
|
| In any case it was clear it's not for small shops like us.
|
| That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps
| those customers are predominantly large?
| viharkurama wrote:
| We took a different approach with Plane's air-gapped
| offering. No minimum user requirements at all. We evaluate
| based on your use case and domain requirements, not team
| size.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Good approach IMHO.
|
| We do the similar with our B2B product (in an entirely
| different niche). We have everything from single-person
| companies up to very large ones. Similarly we set price
| based on use-case and requirements.
| bpt3 wrote:
| It's still on this page:
| https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira
|
| $51k for the smallest license they offer.
|
| I still run an old version on an air gapped network and
| will continue to do so until we're forced to change for
| some reason. It's not a hefty requirement; we run it for a
| team of < 10 developers on a small VM and it just works.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Blind as a bat, thanks. Was looking for a pricing page or
| similar, totally scrolled by that box which looked like
| marketing fluff.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps
| those customers are predominantly large?
|
| There are lots of very small classified networks out there
| with only a few dozen users.
|
| There are a lot more user communities course that aren't
| necessarily airgapped, but where they have special
| compliance requirements that pretty much mandate self
| hosting (or at least bring-your-own cloud.)
| jasondc wrote:
| $$$$ Very expensive
| bpt3 wrote:
| It might as well be for the vast majority of companies, since
| I believe the smallest number of users you can buy support
| for is 500.
|
| To be more specific, they killed off the legacy Jira Server
| and now only offer these enterprise versions of Jira and the
| rest of the suite if you won't move to the cloud.
| thaack wrote:
| Sure if you commit to a 500 user minimum.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get
| snappy.
|
| Same experience with JIRA. I read all these negative comments
| here and elsewhere about how slow and clunky JIRA was, and I
| couldn't relate at all.
|
| Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA Cloud
| and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense.
|
| We've since moved to JIRA Cloud ourselves, and I understand
| now.
|
| We moved and none of the new places had any viable computer
| room, so literally had to put the rack in a closet And well,
| that ain't cutting it for physical access control these days.
| Thankfully we have very simple flows without any BS, so not too
| many 1-5 second clicks to get things done.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA
| Cloud and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense.
|
| Even Atlassian doesn't use Jira cloud. Btw it's not "JIRA".
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Even Atlassian doesn't use Jira cloud.
|
| That would explain a lot.
|
| > Btw it's not "JIRA".
|
| When did they change this? I'm fairly certain[1] it used to
| be JIRA.
|
| [1]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira061
| eastbound wrote:
| In 2013, to be specific.
| joeldo wrote:
| That's no longer the case - a large portion of teams are
| now using cloud variants of Confluence/Jira.
| tomrod wrote:
| What a weird time to enforce British rules for acronyms.
|
| JIRA stands for JIRA Isn't Really Awesome.
| mikestaas wrote:
| Atlassian very much do use Jira cloud. Source: I worked
| there for 10 years. Not apologising for it's performance
| however.
| uxp100 wrote:
| I have had the opposite experience with Jira at a relatively
| large corporation (years ago). Our local Jira was probably
| just configured weird or on underpowered hardware though.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| Having adopted a number of development tools, including
| Jira and Confluence, it's amazing people let them sit there
| chugging away on underpowered machines with hundreds of
| users quietly complaining about the speed. Throwing some
| extra CPU cores and memory is so cheap for the quality of
| life improvement, let alone the productivity gain.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The concurrent (human) user counts at even large
| companies is probably a couple dozen at most.
|
| Usually when these tools, the performance problems
| magically vanish if you disable all the integrations
| people have set up. My company is constantly denial of
| service attacking Jira with Github updates, for example.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Also that Jira is one of these mutants, between SPA and
| pages, doing neither well.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > We've since moved to JIRA Cloud ourselves, and I understand
| now.
|
| Jira on-prem was dog slow, yes, especially if it didn't live
| on the same server as the database. But Jira Cloud? It isn't
| much faster than that! It's a piece of hot mess. Loading
| placeholders _everywhere_. Really I have absolutely zero idea
| what Atlassian is doing, but I know for sure optimizing for
| performance is _not_ amongst the things they are doing.
| echelon wrote:
| Our org used Jira on-prem for 2k engineers and 3k additional
| staff and it was slow as molasses.
|
| The dialogues and context menus took forever to show and page
| navigation was beyond painful.
|
| We had dedicated engineering for maintaining our Jira and
| Bitbucket, and they still fell over. We eventually moved back
| to GitHub. (Our usage went from GitHub on-prem pre-MS ->
| Bitbucket on-prem -> GitHub cloud post-MS.)
|
| I hate Jira regardless of where it's deployed. It's a beast.
| jeron wrote:
| >our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS
| version. Turns out when you eliminate all network latency,
| things get snappy.
|
| Notion, take notes
| yodon wrote:
| How do you handle compliance in confirming that the product is
| only used for the license duration? (Or is it more of a one
| time purchase plus recurring fee for updates?)
| viharkurama wrote:
| It's a subscription license. We offer air-gapped deployments
| under the Business plan. As part of compliance, we request
| customers to share license logs quarterly-no PII involved.
| Also, the license enforces seat limits, so you can't exceed
| the number of users you've purchased.
| https://plane.so/pricing
| Msurrow wrote:
| At this level (govt, 6 figure+ deals) I would at least
| consider if this problem should have a non-tech solution, and
| instead have a legal/lawyer solution. In my experience (not
| US based though) the govt contracts are under compliance
| programmes as well so the govt agency's legal/contract mgmt
| team would probably follow up internally on expiring
| contracts (ie licences) and require the owning stakeholder to
| either renew the contract or abandon the software. Meaning
| the customer would supervise itself regarding licence. But
| even if you don't want to rely on self-supervision then
| having your lawyer spend 1 hour reaching out with a "do you
| need to renew your licence" at the end of a licence term
| would probably be much cheaper than building and maintaining
| an air-gapped licence solution.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Years back a friend of mine's startup failed when USAF
| pirated their software and the original customer org
| stopped paying for it.
|
| Feds are DMCA immune, so no real recourse.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Sounds like having only one paying customer was the real
| cause of the business's failure.
| atonse wrote:
| This seems very suspect.
|
| Usually you do have recourse via procurement channels and
| reps. If you file a complaint with that agency stating
| that they're using a license without paying for it, it
| will result in at least an investigation.
| jasondc wrote:
| Big fan of Plane since it's open-core.
|
| Doesn't seem to be a lot of options for self-hosted/open-core
| project management software. The existing ones looks pretty bad,
| and don't come anywhere close to Jira level functionality.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > don't come anywhere close to Jira level functionality.
|
| In my experience that's probably a good thing. I've moved from
| a company using Phabricator to one using Jira. Phabricator had
| exactly everything we needed and was very nicely designed and
| worked really nicely.
|
| Jira has everything you need plus loads of other stuff that
| project managers feel like they need to add. Oh and they'll
| never clear anything up or fix any config bugs because they
| don't actually have to ever use the "report bug" form so who
| cares if there are 100 fields and half of the mandatory ones
| are hidden in "More fields"? 5 different states for "TODO"? Eh
| who cares. 3 different ways to say which team a bug is in?
| Better fill them all in for every bug.
|
| It's better to be missing features than to have features that
| project managers can configure.
| hd4 wrote:
| just a fyi for anyone looking for a neat little kanban board,
| gitea has kanban built-in into the projects feature.
|
| (obviously lacks really fine-grain customization that would be
| found in other jira alternatives)
| zppln wrote:
| Ehm, fairly sure you can use Jira in an air-gapped environment.
| jasondc wrote:
| from Google: "Atlassian has sunsetted its Server product line,
| including Jira Server, meaning they are no longer supported and
| users need to migrate to Cloud or Data Center versions.
| Specifically, support for Atlassian Server products ended on
| February 15, 2024. This includes the end of new license sales,
| renewals, and security updates for Jira Server. "
| kingnothing wrote:
| There's the self-hosted Atlassian Data Center product.
|
| https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center
|
| They also offer Government Cloud.
|
| https://www.atlassian.com/government
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You'll pay through your nose for a Data Center license
| though, and it doesn't change the fact that Jira is a mess
| so slow that SAP can appear fast in comparison.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Data center version is available. I use it.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Jira has a self-hosting option. It already is air gap ready. See
| Jira Data Center.
|
| 1. https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| There is no price anywhere. I would be interested to use that for
| either my job or for private projects, but where and how much do
| I pay?
|
| Edit: I looked again and even your pricing pages have no price. I
| understand that you may want to restrict yourself to rich
| companies, but I don't understand the point of posting on HN if
| that's the case.
| pc86 wrote:
| Air-gapped probably adds a zero or two to the highest tier
| Enterprise price. You wouldn't buy an Enterprise license for a
| personal project, why would you buy an Enterprise++ license
| (which is essentially what AG is)?
| viharkurama wrote:
| If you want air-gapped it's on Business tier, please look at
| our pricing page.
|
| That being said, we don't recommend the air-gapped version for
| personal use. Instead, you can use our open-source Community
| Edition here: https://github.com/makeplane/plane -- you can
| self-host it and disable telemetry entirely.
| psychoslave wrote:
| So a regular local application is now a sophisticated air-gapped
| industrial appliance. Also we should quickly add it's gluten
| free, I'm sure they are some food regulation out there where that
| would open juicy contract for products use of gluten is
| forbidden.:)
| movedx wrote:
| You'll always find that this industry of ours just goes around
| full circle.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think this cynicism is productive. I've had the
| pleasure of shipping "regular local applications" several times
| over my career, and to do it you lose a lot of very basic stuff
| that modern developers take for granted, most importantly
| software update and debugging telemetry. It's not a small thing
| to take a SAAS product and bundle it up like this, and most
| users don't benefit from it, so it's also not a natural
| starting place.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Local apps usually still require installing dependencies from
| the network, call home for updates, use cloud storage or
| sharing, and may send telemetry data. Different levels of
| strictness.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| This is just shipping a docker container for people to run the
| app on their own infrastructure. Retool does the same thing for
| companies which don't want to expose internal resources and
| databases to the cloud.
| axus wrote:
| Any more details about the offline patch/upgrade process? When I
| looked at gitlab years ago, it handled that fine but the
| documentation seemed "nervous" about it.
| viharkurama wrote:
| You'll find all the docs here:
| https://developers.plane.so/self-hosting/methods/airgapped-e...
| mdaniel wrote:
| I struggle to think why that would be any drama, unless the
| setup is trying to use "bare" gitlab (e.g. running the puppet
| commands manually versus $(docker save -o airgapped_gitlab.tar
| gitlab/gitlab-ce:18.2.0-ce && cp ./*.tar /dev/disk/usb-
| whatever/goodluck/))
| miki123211 wrote:
| TBH, if I were working in such a highly regulated industry, I'd
| be very hesitant about buying software from a company with a .so
| domain and basically beholden to the whims of the government of
| Somalia.
|
| If they said "implement a backdoor for us or all your non-
| airgapped customers lose access tomorrow", are you sure the
| company would be able and willing to say no?
| mdaniel wrote:
| That's a very odd thing to bring up in the context of self-
| hosting, since you would not interact with their .so domain
| whatsoever; ensure that the AGPLv3 aligns with your needs, git
| clone -b v0.27.1 https://github.com/makeplane/plane.git and be
| happy
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Now do an air-gapped Confluence killer, please.
| kevlened wrote:
| https://github.com/docmost/docmost
| viharkurama wrote:
| We already support this. We pack all our products in one single
| offering.
|
| This includes Projects + Wiki. More here:
| https://docs.plane.so/core-concepts/pages/wiki
|
| Here's a blog on how you can switch between products within
| Plane, https://plane.so/blog/introducing-apprail-plane-new-
| navigati...
| rendall wrote:
| > _This post explores the journey of building this specialized
| deployment option for regulated industries where data sovereignty
| isn 't just preferred--it's mandatory._
|
| This is an AI writing tell: "It's not just x--it's y."
|
| https://youtu.be/9Ch4a6ffPZY
| tptacek wrote:
| Given their customer base, I wonder why they bothered with any
| license enforcement for the pure on-prem. Just do the "license
| enforcement" implicitly when customers want to update: they need
| to log in to get the new image.
|
| (Your regular annoying notice that FIPS-compliant crypto is, if
| anything, marginally less secure than non-FIPS crypto; not that
| it matters in any material way, just, it's not a flex.)
| 0xWTF wrote:
| As a DoD employee, it would be _amazing_ if more companies took
| this seriously (I 'm looking at you health tech bros).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I guess my mental model is all wrong but those air-gapped choices
| - they seemed kind of what is natural to do ...
| intexpress wrote:
| A version of JIRA that nobody can access sounds pretty good
| Pi9h wrote:
| I am also building https://docmost.com, a self-hostable
| Confluence alternative that can run fully air-gapped.
|
| It has support for spaces, real-time collaboration, a rich-text
| editor, built-in diagrams support and more.
|
| We launched on HN 1 year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40832146
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