You are not being asked to give up Jira. Your developers work in it, it is a better tracker than anything we will build, and you should keep it. The question on this page is narrower: where the requirements themselves should live, and what it costs you to keep them in Jira.
What this costs you in Jira
The seats are where most of the cost is, and most teams work that out late.
Atlassian bills every user who has product access. There is no reviewer tier and no read-only tier: a user "must be explicitly deactivated, deleted, or removed" to stop counting¹. So your test engineer who opens a requirement twice a month costs the same as your lead.
Then you add a requirements app, because Jira on its own has no requirements. Atlassian requires you to license the app for your whole Jira instance: "The app will only function if its license matches or exceeds the tier of the host product – even if only some of your licensed users need to use the app."⁵
So forty people in Jira, four of whom write requirements, still means forty app licences.
Reqlio charges for the people who write. Reviewers, approvers, viewers and supplier guests are free, with no limit. On a hardware programme that is most of the people who touch a requirement: the mechanical lead who signs off, the test engineer who records a run, quality, the supplier you sent a spec to. They read, comment, vote and approve without consuming anything.
A worked example. Take a 30-person company where 5 people author requirements. In Jira you pay for 30 Jira seats and 30 app seats. In Reqlio you pay for 5 editors, and the other 25 can still review and approve. The gap widens as you grow.
What you still do not get
Suppose you pay for the app anyway. R4J, RMsis and RTM are decent tools and they do requirements, traceability and coverage properly. They are built for Jira, which means they are built around issues.
What none of them give you is the second half of the hardware job: verification campaigns with runs and evidence, the four methods (test, analysis, inspection and review of design) with coverage derived from what actually passed, gates that collect readiness, mass and power budgets with margin growth, FMEA that escalates into a risk register and traces back to requirements, and interface control.
A second app does not close that gap, because those things only work when they share one model of the product: a requirement, the element it is allocated to, the interface it drives, the budget line it claims against and the test that closed it. In Reqlio those are one data model. Bolted onto Jira they are four plugins that do not know about each other.
What an issue cannot be
Underneath all of that is a modelling problem. A Jira issue tracks work that gets done and closed; a requirement is something you committed to and have to keep proving, often years later. They have different lifetimes and different rules, and an app that stores one as the other inherits the mismatch.
- A requirement has no version. You cannot say "REQ-104 is at v3, here is what changed between v2 and v3, and here is who approved v3". Jira keeps a field-change log, which records who edited what rather than which wording was agreed. You notice at the first review where somebody asks "is this the text we signed off?"
- There is no baseline. Nothing freezes the specification at a design review so you can diff against it six months later. If you commit to seven years of support, "what did we promise, and when did it change?" should not take a day of digging.
- There is no verification model. Jira links do carry a type, and you can add your own, but a type is a name with an outward and an inward description and nothing else². So "verifies" can exist as a word on a link, but not as a method, a run, a result or a piece of evidence. The question that matters at a gate is what is not yet verified, by what method, with what evidence. Answering that needs a coverage matrix, which a JQL filter cannot give you.
- There is no document out. Eventually a customer, a notified body or an auditor asks for a specification and the evidence against it. A board export will not pass.
When Jira on its own really is enough
There are two, and both are narrower than they sound.
If you are pure software shipping continuously, a baseline is a tag and traceability is a commit message. Jira plus your CI covers that, and you should stay where you are.
If your requirements are a backlog by another name, things you intend to build with nobody outside the team ever asking you to show that one was met, then what you have is a planning problem, and Jira is the right tool for planning.
Hardware usually fails both tests within a year. The moment someone external asks for evidence, whether that is a customer, a certification body or a regulation like Ecodesign, the backlog stops being enough.
The comparison
Claims in the Jira column are sourced; references are at the bottom of the page. Checked October 2026.
| Jira, with a requirements app | Reqlio | |
|---|---|---|
| Who you pay for | Every user with product access¹, and the app must be licensed for that same tier even if three people use it⁵ | Editors only. Reviewers, approvers, viewers and supplier guests are free, without limit |
| What a requirement is | An issue with extra fields. History is a log of field changes | A versioned object. v3 means three agreed revisions, each with its author, rationale and approval |
| Baselines | Varies by app; in Jira itself, a fixVersion or a label | Freeze the set at a review, diff any two, see what drifted since the active one |
| Verification | Coverage against test cases, if the app does test management too | Four methods with activities, campaigns, runs and evidence. Status is derived from what passed, never hand-set |
| Technical budgets | Not a concept in Jira or in the requirements apps | Mass, power and cost budgets with CBE, margin growth and claims against requirements |
| FMEA, interfaces, gates | Separate apps, or a spreadsheet | In the same model as the requirements they hang off |
| Data residency | Opt-in pinning on Standard and above; EU and Germany available. App data is pinned only if that vendor supports it³; worth asking in writing | Frankfurt. One PostgreSQL database per customer. No app layer to check separately |
| Getting a specification out | Issue export | Word, PDF, XLSX, CSV and ReqIF, on every plan, including after cancellation |
| Free tier | Yes, up to 10 users¹ (the app is extra) | No free tier. 30 days, everything included, no card |
Where the apps genuinely win. If your requirements only ever need to live next to the tickets implementing them, and nobody needs verification evidence, budgets or a signed specification, an app inside Jira keeps everything in one place and your team learns nothing new. That is a real advantage, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Where the seam belongs
The split that works is the dull one: requirements, verification and evidence in Reqlio; work in Jira. The requirement outlives the ticket that implemented it, and the ticket can be closed without anyone reopening the spec.
There is no Jira integration today, not even a one-way one. A Jira URL pasted into a requirement, a comment or a verification run's evidence is a link and nothing more. Nothing syncs, and no field in Reqlio knows what a Jira issue is. A real integration is the most-asked-for thing on the list and it is not built, so if your evaluation depends on round-tripping between the two, this is the point to stop reading and email us rather than discover it in week three.
Questions people ask
We have software requirements too. Is this not a hardware tool?
The product is built for teams whose deliverable is a physical thing. But a physical thing has firmware, an OS and a cloud service in it, and splitting those into a second tool is how traceability dies. Software requirements live in the same tree, trace to the same stakeholder needs and are verified by the same four methods. The project templates include IEC 62304 and EN 50128 alongside the hardware standards.
Can we keep using Jira for sprints?
Yes, and you should. Nothing in Reqlio wants to be a sprint board. Developers carry on in Jira; the requirement, its verification and its evidence sit in Reqlio and outlive the tickets.
What counts as an editor?
Anyone who creates or edits requirements, specs, activities, risks, FMEA rows or budgets, logs test runs, runs AI actions, or manages baselines and reviews. Reviewers, viewers and supplier portal guests are free.
Can we get our requirements out of Jira and into Reqlio?
Export the issues to CSV and import that. You map the columns yourself, with a preview before anything is written. If your Jira already has a requirements app on it, check whether that app exports ReqIF: if it does, use that instead. ReqIF keeps the hierarchy, and identity is carried on ReqIF.ForeignID, so a later re-import updates the requirements Reqlio already knows rather than duplicating them. A CSV import has no such identity, so it creates.
You are one engineer. What happens if you stop?
That is a fair question, and the answer is in writing: ReqIF, XLSX and CSV export on every plan at any time; read-only access to your data for twelve months after cancellation; source-code escrow on Enterprise.
Sources
Every claim above about Atlassian, with where it came from. Checked 4 October 2026.
- Atlassian, Atlassian Cloud licensing — users are billed by product access, and "A user must be explicitly deactivated, deleted, or removed from a synced user directory (if you have Google sync) to not count towards billing"; the Free plan covers "up to 10 users" for Jira and Confluence. The page describes no read-only, reviewer or stakeholder user type that avoids consuming a seat.
- Atlassian, Configure work item linking — a link type is a name plus an outward and an inward description ("causes" / "is caused by"); the defaults include Blocks, Relates and Duplicates, and admins can add their own. The page describes no other property of a link.
- Atlassian, Data residency — "Data residency is available for Enterprise, Standard, and Premium cloud plans"; customers may pin data to "US, EU, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Canada, UK, Japan, India, South Korea or Switzerland" locations; it is opt-in and must be configured. For Marketplace apps, "data residency is available for some apps", with Marketplace Partners deciding independently whether to support it.
- Atlassian, Marketplace app licensing — "Purchase the license tier that matches the number of users you have licensed for your host product", and "The app will only function if its license matches or exceeds the tier of the host product – even if only some of your licensed users need to use the app."
- ease solutions, easeRequirements / R4J — Requirements Management for Jira, Atlassian Marketplace — the app positions itself as letting teams manage requirements inside Jira "while eliminating the burden of purchasing an expensive 3rd party RM tool". Cited as evidence that the category exists, not as a criticism of the app.
Jira, Confluence and Atlassian are trademarks of Atlassian Pty Ltd. R4J and easeRequirements are trademarks of their respective owners. Reqlio is not affiliated with or endorsed by Atlassian or by any Marketplace vendor named here. Comparisons reflect publicly documented information on the date shown; check the sources before relying on them for a purchasing decision.
Keep Jira. Move the requirements.
Thirty days, every module and the AI included, no card. Bring one specification over and see whether it holds up next to the tracker you already have.