As your organization grows, managing users and licenses in Atlassian Cloud quickly becomes more complex.
Inactive users, unused licenses, and excessive permissions can accumulate, leading to inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.

Many administrators face challenges such as:

• Difficulty identifying inactive users

• Ongoing license costs for unused accounts

• Lack of structured tracking for user changes

In this post, we’ll explore how to automatically manage inactive user licenses in Atlassian Cloud to address these challenges.

Why Is Managing Inactive Users Hard?

Organizations often assume that the number of employees aligns closely with the number of licenses.
In reality, there is often a significant gap.

For example:

• Jira licenses: 5,000

• Total users in the organization: 65,000

As the number of users grows, administrators must continuously perform maintenance tasks based on user activity:

• Reviewing user lists
• Checking last login date
• Removing licenses from inactive users

When handled manually, this process introduces several limitations:

• Time-consuming and repetitive work
• Poor scalability as the user base grows
• Increased risk of human error
• Difficulty tracking user access and license changes

These challenges become even more critical during audits, where consistent records and clear policies are required.

License Automation with Flexible User License

To address these challenges, you can use Flexible User License.

Flexible User License is an Atlassian Cloud app that automates license management based on user activity.

Key capabilities include:

• Automatic removal of inactive user licenses
• Maintaining an optimal number of licensed users
• Tracking user access changes
• Providing logs for audit purposes

With this approach, repetitive administrative tasks can be replaced with automated rules.

Optimize License Costs

For example, you can create a rule that automatically removes Jira licenses from users who have been inactive for 30 days.

By applying automation rules, licenses are continuously adjusted based on actual user activity, ensuring your environment remains optimized without manual intervention.

Since Atlassian Cloud pricing is typically based on the number of users, keeping inactive users licensed directly leads to unnecessary costs. Automation helps eliminate this inefficiency and ensures licenses are allocated only to active users.

In addition, all changes are recorded, providing consistency in management and supporting audit requirements.

Ultimately, automation is not just a convenience—it becomes a key strategy for reducing costs and improving operational efficiency.

Audit Log Management

Flexible User License records all rule executions as logs.

This allows you to track:

• When a rule was executed
• Which users had their licenses changed
• What policies were applied

Logs can be exported in CSV format, making them useful as evidence during audits.

Protect Critical Users

It’s also important to exclude critical accounts from automated actions.

Using the Exclude Users and Groups feature, you can prevent the following users from being affected:

• Organization admins
• Service accounts
• Specific groups

Conclusion

As the number of users grows in Atlassian Cloud, license management becomes increasingly complex and costly.

You should consider automation if:

• License costs are increasing due to inactive users
• User management is handled manually
• Audit compliance is difficult to maintain

By leveraging Flexible User License, you can automate license management and build a more efficient and scalable Atlassian environment.

👉  Try the Flexible User License app for Jira for free

👉  Try the Flexible User License app for Confluence for free

👉  Book a demo

👉  Read the user guide for Flexible User License