Using Atlassian's acli for Jira (and Open-Source Alternatives)

atlassian-cli is an independent, community open-source project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Atlassian, and is not Atlassian's official CLI (acli). Product names are used only to identify compatibility.

What acli is (and is not)

acli is Atlassian's own official command-line interface, and its Jira features live under the acli jira command group. If you are searching for "acli jira," you are looking for Atlassian's first-party tool that lets you create, search, assign, and transition Jira work items from the terminal instead of clicking through the web UI. It is built and supported by Atlassian, ships for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and includes safety features such as impact notifications and previews for bulk actions.

Atlassian's acli organizes its Jira work into these subcommand groups: auth, workitem, board, dashboard, field, filter, project, and sprint. Beyond Jira, acli also exposes acli admin for organization administration and acli rovodev for Rovo Dev, Atlassian's AI coding agent. What acli does not try to be is a one-binary tool for every Atlassian product: its focus is Jira and admin, not a combined Jira plus Confluence plus Bitbucket plus JSM toolchain.

acli jira commands you will use

A quick note on vocabulary: Atlassian's newer Jira terminology calls issues "work items," so acli names the subcommand workitem. A Jira issue and a Jira work item are the same thing. Here are the everyday acli jira commands.

Create a work item

# Create a Task in project TEAM
acli jira workitem create \
  --summary "New Task" \
  --project "TEAM" \
  --type "Task"

# Create from a JSON payload for full control over fields
acli jira workitem create --from-json ./workitem.json

Search with JQL

# Return every work item in a project
acli jira workitem search --jql "project = TEAM"

The --jql flag accepts any valid Jira Query Language expression, so you can scope to a status, assignee, sprint, or date range the same way you would in an advanced search.

View, assign, and transition

# View one work item and pick which fields to print
acli jira workitem view TEAM-123 --fields summary,comment

# Reassign and move it through the workflow
acli jira workitem assign TEAM-123
acli jira workitem transition TEAM-123

acli also carries verbs that map to common day-to-day work: edit, clone, link, delete, comment management (comment-create, comment-list, comment-update), watchers, attachments, and create-bulk for creating many work items at once. Because command flags and behavior can change between releases, always confirm the exact syntax against Atlassian's official acli reference rather than memorizing it.

Signing in with acli

Before any Jira command works, acli needs credentials. Authentication lives under its own subcommand:

acli jira auth login

Once you are logged in, the acli jira workitem commands above run against your authenticated site. Because acli is Atlassian's own tool, sign-in and token handling are managed by Atlassian and documented in their onboarding guide. This is one of the practical advantages of a first-party CLI: the auth flow tracks whatever Atlassian ships next without a third party needing to catch up.

Where an open-source alternative fits

acli is excellent at Jira, and if Jira is the only product you automate from the shell, the official tool is a natural default. The gap shows up when your work crosses products. A release engineer might close Jira issues, publish release notes to Confluence, merge a Bitbucket pull request, and update a JSM request, all in one script. Driving four separate tools, or four separate auth flows, gets tedious.

That is the space an independent project fills. atlassian-cli is a single MIT-licensed binary that speaks Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Jira Service Management with one authentication model and one output convention. It is not a replacement for Atlassian's support relationship, and it is not affiliated with Atlassian. It is a community tool for people who want breadth across the suite plus scriptable, machine-readable output. For a head-to-head look at naming, scope, and trade-offs, see acli vs atlassian-cli.

The same Jira tasks in atlassian-cli

Here are the equivalent Jira operations in the open-source atlassian-cli. The verbs live under jira issue rather than jira workitem, and JQL works identically.

# Search with JQL
atlassian-cli jira issue search \
  --jql "project = DEV order by created desc" --limit 5

# View a single issue
atlassian-cli jira issue get DEV-123

# Create a Task
atlassian-cli jira issue create \
  --project DEV --issue-type Task --summary "Test task"

# Assign and transition
atlassian-cli jira issue assign DEV-123 --assignee user@example.com
atlassian-cli jira issue transition DEV-123 --transition "In Progress"

Two things the open-source tool leans into are bulk safety and scriptability. Bulk operations get a preview flag so you can see the blast radius before committing:

# Preview a mass transition before running it for real
atlassian-cli jira bulk transition \
  --jql "project = DEV AND status = Open" \
  --transition "In Progress" \
  --dry-run

And every command accepts a global --format flag (table, json, csv, yaml, quiet, or markdown), which makes piping into other tools straightforward:

# Pull issue keys as JSON and hand them to jq
atlassian-cli jira issue search \
  --jql "project = DEV" --format json | jq '.[].key'

The full command surface, including sprints, projects, fields, workflows, and bulk export, is listed in the command reference.

acli vs an open-source CLI

Both tools drive Jira from the terminal. They differ in who maintains them, how far their scope reaches, and how they are licensed. The table below sticks to checkable facts, not benchmarks.

Neither column is "better" in the abstract. acli gives you Atlassian's own tool, its support, and integrated features like Rovo Dev. atlassian-cli gives you open source, cross-product breadth, and Unix-style output you can pipe. If the Jira REST API is really what you are after, the Jira API from the command line guide shows how to hit endpoints directly.

Which should you use?

A short decision guide:

• Choose acli if you want Atlassian's official tool, vendor support, deep Jira coverage across boards and sprints, or access to Rovo Dev. It is the safe default for Jira-only automation inside an Atlassian shop.
• Choose atlassian-cli if you want an MIT-licensed single binary that also handles Confluence, Bitbucket, and JSM, with dry-run bulk operations and scriptable JSON, CSV, and YAML for pipelines and CI.
• Run both if it helps. They are separate tools and do not conflict. Plenty of teams use the official CLI for interactive Jira work and an open-source CLI for cross-product scripts.

The point of framing them side by side is not to pick a winner but to name each tool honestly. acli is Atlassian's; atlassian-cli is independent and open source. Knowing which is which saves you from installing the wrong thing when you search for "acli jira."

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