FreeMetricsJira → BigQuery: comparing your options
We make one of the products below, so don't take our word for anything — every claim here links to a source you can check. Updated 2 September 2026.
If your Jira site has 10 users or fewer, this page is short: our app is free forever and nothing else in the category has a free tier. For everyone else, it depends on what you're running.
The options
A Marketplace connector
Two apps do this job on the Atlassian Marketplace. BigQuery Connector for Jira by Alpha Serve is the older one, from an established vendor with a whole family of BI connectors; it also supports Jira Data Center, which ours does not. Ours, BigQuery Sync for Jira, is newer and built on Atlassian Forge, which means it runs inside your Jira site and writes straight to your dataset — the app manifest permits exactly two egress hosts, bigquery.googleapis.com and oauth2.googleapis.com, and Atlassian reviews that on every release. No servers of ours are involved, which is also why it can be cheap.
On price: as of September 2026 our per-user rate is about a quarter of Alpha Serve's at every published tier. Rates change, so check the live pages rather than believing a comparison table: ours, theirs.
An ETL platform (Fivetran, Airbyte, Stitch…)
The right answer when Jira is one of twenty sources feeding a warehouse you already run. For Jira alone it's usually overkill: row- or credit-based pricing adds up fast, the data passes through the platform's cloud, and Jira-specific modelling — sprints, changelog semantics, deletions, custom-field typing — is left to you.
Your own scripts on the Jira REST API
Free, fully under your control, and more work than it looks. The parts that hurt are not the happy path: pagination, the points-based rate limit Jira Cloud now enforces, deleted worklogs, schema drift when someone adds a custom field, and the reconciliation you'll eventually write after the first "why don't the numbers match Jira" incident. Fine for a platform team with slack; a bad deal otherwise.
Side by side
| BigQuery Sync for Jira | BigQuery Connector for Jira | ETL platform | Own scripts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data path | Jira → your BigQuery, direct | see vendor's listing | via platform's cloud | via your infra |
| Free tier | free ≤10 users | no | trials/quotas | your time |
| Price basis | per Jira user (live) | per Jira user (live) | rows/credits | — |
| Refresh | 5 min + nightly reconcile | see vendor docs | plan-dependent | whatever you build |
| History & deletions | append-only, tombstones, snapshots | see vendor docs | varies | you build it |
| Jira Data Center | no | yes | some | yes |
"See vendor docs" means exactly that — we're not going to characterise a competitor's product beyond what we can verify.
Common questions
Which one is cheapest?
Under 10 users: ours, it's free. Above that, ours costs about a quarter of the alternative per user (September 2026 — verify on the links above). BigQuery itself barely registers: load jobs are free and a 100,000-issue site stores well under a gigabyte.
"BigQuery Sync" vs "BigQuery Connector" — aren't they the same thing?
Similar names, different vendors. The practical differences are the architecture (Forge with no vendor servers vs the older Connect model), the price, and Data Center support (they have it, we don't). Core feature sets overlap.
Should I move off Fivetran for this?
If Jira is your only source there — probably, the saving is large. If Fivetran serves ten other sources and Jira rows fit your contract, keeping everything in one place is a perfectly good reason to stay.
How do I know my data is safe?
Ask any vendor where the data flows and who can see it, then check the Privacy & Security tab on their listing rather than the marketing page. In our case the answer is enforced rather than promised: the Forge manifest limits egress to two Google endpoints, and we have no servers that could hold your data.