YouTrack Review (2026): Dutch Jira Rival, Free for 10 Users

What is YouTrack?

Who is behind YouTrack

YouTrack is a project management and issue tracking tool from JetBrains, the company best known for developer tools such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and the Kotlin language. JetBrains was founded in Prague in February 2000. Its corporate overview names JetBrains N.V. in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as headquarters, with the Prague company JetBrains s.r.o. handling sales in Europe and Asia. JetBrains describes itself as privately owned and organically grown, with about 2,600 employees and 15 offices.

YouTrack competes directly with Jira. It combines an issue tracker, agile boards, Gantt charts, a knowledge base and a helpdesk in one product, and JetBrains markets it openly as an alternative to Jira and Confluence.

Where YouTrack hosts your data

YouTrack comes in two versions. YouTrack Cloud is hosted by JetBrains on Amazon Web Services. When you create an instance, you choose its region – Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), US West or Singapore – and JetBrains says your application data is always processed within that AWS region. Moving to another region later needs a request to support. The database, including attachments, is encrypted at rest with ChaCha20, each instance has its own key, and backups stay on Amazon servers. So your data can stay in the EU, but it runs on a US cloud provider.

YouTrack Server runs on your own hardware or with a hosting provider of your choice, which is the option for teams that must avoid US clouds. You can migrate from Cloud to Server at any time.

Checked 25 Oct 2026. Hosting can change – report a change.

YouTrack pricing

Free: YouTrack Cloud is free for up to 10 users with 30 GB of storage and every feature except a custom logo, plus a helpdesk with 3 agents and unlimited reporters. Paid Cloud: from 11 users you pay per user, and the price drops as you add users – €4.50 per user a month with annual billing for small teams, going down to €2.81 at 1,000 users. JetBrains lists monthly billing at $5.40 per user for 11 users, and annual billing saves two months. Paid plans get 3 GB of storage per user. Extra helpdesk agents cost $5.50 per agent a month on an annual plan.

YouTrack Server is sold as an annual subscription with updates and support: free for 10 users, €900 a year for 15 users and €1,500 a year for 25 users (excl. VAT). A 14-day trial with 100 users and 50 agents needs no credit card.

Compared with Jira, the free tiers are the same size (10 users), but YouTrack gives you 30 GB instead of 2 GB, and its €4.50 per user is well below Jira Standard at $8.48 per user a month.

Features and migration from Jira

YouTrack covers the full Jira workflow: issues with custom fields and workflows, Scrum and Kanban boards, an interactive Gantt chart with dependencies, time tracking with reports, a knowledge base with a public help centre, and a helpdesk with SLAs. AI features such as text-to-issue, summaries and reply suggestions are included with free weekly credits. Native apps for iOS and Android cover issues, tickets, boards and articles.

The Jira importer brings over projects, users, groups, issues, links, attachments, custom fields, labels, logged work, comments, history, watchers and voters. Boards, dashboards and reports are not imported. For Jira Cloud you upload a user CSV export first; continuous import can check for changes every few minutes, which JetBrains recommends mainly for Jira Server. YouTrack is SOC 2 compliant since version 2023.2.

What users say about YouTrack

JetBrains has 2.6/5 from 102 reviews on Trustpilot (checked 25 October 2026). That profile covers the whole company, and most reviews are about JetBrains’ IDEs and AI subscriptions rather than YouTrack, so it says little about the issue tracker itself.

Pros and cons

Verdict on YouTrack

Verdict: YouTrack is the most complete European replacement for Jira: the same jobs in one tool, free for 10 users and cheaper above that, from a privately owned Dutch-Czech company. The catch is the cloud – it runs on AWS, even in the EU regions – so teams that need full sovereignty should run YouTrack Server on their own infrastructure. Best for: software and product teams leaving Jira. Not for: organisations that must avoid US clouds and do not want to self-host.

YouTrack is ranked #1 in Best European alternatives to Jira and #2 in Best European project management tools.

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YouTrack: FAQ