Import from JIRA
Bring a JIRA Cloud project into Hilbana: issues, hierarchy, states, labels and comments.
Importing from JIRA brings the issues of a JIRA Cloud project into a Hilbana project. It’s a one-time import, not a sync: what you change in JIRA afterwards doesn’t travel on its own, and what you change in Hilbana doesn’t go back. You can run it again whenever you want, but each run is a move, not a permanent link between the two tools.
What you need
- To be a workspace admin: the screen and its operations are admins-only.
- Your JIRA site URL (something like
yourcompany.atlassian.net). - Your Atlassian email and a personal API token, which you create at
id.atlassian.com. Copy it right away: Atlassian won’t show it again.
The token is stored encrypted and is never shown back, not even masked. It grants access to everything you can see in JIRA, so you can revoke it from the screen itself — with Disconnect — or from Atlassian whenever you want.
How to use it
Everything happens in Settings → Import, on a single screen. You pick JIRA as the source (Trello, Asana, Linear and monday are shown dimmed, as “Coming soon”) and its panel opens below.
- Connect the account. Site, email and token. Test connection tells you whether JIRA recognises you before anything is saved.
- Pick the JIRA project. You get the projects your account can see, with their approximate issue count.
- Pick the target project in Hilbana, either existing or created right there. The whole import lands in a single project.
- Analyse. This is a read-only preview: it walks the project and reports how many issues, comments, sub-tasks, labels and people there are, what will be dropped, and a proposed set of mappings.
- Confirm the mappings. JIRA states map one to one onto yours — the proposal comes pre-filled, and you can create a missing one — and people are matched against workspace members by email and, if the site hides it, by name. An unmapped state blocks the import: no issue ever lands in a guessed state.
- Review and run. The last step repeats the numbers, states what stays behind and only then writes. On a large project it takes a while and you’ll see progress.
- History. Every run is recorded with what it created, skipped and updated.
What comes across
| From JIRA | Into Hilbana |
|---|---|
| Summary | Issue title |
| Description | Description, converted to markdown |
| Status | Workflow state, per the mapping you confirmed |
| Priority | Priority (Highest → urgent, Lowest/Low → low…) |
| Assignee | Assignee, per the people mapping |
| Labels | Labels; missing ones are created |
| Created, updated, resolved and due dates | The same dates |
| Story points | Estimate |
| Epics and sub-tasks | Parent/child issue hierarchy |
| Comments | Comments, with their original date |
About comments: if the author matches a member of your workspace, the comment is created under their name. If nobody matches, it’s created under whoever runs the import, with a first line saying whose it was and when. Either way the JIRA date is kept, so the thread reads in its real order. No new users are ever created.
What doesn’t come across
- Attachments.
- Change history of each issue.
- Sprints (they don’t become cycles).
- Versions (they don’t become milestones).
- Issue links (“blocks”, “relates to”…). The parent/child hierarchy is kept; the other links are not.
Fields with no equivalent are dropped too, such as resolution, environment, votes or time spent. The confirmation step tells you how many attachments and versions stay behind before anything is written.
Re-importing the same project
Hilbana remembers which Hilbana issue came from which JIRA issue, so re-importing doesn’t duplicate: the ones already there are skipped by default.
If you want to refresh them, there’s an “Update the ones you already imported” checkbox, unticked on purpose. Ticking it resets title, description, state, priority, assignee, labels, dates and estimate to the JIRA values — that is, it overwrites whatever you’ve done in Hilbana since the previous import. Comments already brought over aren’t duplicated, and an issue created by hand in Hilbana is never touched.
Undo
Every row in the history has Undo, which deletes the issues and comments of that run. Before you confirm it tells you how many there are, how many of those issues have been touched since, and whether any later issue will be left without a parent. Anything created afterwards is untouched, and labels stay: you may be using them elsewhere.
Details
- Importing is available on every plan, including the free one, and the only requirement is being a workspace admin. Free brings over 200 issues per import (the confirmation step tells you the real number before you start, and the summary tells you how many stayed behind); paid plans have no cap.
- JIRA Cloud only. If you’re on JIRA Server or Data Center, today’s route is your agent: with the MCP connected it can read your JIRA and create the issues.
- Numbering is Hilbana’s: imported issues get their own identifier, not the JIRA one.
Related: Projects · Issues · Workflow states · Members & roles.