What is Atlassian Guard? Pricing, features & alternatives explained

Summary

• Atlassian Guard is the consolidation and expansion of two previous cloud security products.
• Atlassian Guard Standard is basically the new name for Atlassian Access (with some extra features).
• Atlassian Guard Premium is the new name for Atlassian Beacon (but includes additional capabilities and all the features in Standard).
• Whether you need Guard Standard largely depends on whether you need single sign-on (SSO). There are unfortunately no alternatives to Guard Standard for SSO.
• Whether you need Guard Premium largely depends on your compliance requirements. If you need stronger threat detection and response, you can choose between Guard Premium or an Atlassian Marketplace app like the Data Protection & Security Toolkit.
• The Data Protection & Security Toolkit is much more cost-effective than Guard Premium and you can actually save thousands annually if you have 100 users (and tens of thousands if you have 1,000 users).
• The Data Protection & Security Toolkit also offers more flexibility and control in its content scanning and remediation capabilities, including field-targeted and scheduled scans, anonymization and replacement of sensitive data, and built-in response automation.

Atlassian Guard FAQs

Atlassian Guard is Atlassian’s primary security solution for Cloud customers. But many companies still aren’t sure what it is and if they need it.

Here are a few of the questions about Atlassian Guard we see coming up a lot:

1. What exactly does Atlassian Guard do?
2. How is Atlassian Guard different from Atlassian Access?
3. What’s included in Guard Standard vs Guard Premium?
4. Do I actually need Atlassian Guard?
5. Are there alternatives to Atlassian Guard?

In this article, we’ll aim to answer these questions by explaining what Atlassian Guard does, comparing the Standard and Premium tiers, and highlighting key considerations for Atlassian Cloud users.

We’ll also explore an alternative solution, the Data Protection & Security Toolkit, which offers more flexible threat response capabilities than Atlassian Guard at a fraction of the cost.

The reason this article is part one of two is because Atlassian Guard, despite being a cloud product, also offers benefits for Data Center users. This will be the focus in part two.

What is Atlassian Guard?

Atlassian Guard is a consolidation and expansion of two previous cloud security products:

• Atlassian Access for identity security
• Atlassian Beacon for threat detection and response

These two products became the two subscription tiers of Atlassian Guard:

• Atlassian Access became Atlassian Guard Standard
• Atlassian Beacon became Atlassian Guard Premium (with all the features of Guard Standard and some brand-new data loss prevention features)

So if you’ve been wondering if Atlassian Guard is different to Atlassian Access, the answer is no for Guard Standard — it’s the same identity and access management tool, just with a new name and packaging. Its capabilities have expanded since the rebrand to include enforced single sign-on (SSO).

The key difference is that you can now upgrade to Guard Premium, which adds all the capabilities of Atlassian Beacon along with some additional features. Its capabilities have expanded since the rebrand to include data redaction.

Why did Atlassian consolidate Access and Beacon into one product?

Having Atlassian Access and Atlassian Beacon was like having one company managing the door locks and badge access systems in an office building, and another company running the CCTV cameras and intruder alarms. It was harder to get a complete picture of your security posture or maintain a consistent security strategy. It was also more difficult to understand which security capabilities you actually needed.

This is why Atlassian consolidated Access and Beacon into a single unified tool. Just like Jira Software and Jira Work Management becoming Jira, Atlassian Guard reflects Atlassian’s broader shift from fragmented point solutions to integrated platforms that reduce operational overhead and strengthen centralized control.

Guard Standard vs Guard Premium

Atlassian Guard Standard provides your user identity foundation, while Guard Premium adds a security operations layer.

What does Guard Standard do?

Guard Standard focuses on preventing data loss with user management and authentication controls. Its main benefit is enabling users to log in to Atlassian Cloud products using SSO via your company’s identity provider.

It also offers cross-domain identity management (SCIM), API token controls, security policies, and some basic tools for detecting suspicious login activity. It helps ensure only authorized users have access to Atlassian Cloud products.

What does Guard Premium do?

Guard Premium introduces more proactive data protection capabilities. It allows you to classify sensitive data, apply policies to prevent unauthorized sharing or exporting, and detect suspicious behavior through content scanning and automated alerts. It also offers some basic automated remediation such as redaction of sensitive content.

A quick breakdown of Atlassian Guard Standard vs Atlassian Guard Premium

Do you need Atlassian Guard Standard?

You may have already been using Atlassian Access for user management, in which case you’ve just quietly transitioned over to Atlassian Guard Standard and nothing’s really changed (apart from the addition of some new features).

If you didn’t have Access and you’re wondering if you need Atlassian Guard Standard, it largely depends on your team size and authentication needs.

If you’re a small company with simple authentication needs that don’t include SSO, you can usually just rely on Atlassian’s built-in user management.

If you do need SSO, Guard Standard is the only way to implement SSO in Atlassian Cloud, and there are unfortunately no alternatives.

There’s frustration in the Community about this because Guard Standard is expensive at $4+ per user per month, based on a team size of 100 — around $5,000 a year. That said, if you are scaling up, Guard Standard is included at no additional cost in the Atlassian Cloud Enterprise plan.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to Atlassian Guard Premium.

Do you need Atlassian Guard Premium?

Atlassian Guard Standard is mostly focused on prevention of data loss. Atlassian Guard Premium shifts the focus to treatment. It’s aimed at organizations who need to identify data risks and deal with them.

If you’re already using other security tools to deal with data risks, and you have relatively straightforward compliance requirements, you may not need more than Guard Standard.

But if you do need more robust threat detection and response, you may want to consider either Atlassian Guard Premium or an Atlassian Marketplace app.

Choosing between Guard Premium or a Marketplace app depends on your budget and the threat detection and response capabilities you’re looking for. Guard Premium is a significant investment because the per-user rate is high, so you may find the Data Protection & Security Toolkit a compelling alternative. Also, if you want more flexible content scanning and remediation options, the Data Protection & Security Toolkit offers a few advantages over Guard Premium.

Pricing of Atlassian Guard Premium vs Data Protection & Security Toolkit

Like Guard Standard, Atlassian Guard Premium is expensive. For 100 users, it’s $8+ per user per month, which is nearly $10,000 a year.

The Data Protection & Security Toolkit is a powerful alternative to Guard Premium that costs a fraction of the price.

Here is a table that illustrates the cost differences between Guard Premium and the Data Protection & Security Toolkit, showing how much companies can save.

It means that if you have 100 users, you can save $8,376 a year by purchasing the Data Protection & Security Toolkit.

Capabilities of Atlassian Guard Premium vs Data Protection & Security Toolkit

Another difference between Atlassian Guard Premium and the Data Protection & Security Toolkit is how deep they go on detecting and responding to threats.

Content scanning

Both tools offer content scanning, but the Data Protection & Security Toolkit lets you customize how scanning is done.

Guard Premium offers two kinds of scanning: event-driven scans and manually triggered full-site scans. Event-driven scans happen continuously as soon as content is created or updated, and it’s only the newly created/edited content that gets scanned. Existing content is excluded. Full-site scans are triggered by an admin and scan your entire instance, including existing, historic data.

The problem with both is that there’s no way to exclude specific fields or content objects from scans. If you want to look at historic data, you have to scan your entire instance indiscriminately, which puts unnecessary load on your system and can prolong scan times.

With the Data Protection & Security Toolkit, you can select which fields, work items, pages, and spaces across Jira and Confluence should be scanned and which should be ignored. This enables you to look at historic data without scanning your entire instance, reducing system load and facilitating faster scans.

You also have the option of scans that run on a schedule, giving you continuous, targeted visibility and more proactive control over threat detection.

Data governance

In data governance terms, Atlassian Guard Premium is a stronger tool than the Data Protection & Security Toolkit. The Data Protection & Security Toolkit is more focused on protecting and cleaning up your data than preventing unauthorized sharing.

Atlassian Guard Premium has data classification features that enable you to classify content automatically using classification rules, e.g. assign a label of “Highly confidential” to a Confluence page if a credit card number is detected.

You can also apply data security policies to allow or block actions based on the content’s attributes, including the classification level assigned to it. For example, if a page is classified “Highly confidential”, it can’t be exported.

Having said that, if you want to prevent unauthorized sharing or exporting, you may not need Guard Premium. Guard Standard may be enough. You don’t get data classification, but you can apply security policies that block sharing and exporting actions based on where the content is located, i.e. certain Jira and Confluence spaces.

Therefore, unless you really want data classification, you probably don’t need Guard Premium. The Data Protection & Security Toolkit still lets you label content if sensitive data is found in it.

Automatic remediation and response actions

Atlassian Guard Premium has the ability to automatically redact sensitive content such as personal identifiable information (PII). This results in the permanent removal of the data.

Apart from that, you can use Jira and Confluence automation to trigger Guard Premium to take any action available in the automation engine. This includes commenting on a page or work item, sending an email, or creating a new Jira work item.

With the Data Protection & Security Toolkit, you have a lot more options.

Firstly, while Guard Premium destroys the sensitive data, the Data Protection & Security Toolkit fixes it. Instead of just redacting it, you can:

• Anonymize: this replaces identifiable information with an anonymous equivalent, e.g. “johnsmith@example.com” → “Anonymous email”
• Replace with text: this overwrites the original value with a custom label or message, e.g. “API_KEY_12345” → “REDACTED”
• Mask value: this partially hides the original value but keeps some characters visible, e.g. 07*** ***219

None of these mechanisms actually strip the data like redaction in Guard Premium, so the record remains usable if needed.

With the Data Protection & Security Toolkit, you also have the ability to comment, email, add a label, restrict a page, show a warning, or create a Jira work item. But the difference is that all these actions are built in. You don’t need to use a separate automation engine.

A summary of Atlassian Guard Premium vs Data Protection & Security Toolkit

Here’s a table to summarize the differences in content scanning and remediation across the two products.

So if you want more flexible and proactive threat detection and response while saving thousands of dollars, try the Data Protection & Security Toolkit free for one month.