No — Structure and Advanced Roadmaps aren’t two names for the same feature, and picking one doesn’t retire the other. Structure is a Marketplace app, originally built by ALM Works and now owned by Tempo. Advanced Roadmaps is Atlassian’s own feature, renamed twice since 2020 and now called Plans, bundled into Jira Premium and Enterprise. If you already have one, or you’re pricing one against the other, this page is about the actual difference — not a ranking, because they solve different problems and, per a real Atlassian Community thread below, plenty of teams run both.
Untangling the names first
Three names get used for what’s really two different products, and the naming is exactly why “jira structure vs advanced roadmaps” and “jira portfolio vs structure” searches exist at all:
- Structure — a Marketplace app, not a Jira feature. Built by ALM Works, a Boston-headquartered company with an engineering team in Saint Petersburg, Russia; Tempo announced its acquisition of “ALM Works, developer of the Structure for Jira software suite” in December 2021 (Tempo). It’s still a separate purchase and a separate install today, sold on the Atlassian Marketplace — where its own listing title is literally “Jira Portfolio Management PPM,” which is one direct source of the “jira portfolio vs structure” confusion: it’s not the same “portfolio” as the next bullet.
- Portfolio for Jira → Advanced Roadmaps → Plans — one Atlassian-owned feature, renamed twice. Atlassian’s own Community announcement states plainly: “Today, we are renaming the Marketplace add-on Portfolio for Jira to Advanced Roadmaps for Jira” (Atlassian Team, May 19, 2020). It then moved from a separate add-on into a native part of Jira Software Premium and Enterprise in early 2021, and the UI name in use today is Plans — confirmed by a 12,565-view Community thread whose accepted answer is unambiguous: “Plans is the new name of Advanced Roadmaps and there is no difference, just a name change.”
- Not the same as Strategic Roadmaps. Tempo — the same company that now owns Structure — also sells a separate roadmapping tool called Strategic Roadmaps, formerly Roadmunk, rebranded per Tempo’s own announcement. It’s a standalone strategy-roadmap product, unrelated to either tool on this page — worth ruling out early if “roadmaps” is what brought you here.
So: two vendors, two products, three historical names for one of them, and a fourth Tempo product that sounds related and isn’t. Once that’s sorted, the actual comparison is simpler.
What each one actually does
| Structure | Plans (Advanced Roadmaps) | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Tempo (originally ALM Works) | Atlassian, native |
| How it’s sold | Separate Marketplace purchase, any Jira Cloud plan | Bundled into Jira Premium / Enterprise only — no separate purchase |
| Hierarchy source | Its own custom structures, plus custom issue-link types | Epic field + Parent Link |
| Best for, per Tempo’s own comparison | ”Visualize large amounts of issues and projects in a single view, create custom hierarchies, and perform advanced roll-ups and calculations with Formulas" | "Native, multi-team roadmaps with team-level capacity planning and configurable hierarchy above Epics” |
| Scope | Cross-project, spreadsheet-style, any hierarchy you define | Cross-project roadmap/timeline view, capacity + dependency planning |
That “Formulas” line is Structure’s real differentiator — Tempo’s own comparison calls it a “formulas feature (unique to Structure)” for calculations across a hierarchy that Plans doesn’t attempt. Plans’ differentiator runs the other way: it’s a Jira-native surface with no install, no separate license, and team-level capacity/scenario planning that Structure doesn’t build.
Migrating between them isn’t a button
If you’re on Structure and pricing Plans (or the reverse), the honest answer on portability comes from a real Atlassian Community thread — someone who had “created quite extensive structures of issues” in Structure asking whether they could import them into Advanced Roadmaps. The reply came from David Niro, at the time of ALM Works (Structure’s original maker), and it’s specific: Advanced Roadmaps builds its hierarchy from the Epic field and Parent Link, while Structure also supports arbitrary custom issue-link types — so converting a Structure hierarchy into Roadmaps’ model isn’t a built-in export, it typically needs a scripting tool like ScriptRunner, and some structures won’t translate cleanly at all. Going the other direction — pulling Roadmaps-built hierarchy into Structure — is, per the same reply, the easier one.
That’s not a reason to avoid either tool. It’s a reason not to assume “we’ll just export it” if a switch is on the table.
You don’t have to pick — they can run together
Nothing about Structure or Plans is exclusive. The same Community thread shows a user already syncing the two with a “Child issue from Advanced Roadmaps” automation rule, keeping Structure’s view current as Roadmaps/Plans data changes underneath it. Tempo’s own comparison frames the decision as “which job,” not “which vendor” — pick Structure for cross-project spreadsheet-style hierarchy and formula rollups, pick Plans for a native, no-install multi-team roadmap with capacity planning, and nothing stops a site running both for different audiences (a PM living in Structure’s grid, a team lead living in Plans’ timeline).
This is also the one comparison on this site written partly from the inside rather than desk research alone: Crosstown Tech’s founder was Structure Cloud’s product manager at Tempo for five-plus years, to January 2025 — noted here for transparency about where the operator knowledge on the Structure side comes from, not as an endorsement, and not extended to hands-on Plans experience, which comes entirely from the public documentation cited above.
If neither one does what you actually need
Both tools assume you’re staying inside one Jira site. Structure’s hierarchy and Plans’ roadmap both stop at your Jira instance’s edge — neither one was built to unify work that lives in Jira and somewhere else, like Microsoft Planner, or across two separate Jira sites after an acquisition or a reorg. If that’s the actual wall you’re hitting, OneView reads real data across Jira and Microsoft Planner into one grid, with rollups and arbitrary grouping you define — not a replacement for Structure’s formulas or Plans’ capacity planning inside a single site, but the answer once the question becomes “across everything,” not “within Jira.” Start a free trial if that’s the shape of your problem.
Related reading
Both Structure and Plans exist because Jira’s native hierarchy tops out at Epic — see a hierarchy level above Epic in Jira for what Jira itself offers before you reach for either add-on, including the same Premium/Enterprise line that gates Plans specifically. And if the wall you’re hitting is a number rather than a level — an Epic that won’t total its children’s story points — summing story points from children to a parent covers Plans’ partial roll-up answer and the automation-rule workaround in full, the same underlying gap this page’s table shows Structure closing with its own Formulas feature instead.