Laya Board for Jira

Laya Board is a free app for Jira, built on Atlassian Forge, that gives you a fast Laya-style board over your real Jira issues — inside Jira itself. Nothing is copied or migrated: the board reads and writes Jira directly, so every change is a real Jira change and Jira's own permissions always apply. Field edits, transitions and comments are made as you; a small set of agile operations — ranking and sprint or backlog moves — are applied by the app after checking your own Jira permission.

What Laya Board is

• A board experience over your existing Jira issues — the columns replicate your Jira board's own column configuration and order.
• Free: the app never paywalls any feature.
• Private by design: the app's screen in your browser only talks to Jira and to the app's own backend. Any calls to Laya.net happen server-to-server, and only once your site is linked.
• Usable on its own: you do not need a Laya.net account. The board, the sprint planner, Board Studio and sharing a board externally all work on a plain install — linking a Laya.net workspace is optional and adds to what you already have.

Where it appears in Jira

• Project sidebar — a Laya Board entry opens the board for that project.
• Apps navigation — a Laya Board entry opens the boards hub, called Mission Control (page title Boards), listing every board in one place.
• Issue view — a Laya Board glance with an Open in Laya Board button.
• More-actions (•••) menus — Open in Laya Board on issues, agile boards and backlogs, and Open sprint in Laya Board on sprint cards.
• Command palette — Open Laya Board jumps straight to the boards hub.
• Jira Settings → Apps → Laya Board and each project's settings sidebar — the app's settings screen (covered in the admin guide).

Working on the board

The board chrome gives you Refresh, Studio, a Manage menu, Add external board, Create master board, Share externally and a Help menu. Your own edits appear the moment you make them — the board writes to Jira and shows the confirmed result straight away, without waiting for a refresh. Work changed elsewhere in Jira is picked up in the background, and returning to the tab brings it up to date immediately. Refresh is there for when you want to force the point.

• Dragging a card to another column runs a real Jira workflow transition. If no transition exists from the current status, the move is refused with "No workflow transition to that status from here."
• Re-ordering cards inside a column is saved to Jira's own rank, so the order you set is the order everyone sees.
• The Manage menu offers Sprint planner, Create Jira board, Create Laya board, Versions & components and Visible custom fields. Items you cannot use are greyed out with the reason — for example Versions & components needs the "Administer projects" Jira permission.
• Jira enforces every write: if a check of your permissions is inconclusive, the button stays available and Jira itself is the final judge.

Board Studio

The Studio button opens Board Studio, a drawer with five tabs: Overview, Theme, Columns, Cards, Effects. Theme offers background styles Plain / Gradient / Grid / Frosted, text sizes A− / A / A+ and density levels; Effects offers intensity Subtle / Standard / Lively and motion Full / Reduced / Off. The Overview tab shows a Current configuration summary with Quick actions and Manage sections.

Saved views and personal preferences

Saved views are stored in your browser, one list per board — they are not synced to an account. The same is true of several personal preferences, including interface scale, Mission Control density, starred external boards, panel and column widths, and the welcome card dismissal. Switching browser or machine starts those fresh.

What works without a Laya.net account

Everything on the Jira side works with no Laya.net account at all: the board, transitions, ranking, the Manage menu, the sprint planner and Board Studio. Sharing a board externally works too — you do not need to link anything to publish a public guest link (see below). Only the features that genuinely live on a Laya workspace — Add external board, Create master board and Create Laya board — stay disabled with the tooltip "Connect Laya.net first" until your site is linked (and "Checking Laya connection…" while the app checks).

Sharing a board externally — no account needed

Share externally works on a plain install, with no Laya.net account and no connection. It opens a sharing studio: a live preview of your board exactly as a guest will see it, next to the link, appearance and visibility settings. Nothing is published until you press the button — then you get a real, live laya.net/public/board/… guest link you can copy and send. Anyone with the link can view the board; they need no account of their own.

The preview is redacted before it leaves Jira, and you choose what guests see. Each of these can be hidden: issue keys, assignees, work types, priority, estimates, labels, due dates and subtask progress. A share can never show more than the person who created it could see in Jira.

The app on its own vs linked to Laya.net

Linking is an addition, never a prerequisite for the Jira work itself. This is the honest split.

Linking to Laya.net

Linking uses a short pairing code that you approve on Laya.net — you never type a password into Jira, and no issue data leaves Jira as part of connecting. Laya.net receives only your site URL and account id to establish the link.

1. Start the connectionOn the board, choose Connect Laya.net. The Connect to Laya.net wizard opens with the subtitle "Link this Jira site to a Laya.net workspace" and shows a pairing code in the format XXXX-XXXX, with an "expires in m:ss" countdown.
2. Approve on Laya.netClick Approve in Laya.net. On the Connect an app to Laya page, enter the Connection code (codes are valid for 15 minutes).
3. Choose a workspaceOn the Grant access to workspace step, pick the workspace to link — each is badged Personal or Team — and click Approve access. The consent line explains the app will be able to read and write boards in that workspace, and that you can revoke this at any time from the workspace settings.
4. Finish in JiraBack in Jira the wizard shows "Connected to {workspace}" — click Continue. If something goes wrong you will see a clear card such as This code expired, Approval was declined or This code was already used, each with Try again.

Once linked, the previously disabled buttons come alive and Mission Control gains Roadmap, Open Laya workspace ↗, Compose master board and New board actions.

What linking unlocks

• External boards — two-way editable boards for Azure DevOps, monday.com, GitHub and GitLab, right inside Jira.
• Native Laya boards — boards that live on your Laya workspace and need no Jira permissions.
• [Master boards](/help/boards/master-boards) — one board layered from up to 50 source boards, with cards grouped into swimlanes by source board.
• Roadmap — the organisation roadmap, opened from Mission Control.
• More on external shares — sharing itself already works without linking; a linked workspace adds password-protected links, removal of the "Powered by laya.net" badge, the full Board Studio theming on the share, and fully hands-off syncing: an unlinked share already streams changes to its cards live, and linking adds automatic pickup of new cards as well.
• Sync with your workspace — Jira changes stream into Laya, and edits made in Laya.net flow back into Jira through the app.

Day-to-day tips

• External boards are two-way editable from inside Jira, and fields a provider cannot back simply degrade to read-only with a friendly notice rather than pretending to save.
• A Jira project mirrored as an external board is read-only in that view — "This mirrored Jira board is read-only inside Laya Board — edits happen in Jira." Use the project's own Laya Board instead.
• Connected Azure DevOps, GitHub and GitLab boards have a full Backlog inside Jira — sprint sections with dates and progress, a pinned Backlog bucket, and drag between them. monday.com has no sprint concept, so its Backlog tab stays disabled with "Backlog is managed in monday.com".
• Connected boards also carry the Sprint quick-filter, so you can narrow any board to one sprint — a GitHub milestone or project iteration, a GitLab iteration or milestone, an Azure DevOps iteration — without leaving Jira.
• Create a card while a board is filtered to a sprint and it lands in that sprint, rather than in the backlog where the filter would immediately hide it.
• Edits you make are reflected immediately rather than on a refresh cycle, and each card shows a sync indicator that reports whether the change reached Jira. Boards also reconcile continuously in the background so work changed elsewhere arrives on its own — no manual refreshing to stay current.
• Changes made in Laya.net and written back into Jira appear in Jira's history as the Laya Board app by default — members who link their own Jira access in Laya get a per-user toggle to have their edits attributed to them personally. See people and assignee matching.
• The Help menu (Help & support) offers Contact support, Send feedback and Keyboard shortcuts.

FAQs