Official Atlassian VS Code extension
Atlassian for VS Code is Atlassian's official VS Code extension for Jira and Bitbucket — view issues, create branches from issues, and review Bitbucket PRs inside the editor.
Being official, it has deep Jira issue views (comments, attachments, full editing) and genuinely good Bitbucket pull request review support — if your team is on Bitbucket, the PR workflow inside VS Code is its strongest feature.
It leans heavily toward the Bitbucket side of Atlassian's stack. The git automation is thinner: it can start a branch from an issue, but there's no team-wide branch naming policy, no commit template enforcement, no WIP/done lifecycle, and no standup generation. If your code lives on GitHub or GitLab instead of Bitbucket, a lot of the extension goes unused.
This is really the whole reason Jitly exists — it's not trying to replace Atlassian for VS Code at what Atlassian for VS Code is good at. Jitly's job is narrower and more specific: jitly start ABC-123 creates your branch and moves the Jira ticket to In Progress in one shot, jitly done commits, pushes, and updates the status to whatever your team's workflow has, fetched live so it never gets out of sync with how your Jira is actually configured.
And it's not just a CLI anymore — the Jitly VS Code extension does the same job visually: a sidebar with your Jira tickets, one-click start, pause work with a WIP push, done with live status transitions, and a one-click standup generator. Same project config and policies as the CLI, so a team can mix both.
Mainly teams on the full Atlassian stack (Jira + Bitbucket) who mainly want PR reviews inside VS Code. If that's not you, this comparison probably isn't that relevant to your day — Atlassian for VS Code and Jitly solve different problems most of the time.
pip install jitly) or a VS Code extension. They're rarely a straight either/or choice — most teams comparing them are really deciding what to combine with what they already use.