Problem

JIRA comes with an instance of Crowd embedded within it to help you manage users in other Atlassian products, such as Confluence, Fisheye/Crucible, and Bamboo.

However, the default settings are not ideal if you have more users in the attached application than you have in JIRA. Managing your users in JIRA this way will go over the user limit in JIRA.

Solution

In this example, we'll be using Confluence. The same information applies to any Atlassian application that you can connect to JIRA for user management.

You'll want to create a Confluence-only users group in JIRA and then prevent that group from logging in to JIRA. This will prevent them from counting toward the JIRA license limit. To do this, simply remove the "JIRA Users" global permission from the group.