A side of diagramming with that Burger? The Top Ten Atlassian Third Party Apps

A first look at the Atlassian Marketplace – Who are the big hitters? – How this can inform you on your app strategy…

The marketplace offers an enormous treasure trove of information about what customers are doing with their Atlassian products. So we decided to study it. A good way to think about this is that Atlassian, with almost certainly the largest market share of SDLC tooling – is also an ecosystem unto itself. What is hot in the marketplace, is hot functionality.  

Alongside our head-to-head assessments, we are starting a series of market share analyses of all categories and also specific ones. We’re keen to see if, or how, the Pareto rule applies to the marketplace. One very interesting thing we found is that Confluence has a surprising share of the top ten apps and within that diagramming has been very popular. This is a fairly static list in terms of change, but our preliminary 5 month tracking suggests only Draw.io and Zendesk for Jira are experiencing growth above the license renewal churn.  

The top line findings are below.

Top 10 Apps summary  as of 21 March 2019

Note: This is our analysis  of Atlassian Marketplace data and it is not in any way the Atlassian official position on this topic.

For a sense of context we counted 1.3M instances of all apps of which 300K are Atlassian free downloads. So there are about 1M instances  of note out there – and the Top 10 count for approximately 17% of the paid and free total. No Pareto here. This points to the wide variety and competitive nature of the marketplace. We will be doing another post on free Apps.

Incidentally, we counted just under 900 individual vendors on the marketplace selling some 3000 separate apps. A final note is that we find the Atlassian categories of apps too broad and so we are creating our own, but that’s work in progress! For instance diagramming is diagramming – yet the diagramming apps are in a category that has 234 apps and it’s called charts and diagramming.  

The top ten paid apps with trend data applied:

Notes:

• All information quoted here is publically available – we base comments on many years of experience as a major Platinum Partner.
• Atlassian free apps/utilities removed.
• Active instances do not include behind the firewall apps that don’t connect to the internet (one estimation typically 30% of total instances.
• Active instances include evaluations and non production licenses (could be they cancel each other out).
• Nothing is perfect – we think these numbers are indicative.

Highlights:

• First off congratulations to Siebert media and Co regarding Draw.io.  This product first arrived in 2012 and has had a meteoric rise over the last five years. They are King of the Hill!
• Scripting is still a key function – no doubt the reason that cPrime has been pushing their product hard – Adaptavist still has the lead as the early entrant (we will be doing a more detailed analysis of the scripting segment soon!).
• Three products focussed on the diagramming segment – Gliffy once the market leader, overtaken by Draw.io.
• Tempo the perennial major player still going strong (although we’re seeing some smaller players entering the segment with more niche, lower cost offerings).
• We love utilities that support Jira and Jira service desk – and JSU and Workflows Extension are certainly top products.  
• Zen desk integration clearly shows just how popular Zen desk is – even though Jira Service Desk competes with it.
• Testing still matters with Zephyr – but closer inspection will show other players catching up.  See our head-to-head evaluation.

What does this mean for you?

• Make sure you get the most from Confluence – diagramming is a clearly important tool – save money by getting rid of silo apps like PowerPoint and Visio. These apps are world class and operate in a collaborative environment. 
• Time management – tracking time at source rather than in some other system remains best practice. If you aren’t doing it – have a rethink.
• Scripting and the utilities products show that Jira continues to be a foundation for what’s called Low/No code platforms (loco/noco). Jira is the Swiss Army knife of computing. We applaud the use of Jira this way but it’s a good idea to set up dedicated instances with lots of horsepower for these kinds of apps. Overly complex instances are hard to support and keep stable.
• Service Desk is a hugely successful core Atlassian offering – the utility offering add a lot of value to this – and remember its 20% the cost of equivalent offerings like Service Now.  

The Marketplace is a vibrant, low cost, magical place for new functionality that leverages your Atlassian investment – congratulations to the top ten applications!