What a year it’s been for the Atlassian Marketplace! With great growth across the board, some fascinating new mergers/acquisitions, and a host of innovative new releases, 2022 could make a case for being the best year yet for the Marketplace’s vendors and customers. Through our Marketplace Analytics Research Service (MARS™) database, at Blended Perspectives, we’ve had a front-row seat to it all.
With MARS™ providing us with unique, unbiased Marketplace analytics, we’ve used these insights to put together a “Year in Review”, recapping all of the most significant happenings of the Marketplace over the past 12 months. As an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we work closely with a huge number of Marketplace Vendors, with MARS™ forming a key tenet of this. By helping promote quality apps and the Marketplace in general, we aim to expand awareness of the Atlassian Marketplace as a whole as well as individual solutions in it that can help to meet customer requirements. In the spirit of this, our Year in Review will highlight the overall trends that the Marketplace has seen in 2022, the top growing apps, as well as all of the new apps that we welcomed to our “500 Club”.
Congratulations to everyone involved in helping make the Atlassian Marketplace what it is and pushing it forwards in its continuous evolution!
Atlassian Marketplace - The Overall Highlights
Over the course of 2022, the total number of installs for 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps has grown by 16% from 1.535M to 1.776M. This growth has largely been driven by installations of cloud apps and is particularly impressive when compared to growth rates over previous years (4% in 2021 and 13% in 2020.)
Figure 1: Atlassian Marketplace Install Growth (2022)
Interestingly though, while this has been a bumper year for instance growth, the number of net new Atlassian Marketplace applications was only 182 in 2022 compared to 1,004 and 633 in 2021 and 2020 respectively. This drop would appear to show that vendors have mainly focused their energies on improving their existing app portfolios (apps they released in 2020 and 2021) this year rather than investing in creating new products.
Figure 2: Net New Atlassian Marketplace Apps (2020, 2021, 2022)
Going back to the 16% growth that the Marketplace has experienced and where it has come from, Figure 3 shows us that, as you’d perhaps expect Jira and, to a lesser but still significant degree, Confluence has been driving this upwards trend. Jira has grown by 21% (205,000 instances in absolute terms), and Confluence by 15% (71,000), while Bitbucket and Bamboo apps have both largely struggled.
Figure 3: 2022 App Instance Growth Breakdown by Product
When performing the same analysis in Figure 4, but this time breaking down growth by app platform, we can see that Cloud is definitely driving the most growth on the Marketplace. While current restrictions mean we cannot break down platform installs within individual apps, we can assess growth across various platform availability e.g. apps that run on Cloud, DC, & Server versus apps that run on say just Data Center and Server. In this analysis, we can see that most installs come on apps running on all three platforms while those apps with no Cloud capability (they run on DC & Server or just Server) have experienced significant negative growth over 2022 (-6% and -9% respectively). Meanwhile, apps on all three platforms have grown by 17% overall, Cloud-only apps by 52%, while apps on Cloud & DC have grown by a remarkable 137%. 2022 has definitely shown that it Cloud is the place to be.
Figure 4: 2022 App Instance Growth Breakdown by Platform
Breaking down the Marketplace’s 2022 growth by our MARS™ “Meaningful Categorizations”, we can see that on top of being the largest Category, Integration was also the fastest growing over 2022 putting on over 63,000 instances. Planning was the second fastest growing category (up 36,000 instances) while Test Management apps also had a great 2022, up 24,000 instances (40%).
Figure 5: MARS™ Categories | Size & 2022 Instance Growth
In terms of mergers/acquisitions, it was again a big year for Appfire as they completed seven major acquisitions. Perhaps most interestingly, 2022 was the first year in which Appfire made acquisitions not just of Atlassian Marketplace apps and vendors, like their moves for Comalatech, Numbered Headings, Arsenale, Digital Toucan, & Nextup.ai, but also expanded beyond the Atlassian Marketplace. The takeover of 7pace was a particularly interesting move into both the Azure DevOps and Time Management spaces while Appfire also launched whiteboards.io as their first standalone product. All of these takeovers mean that when looking at Appfire’s market share, they now control 18% of all paid Atlassian Marketplace instances.
Figure 6: Appfire Market Share | Paid Instances
Finishing up our overall highlights for the Atlassian Marketplace in 2022, Figure 7 demonstrates all 4,300+ active Atlassian Marketplace apps by their instances and number of users as of December 2022. As well as providing a nice overall picture of the structure of the Marketplace it also demonstrates the apps that are outliers by users, instances or both. Clearly, draw.io Diagrams & Whiteboards is the standout app by this view and as we’ll see shortly, it was also the standout app in terms of 2022 growth.
Figure 7: Atlassian Marketplace Overview | Dec 2022
Atlassian Marketplace - The Fastest Growing Apps (2022)
Every month we highlight the fastest growing Paid and Free Atlassian Marketplace apps by both absolute and percentage growth. Since 2022 is drawing to a close, we thought that it would be interesting to see what the fastest growing apps by these metrics were over the whole year.
Following on from our earlier views looking at the Marketplace from a holistic perspective, here we can see the individual apps that have really accelerated forwards in 2022. As mentioned earlier draw.io Diagrams & Whiteboards was the fastest-growing paid app in absolute terms while a special congratulations is also due to OKR with Gantt Roadmap for Jira Cloud by Boja Consulting AB which was the fastest-growing paid app in percentage terms.
Congratulations to all of the following apps and the vendors behind them!
Paid | Absolute Growth
Paid | Percentage Growth (> 1,000 instances)
Free | Absolute Growth
Free | Percentage Growth (> 1,000 instances)
Atlassian Marketplace - The New 500 Club Entrants
Our annual “Year in Review” wrap-up is also the perfect time to once again congratulate all of the apps and vendors who entered our 500 Club this year. The 500 Club is made up of Atlassian Marketplace apps with over 500 instances which are assigned one of our “Meaningful Categorizations”. The 500 Club is particularly important to us since the member apps while only making up 16% of all Marketplace apps account for over 80% of all Marketplace instances.
Over 2022 we saw a remarkable 77 apps make the 500 instance threshold and enter the 500 Club! Figure 8 also shows that amongst these 77 new apps, the most common categories they were assigned were Integration, Publishing, Reporting, & Planning.
Figure 8: 2022 New 500 Club App Category Breakdown
Congratulations to the 2022 500 Club Entrants!
Looking to the Future
Wow, what a year it’s been! The Marketplace, already a very mature ecosystem, has come on leaps and bounds in 2022 with some incredible work being done to ensure solutions are being continually improved and innovated on.
The investment into the Atlassian Marketplace by the incredibly talented individuals working within it has really paid off in 2022 and is showing no signs of slowing down. With the way things have been trending we see no reason why 2023 can’t be even better than 2022, which makes you wonder: just how big can this ecosystem get?
Here’s to an excellent 2022 and what we’re sure will be an even better 2023!
If you have any questions then get in touch with us at hello@blendedperspectives.com.