MARS™
One of our unique offerings at Blended Perspectives is our Marketplace Analytic Research Service™ (MARS™) database of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps.
At Blended Perspectives we pride ourselves on being a Solution Partner who does not make our own applications. Because of this customers and the Atlassian community as a whole can rely on us for objective, unbiased assessments of the Atlassian Marketplace. MARS™ is a key part of this. As a quantitative database covering every facet of the Atlassian Marketplace, MARS™ lets us combine our qualitative assessments of apps with the latest up to date information on a range of data driven metrics.
MARS™ contains a vast array of data from instances, reviews, and pricing, to platform, app growth, and version releases. This is all tied together at the top level through our meaningful app categorization in which, for every app over 500 instances, we carefully assigned our own categories based on the primary functionality of each app. We do this instead of using Marketplace app categorizations which are somewhat meaningless due to vendor self-selection. This means that MARS™ can give us a completely unique perspective into which apps are really excelling and driving forwards in the Marketplace.
MARS™ Categorizations
Our MARS™ categorizations are one of the main things that makes it such a unique and valuable service to both our customers and the Atlassian community as a whole.
In the Atlassian Marketplace vendors self-select categories and, as we’ve noted before, these self-categorizations are not sufficient for Atlassian users looking to find applications to suit particular needs. This is because vendors (naturally) over-categorize their apps to fill as many search queries as possible. While this is understandable, as a customer looking for an app to suit a particular purpose can be difficult. Therefore, we have put a lot of effort into creating our own categories and assigning every 500 Club app to one.
Unlike Marketplace Categories, our categorization is based on primary functionality and utility. This means that when a customer wants to use MARS™ to find , say, a “Reporting” app they get apps that really are what they’re looking for.
If you have any questions or input around our categorizations then please feel free to reach out to us.
The Big 10
Out of our 23 MARS™ categories the 10 largest categories make up 87% of all instances. These 10 categories represent the main areas which Jira and Confluence users look to the Marketplace to extend the functionality of their products. Our report here will focus on those 10 categories.
Figure 2: The “Big 10” Categories
While we are mainly highlighting the “Big 10” Categories here it is worth noting that the others aren’t “small” by any means. The 15,000 instances of the Intranet category is still a remarkably high number of customers, especially when you consider that an organization like ServiceNow only has 7,000 or so total customers. The scale in Figure 3 is just severely distorted by the sheer massiveness of the Big 10 Categories, in particular Planning and Publishing.
Fastest Growing Apps by Category
Absolute Growth Winners
Percentage Growth Winners
PLANNING
App: Agile Roadmaps, Gantt Timeline & Prioritization for Jira
Vendor: DevSamurai
Monthly Absolute Growth: 318
PUBLISHING
App:Scroll PDF Exporter for Confluence
Vendor: k15t
Monthly Absolute Growth: 113
DIAGRAMMING
INTEGRATION
App: Figma for Jira
Vendor: Figma
Monthly Absolute Growth: 1320
SCRIPTING/AUTOMATION
App: Scriptrunner for Jira
Vendor: Adaptavist
Monthly Absolute Growth: 49
REPORTING
App:Table Filter and Charts for Confluence
Vendor:Stiltsoft Europe
Monthly Absolute Growth: 398
TEST MANAGEMENT
App: Zephyr Scale – Test Management for Jira
Vendor: SmartBear
Monthly Absolute Growth: 1817
ADMINISTRATION
App: Deep Clone for Jira
Vendor: codefortynine GmbH
Monthly Absolute Growth: 385
UTILITIES
App: Canned Responses Pro Templates for Jira
Vendor: Appfire
Monthly Absolute Growth: 198
TIME MANAGEMENT
App: Worklogs – Time Tracking and Reports
Vendor: SolDevelo
Monthly Absolute Growth: 125
PLANNING
App: Agile Planning Poker, Retrospectives & Daily Standup Meeting
Vendor: DevSamurai
Monthly Percentage Growth: 14%
PUBLISHING
App: Documents for Jira
Vendor: StonikByte
Monthly Percentage Growth: 4%
DIAGRAMMING
App: Graphity – Diagrams for Confluence
Vendor: yWorks GmbH
Monthly Percentage Growth: 5%
INTEGRATION
App: Google Drive and Docs for Confluence
Vendor: ikuTeam (Office 365 & Gsuite Apps).
Monthly Percentage Growth: 14%
SCRIPTING/AUTOMATION
App: Scriptrunner for Confluence
Vendor: Adaptavist
Monthly Percentage Growth: 1%
REPORTING
App: Dashboard Hub for Jira – Custom Charts & Share Reports
Vendor: Appfire
Monthly Percentage Growth: 5%
TEST MANAGEMENT
App: Zephyr Scale – Test Management for Jira
Vendor: Smartbear
Monthly Percentage Growth: 8%
ADMINISTRATION
App: Deep Clone for Jira
Vendor: codefortynine GmbH
Monthly Percentage Growth: 5%
UTILITIES
App: Canned Responses Pro Templates for Jira
Vendor: Appfire
Monthly Percentage Growth: 8%
TIME MANAGEMENT
App: Simple Timesheet & Worklog Dashboard Gadget for Jira
Vendor: Agilis LT
Monthly Percentage Growth: 4%
Congratulations to all of the apps and vendors who feature here as the growth leaders of their respective categories!
If you have any questions about MARS™ or any of our unique offerings then please touch with us at hello@blendedperspectives.com.