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:
BigPicture – Project Management & PPMVendor:
AppfireOctober Absolute Growth: 307
PUBLISHING
App:
Better Excel Exporter for JiraVendor:
Midori Global Consulting Kft.October Absolute Growth: 253
DIAGRAMMING
INTEGRATION
App:
Power BI Connector for JiraVendor: Alpha Serve
October Absolute Growth: 496
SCRIPTING/AUTOMATION
App:
Scriptrunner for JiraVendor: Adaptavist
October Absolute Growth: 420
REPORTING
App:
Table Filter and Charts for ConfluenceVendor:
Stiltsoft EuropeOctober Absolute Growth: 309
TEST MANAGEMENT
App:
Zephyr Scale – Test Management for JiraVendor:
SmartBearOctober Absolute Growth: 1183
ADMINISTRATION
App:
Deep Clone for JiraVendor:
codefortynine GmbHOctober Absolute Growth: 425
UTILITIES
App:
Issue Templates for JiraVendor:
DevinitiOctober Absolute Growth: 133
TIME MANAGEMENT
App:
Timesheet Tracking for JiraVendor:
TouchDownOctober Absolute Growth: 390
PLANNING
App:
Gantt Chart Planner – Roadmap & Timeline – for ConfluenceVendor:
Ricksoft, Inc.October Percentage Growth: 6%
PUBLISHING
App:
Aura Content Formatting Macros (Tabs Miro Figma Google HTML)Vendor:
//SEIBERT/MEDIA – AppAnvilOctober Percentage Growth: 10%
DIAGRAMMING
INTEGRATION
App:
Git for Confluence | Markdown, PlantUML, Graphviz, MermaidVendor:
Avisi B.V.October Percentage Growth: 17%
SCRIPTING/AUTOMATION
App:
Scriptrunner for ConfluenceVendor: Adaptavist
October Percentage Growth: 2%
REPORTING
App:
Dashboard Hub for Jira – Reports & ChartsVendor:
AppfireOctober Percentage Growth: 9%
TEST MANAGEMENT
App:
AIO Tests (All-In-One Test Management for Jira)Vendor:
Navarambh Software Pvt. Ltd.October Percentage Growth: 9%
ADMINISTRATION
App:
Deep Clone for JiraVendor:
codefortynine GmbHOctober Percentage Growth: 6%
UTILITIES
App:
Dependency Mapper for JiraVendor:
Quirk ConsultingOctober Percentage Growth: 9%
TIME MANAGEMENT
App:
Vendor:
SolDeveloOctober 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.