New Apps in the 500 Club! – July 2021

Welcome to the new Apps in the 500 Club!

Made up of all Atlassian Marketplace apps with over 500 instances, the 500 Club is a key part of our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS)–our database of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps.

We created MARS in November 2017 because while many Atlassian Partners make their own apps, we believed that we could bring greater value by creating a quantitative and objective database on every facet of the Atlassian Marketplace.

We believe that MARS is essential for two reasons:

Firstly, there is the vast size of the Marketplace: with 2,000 vendors, 4,000 apps, and 1.6M active installs it can be difficult to see through the noise of the Marketplace and find apps that will add value to your instance.

Secondly, vendors are able to self select categories on the Marketplace. While this is certainly democratic it can mean that when you’re searching for an app in a specific category, reporting for example, you will find it hard to clearly see and compare ‘true’ reporting apps because apps with any small amount of reporting will self categorize as reporting.

MARS overcomes these problems in two ways:

To overcome the size of the Marketplace we focus our attention on the 567 apps in the 500 Club. This means we are able to have more valuable insights into the Marketplace without seriously sacrificing our breadth since the 500 Club apps make up over 83% of Marketplace instances.

And to overcome vendor self selection, we have carefully assigned categories to all 500 Club apps based off of primary functionality. This means that when you search for a reporting app in MARS, you will only see true reporting apps. Every month we welcome in all of the apps that bypassed the 500 instance threshold–you’ll also be able to see how we’re categorizing them.

Congratulations to the following apps for entering the 500 club!

All seven of these apps are really impressive and their success is clearly being reflected in their growing popularity. Story Mapping for Jira – Free, Jira Integration: Zephyr Enterprise, and Checklist for Jira Cloud. Free have particularly impressed this year with all three of them showing remarkable growth this year of well over 1,500 percent!

Meanwhile, Appfire’s acquisition of Spartez is already proving to be a canny move with another of their apps breaking into the 500 Club (on top of two others that did so last month). Chat for JSM is a really interesting app that we’re looking on integrating into our ITSM Synthesis Blueprint–you can learn more about this solution blueprint and our whole Synthesis library of solutions here.

SmartBear are another vendor excelling with the moment as on top of Zephyr Enterprise’s integration to Jira joining the 500 Club and growing by 1700% this year, another of their testing apps, TM4J, was the fastest growing paid app in July.

Finally, something that has really been intriguing us recently is the idea of gamification in Jira. It’s great that Trophies for Jira has broken into the 500 Club as it is a top application in this space and will feature heavily in an upcoming report into gamification we’re planning. Gamification has the potential to be an awesome addition to bug finding/fixing, ticket closure, meeting SLAs and much more.