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)–Blended Perspectives’ database of 3rd party Atlassian Marketplace apps.
We created MARS in November 2018 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 1,500 vendors, 4,000 apps, and 1.5M 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, there is a problem with vendors self categorizing on the Marketplace. While this is certainly democratic practically, when you’re searching for an app in a category, for example, reporting, it can be a challenge. With so many entries how do you compare true, dedicated reporting apps? Charts and diagramming for instance has 200+ apps in it, few of which have anything to do with diagramming.
MARS overcomes these problems in two ways:
To overcome the size of the Marketplace we focus our attention on the 544 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 82% of Marketplace instances.
And to overcome vendor self-selection, we have carefully assigned “Meaningful Categories” to all 500 Club apps based on the primary functionality. This means that when you search for a reporting app in MARS, you will only see true reporting apps.
Congratulations to the 3 following apps for entering the 500 Club!
Every month as a team we excitedly look through the new 500 Club apps as we believe that it gives a great indication as to the general direction of the Atlassian Marketplace.
Although we’re not welcoming as many 500 Club members as usual, these three apps are all very interesting and have been showing excellent growth over the past year and beyond.
Once again integrations to external products are excelling. MURAL is an incredibly popular collaborative whiteboard tool that teams can use to brainstorm, plan, and design–especially in a remote/hybrid work environment. Released in June of this year, this integration between Jira and MURAL allows you to import issues from Jira Cloud into MURAL as sticky notes and see basic attributes from an issue on a sticky note (like status and priority). Users can also export sticky notes from MURAL to create new issues in Jira. This is great for Jira users who are already using MURAL, however, for those looking for a more embedded whiteboard tool in Jira Whiteboards for Jira is the more feature-heavy and integrated option.
Likewise, Mermaid Integration for Confluence is the most popular and fastest-growing tool that lets you embed and edit Mermaid diagrams onto your Confluence pages. Mermaid is a Javascript-based diagramming tool with which you can create diagrams using text and code. With this integration, you can dynamically insert flowcharts, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, state diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, Gantt charts, and pie charts into Confluence.
Markdown Exporter for Confluence is a nifty Confluence application that lets users export Confluence pages to Markdown files. This exporter by Bitwelt supports full Markdown syntax (tables and code block) and is the only Marketplace add-on that allows users to convert Confluence pages to Markdown files in just one click.
If you have any questions on MARS then get in touch with us at hello@blendedperspectives.com.