You might be thinking “Why the Clone Wars”? It turns out that cloning is a key feature in the Administrative category because more organizations are templating their offering to users. This is also a key component in our own blueprint solutions. These cloning apps are growing quickly and this is another example of how MARS can really identify hot trends.
As a recap, our Marketplace Analytic Research Service (MARS) is a database of Atlassian Marketplace 3rd party apps. While many Atlassian Partners make their own apps, we believed that we could bring greater value to our customers and the Atlassian Community as a whole by creating a quantitative and objective database covering every facet of the Atlassian Marketplace.
MARS contains a vast array of data from instances, reviews, and pricing, to the 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 rather than 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.
Administration
We define apps as “Administration” if they support the background operation of Atlassian apps and are not “application or functional” in nature. Examples include cleaning up instances, copying configurations, and apps that support the health of the overall application.
Administration is a very significant category in the Atlassian Marketplace. It’s the 9th largest (out of 26) and has experienced decent growth of 4% so far this year.
Categories: Instances & 2021 Rate of Growth
The Atlassian Marketplace is a hub of creative solutions to common problems that Jira and Confluence users face and the Marketplace vendors have come up with a plethora of innovative solutions to these issues.
Here are the 10 most popular Administration apps:
Top 10 Administration Apps with 2021 Rate of Growth
The Apps: Cloning
Impressively, all three of the fastest-growing Administration apps this year have been cloning applications–an interesting development for the category.
Jira allows users to make clones of individual issues, however, for a growing number of users (as we can see from the marketplace growth data) this is not enough and they are looking towards the three largest cloning apps on the Atlassian Marketplace for their advanced cloning needs.
Native Jira cloning only lets users clone single issues and does not provide the ability to clone a number of issue fields beyond issue summary and copy attachments, subtasks, and links. These three apps (Deep Clone for Jira, Clone Plus for Jira, and Elements Copy & Sync) go far above and beyond the standard cloning functionality of Jira and are major time saving tools for admins and standard users alike.
Top 10 Cloning Apps by 2021 Rate of Growth
Three Fastest Growing Cloning Applications
Deep Clone for Jira by codefortynine is both the largest and fastest growing cloning app for Jira.
Deep Clone is a cloud-only application and codefortynine’s focus on creating an application solely for Jira cloud is definitely paying dividends as their impressive app grows with the cloud platform as a whole. This app is powerful enough for admins to make the most of it while also being simple enough to use that all Jira users can get some value from it.
Deep Clone is very feature-heavy and has a vast number of use cases:
Templating
- The most popular feature of Deep Clone is its ability to clone entire projects (including issues, settings, versions, and components)
- On top of this, Deep Clone gives users flexibility with the ability to Bulk Clone up to 100,000 issues while moving them to other projects and clone entire issue hierarchies
Managing Multiple Jira Instances
- Users can clone issues between two Jira instances that have Deep Clone installed.
Advanced Automation
- Deep Clone also gives users the ability to automate their cloning
- With Deep Clone you can automate cloning with the Deep Clone workflow post-function and create presets for recurring cloning actions
- Users benefit from advanced cloning settings (clone and move, clone and edit, have more flexibility when it comes to cloning fields, create versions or components while cloning, clone sprints, etc…)
Advanced Cloning
- Deep Clone offers advanced features, that are not available in the standard clone feature of Jira such as: the ability to clone comments & issue statues, choose which fields to clone and which to not, clone cloned issues can be moved to another project and issue type while cloning, while some data can be created in the target project while cloning (components, labels, versions, sprints)
You can check out Deep Clone on the Atlassian Marketplace today or see it in action here!
Like Deep Clone, Clone Plus for Jira enhances Jira’s native cloning functionality and gives users more control over the issue cloning process. Clone Plus for Jira is available for cloud, Data Center, and server customers. It has seen very impressive growth of over 11% this year and is much deserved for this incredibly feature rich app.
Advanced Cloning
- Clone Plus for Jira provides a much more robust cloning experience over Jira’s native functionality. The app’s users can clone the issue to the same or different project, change the clone’s issue type, and select a variety of clone options, including, but not limited to, copying attachments, subtasks, links, comments, worklogs, watchers, etc. We could go on, but you get the point – Clone Plus is an excellent alternative to Jira’s native cloning functionality.
Bulk Cloning
- Like Deep Clone, Clone Plus lets users bulk clone issues–in Clone Plus’ case up to 1000 issues to the same or different project. Clone Plus’ bulk cloning allows for the same level of customization as its single issue cloning and is a huge time saver for admins who might otherwise have to copy issues one by one. Clone Plus’ Bulk Clone is available on Data Center and cloud versions of the app.
Custom Clone Operations
Last but not least, admins can speed up the single and multiple issue cloning process by creating custom Clone operations. Users can select a specific Clone operation to apply preset clone settings during the cloning process. Clone operations come in handy for repetitive everyday cloning use cases such as copying a support issue for a development team. This could also be useful for standard procedures such as duplicating a support issue to engineering to fix a bug–in this case all of the clone settings would be predefined, saving users on all ends valuable time through standardizing best practices.
We hope you enjoyed this quick overview of this feature-heavy app. If you’d like to learn more, check out this short demo to see Clone Plus in action or head over to the Atlassian Marketplace to try the app for free today.
Elements Copy & Sync by Elements is perhaps the most overarching of all the cloning apps mentioned, although this increased functionality does come with a higher price point. However, paying this premium is clearly something many users are willing to do as Elements’ growth of 19% this year demonstrates.
Elements Copy & Sync is available on cloud, server, & DC and provides much of the same usages as the other cloning apps including the ability to clone, move and link issues in the same project or to another project and configuring exactly what you copy between issues.
However, its ability to sync across Jira issues makes Elements’ application truly unique in this field. With Copy & Sync you can keep fields from different Jira issues in sync which is very useful for teams working on different issues ensuring they’re accessing up-to-date information.
There are a number of potential use cases for Elements Copy & Sync including:
- Copy issues from JSM to Jira Software with comments & attachments synced
- Create change requests from a Service Management Ticket
- Create Epics or Stories from a Support ticket and sync fields
- Create Epics from Initiatives (Advanced Roadmaps)
- Copy an issue and its subtasks
If Elements Copy & Sync looks interesting to you then you can watch a demo here or check it out on the Atlassian Marketplace.
Summary
In summary, Administration is a booming Atlassian Marketplace category and increasing numbers of Jira users and admins are making the most of the incredible time-saving tools available within this category. As we have seen through MARS, this is particularly the case for cloning applications which are growing at an astonishing rate this year.
All of the cloning apps we’ve mentioned here are excellent and you can’t go wrong with any of them–which one works best for you will depend upon your unique use cases. Get in touch with us at hello@blendedperspectives.com if you want a category report more tailored to your requirements.
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