Home/Research

Desk research · Atlassian Marketplace

What sells on the Atlassian Marketplace in 2026, and how do you read the demand signals for a Jira or Confluence app?

Installs are concentrated in integrations, admin toolkits, time tracking, test management and diagrams: the top 50 apps hold more than half of all installs, and the median app has single-digit installs on Jira. Small Forge apps still get in, mostly in reporting gadgets, admin utilities and diagram-as-code, while Atlassian charges no revenue share on Forge revenue up to $1 million per partner. The end of Data Center, on 28 March 2029, is the main engine of new cloud demand.

Published 2026-10-19

The short answer

On 19 October 2026 the Atlassian Marketplace listed 4,810 Jira Cloud apps and 1,869 Confluence Cloud apps. Installs are concentrated: the top 50 apps hold 52.9% of all Jira installs and 56.6% of Confluence installs, and the median app has 6 installs on Jira and 16 on Confluence. What sells in volume is integrations with large tools (source code, design, monitoring), admin and workflow toolkits, time tracking, test management, diagrams and tables.

Small apps still get in, but rarely and in specific places. Of the 1,631 Jira listings whose first cloud version is dated 2026, 47 had reached 100 installs; on Confluence it was 11 of 466. The economics favour Forge: since 1 January 2026 Atlassian takes no revenue share on eligible Forge revenue until a partner reaches $1 million in lifetime Forge revenue. The structural driver of demand is the end of Server and the scheduled end of Data Center, which pushes customers, and their apps, to Cloud.

This article is for people deciding whether to build for Jira or Confluence. Every platform rule below was checked in Atlassian's own documentation or announcements, and every market figure comes from the public Marketplace API, read on 19 October 2026.

What the Marketplace looks like in October 2026

We read every cloud listing for Jira and Confluence from the public Marketplace API (REST v2). For Jira, 228 apps have at least 1,000 installs and 2,643 have fewer than 10. For Confluence, 104 apps have at least 1,000 installs. 2,737 Jira apps (57%) and 990 Confluence apps (53%) have no review at all.

Concentration by vendor is as strong as by app. The Jira listings come from 2,270 vendors, and the top 10 vendors hold 47.6% of Jira installs. Atlassian itself is the largest, at 11.9%, followed by Appfire with 9.0% across 56 listings and Tempo with 7.8%. On Confluence, 742 vendors share the installs and the top 10 hold 50.0%; the largest are the draw.io vendor with 11.7% and Appfire with 10.7% across 42 listings.

Many listings are no longer active products. 1,362 Jira listings and 467 Confluence listings had not shipped a new cloud version in the 12 months before our reading. For a newcomer this cuts both ways: part of the shelf is abandoned, and part of the competition a scan counts does not really compete.

What sells: the categories and the leaders

The largest Jira apps by installs are integrations owned by other platforms: GitHub for Atlassian (137,701 installs), Figma for Jira (48,422) and GitLab for Jira Cloud (32,244). Behind them come the classic paid categories: scripting and admin toolkits such as ScriptRunner (34,580), checklists, timesheets from Tempo (26,396), test management such as Xray (25,238) and Zephyr, and workflow extensions such as JMWE (16,450).

On Confluence the leaders are diagrams and structured content. draw.io has 60,954 installs and a rating of 4.81 from 1,207 reviews; Lucidchart, Miro and Gliffy follow. Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets (14,954) and Scroll PDF Exporter (8,741) show the other durable demand: turning pages into data and documents.

Ratings and installs move independently. GitHub for Atlassian rates 3.34, GitLab for Jira Cloud 2.75 and Sentry for Jira 2.47, and all three sit in the top tier by installs. An official connector is installed because the other product is used, not because the connector is liked, so a low rating on a connector is not an opening for a third party.

Category shares show where a newcomer meets a wall. In the Jira Source code category one app holds 74% of installs and in Deployments 83%; on Confluence, draw.io holds 82% of Blueprints. The broad Jira Project management category is the opposite: 1,160 apps, and the leader holds 4%.

How to read the demand signals

Installs. Each listing in the public API carries a totalInstalls figure. We found no Atlassian page that defines it. Two things we could observe: the API returns the same number whatever hosting filter is applied, so for apps that also sold a Data Center version it cannot be split by hosting; and the number moves down as well as up. ScriptRunner for Jira read 34,580 and, a few minutes later the same morning, 34,568. It behaves like a current count of installations, not a lifetime total. It counts free tiers and trials as well, so it is not a count of paying customers.

Reviews. More than half of all listings have none, so the absence of reviews says little about a small app. For a leader, the text of the low-rated reviews is useful as a specification of what is missing; the count of complaints is not a measure of willingness to pay, as we found in earlier work on review data.

Feature requests. Atlassian's public tracker, often called JAC, lists feature requests with vote counts. We measured separately how votes on such requests convert into installs of the apps that answer them, and the conversion was poor; the status of a request carried more signal than its votes. We do not repeat that measurement here. The practical rule stays the same: use the tracker for hypotheses and use Marketplace installs as the check before building.

The API itself. In November 2024 Atlassian staff listed GET /rest/2/addons among the Marketplace V2 APIs to be deprecated, with removal planned for May 2025. On 19 October 2026 the endpoint still answered. Anyone building a scanner on it should expect it to change without much notice.

Where small apps still get in

To see whether new apps reach anyone, we used the date of each listing's earliest public cloud version. That date is unreliable for older apps: hundreds of long-established listings show an earliest version in early 2025, which suggests the version record was reset then. So we only treat apps whose first cloud version is dated 2026 as a new cohort, and even that cohort may include some relisted apps.

The 2026 cohort is large and mostly empty. On Jira, 1,631 listings first appeared in 2026; 531 have no installs and 1,315 have five or fewer. 47 reached 100 installs and 4 reached 1,000. The top three are free AI coding agents published by Atlassian, Cursor and GitHub, with 9,468, 3,690 and 3,519 installs. On Confluence, 466 listings appeared in 2026, 366 have five or fewer installs, 11 reached 100 and none reached 1,000.

The new apps that did reach 100 cluster in a few kinds of work. On Jira: agile metrics and reporting gadgets, planning poker and retrospectives, admin tools such as user and licence export, file and dynamic custom fields, and connectors to CRM and service desk products. Several of the 47 come from vendors that publish families of related apps, with similar install counts across the siblings. On Confluence, four of the 11 render diagrams written as code: three Mermaid apps and one PlantUML app.

Diagram-as-code shows why such niches stay open. The most installed Mermaid viewer on Confluence, published by Atlassian Labs, has 7,649 installs and a rating of 2.99 from 26 reviews; the next one has 6,252 installs and 4.02. Demand is proven, no listing is clearly liked, and the leader is a free lab project rather than a vendor that defends the niche.

The Forge economics: revenue share and billing

Atlassian announced the current revenue share model on 5 May 2025 and moved its dates on 3 November 2025. As of 19 October 2026, Atlassian's partner FAQ states payouts to partners of 83% for Forge apps and 75% for Connect apps from 1 October 2026, and 75% for Data Center apps. In Atlassian's own terms the commission is 17% on Forge and 25% on Connect. The increases were first scheduled for 1 January and 1 July 2026 and were deferred by three months.

On top of that sits the Forge incentive. Since 1 January 2026 partners pay 0% revenue share on eligible Forge earnings until they reach $1 million in lifetime Forge revenue, counted per partner company across all its Forge apps, subsidiaries included. Apps carrying the Runs on Atlassian badge received it earlier, from 5 October 2025. To count as Forge, an app must have no Connect modules, use OAuth authentication and use Forge UI. Atlassian calls the incentive temporary and says partners will get at least six months' notice before standard rates change.

Atlassian also runs the money. Cloud apps must be paid via Atlassian; a customer enters a 30-day free trial that rolls automatically into a paid subscription, and billing continues until the customer cancels. For a small vendor this removes the billing, licence server and invoicing work entirely. It does not create customers: on 19 October 2026, 2,976 Jira listings were paid via Atlassian, 1,519 were free, and most of the paid ones have very few installs.

Trust badges: Runs on Atlassian, Cloud Fortified and what replaces it

Runs on Atlassian is a badge Atlassian applies automatically to Forge apps that meet three requirements: they use only Atlassian-hosted compute and storage, they support data residency matching the host product, and customers can control external data egress through admin settings. Partners do not apply for it. An app that sends data to an outside service, for example an external AI model, loses it.

Cloud Fortified still appears on listings: the API returned 692 Jira and 486 Confluence cloud apps with approved Cloud Fortified status. But Atlassian's documentation says the programme no longer accepts new submissions and will be phased out by the end of calendar year 2026. Its successor, Atlassian Enterprise Certified, is open to Forge cloud apps and asks for an annual penetration test, a public status page, SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 compliance, a public accessibility report and an AI usage policy where AI is used.

Read together, the badges split the market. Runs on Atlassian is cheap to earn for a simple Forge app and signals that data stays inside Atlassian. The enterprise certification is the expensive tier, and a solo vendor is unlikely to meet its compliance requirements quickly.

The demand engine: end of Server, end of Data Center, end of Connect

Atlassian ended support for its Server products on 15 February 2024, including Marketplace apps for Server. In September 2025 it announced the same path for Data Center: no new Data Center app submissions from 16 December 2025, no new Data Center subscriptions or Marketplace apps for new customers from 30 March 2026, a last purchase date for existing customers of 30 March 2028, and expiry of all Data Center licences, which then become read-only, on 28 March 2029. Bitbucket Data Center apps are exempt.

For app vendors this is the main source of new cloud demand in the next years: every Data Center customer that moves has to replace or migrate its apps. Atlassian describes its customer base as more than 300,000 customers in that announcement and states $6B in lifetime Marketplace sales on its developer site.

The same transition closes doors on the supply side. New Connect apps could no longer be listed from 17 September 2025, apps with a Connect descriptor could no longer be updated from March 2026, and Connect end of support, first planned for December 2026, was moved to 31 January 2027. Atlassian's documentation also gives 2 March 2026 as the start of enforcement for points-based API rate limits on Jira and Confluence Cloud apps, by default 65,000 points per hour per app. A new entrant builds on Forge from day one; many incumbents are still paying for the migration.

Where the reports were wrong

1. Who shares the API quota. One AI deep-research report said the 65,000-point hourly quota is shared across all tenants and all apps installed on a Jira site, and proposed a quota monitor for site administrators. Atlassian's documentation describes the default as one quota per app, shared across all of that app's tenants, with a per-tenant pool assigned only after Atlassian review; API token traffic is excluded. The other report described the default correctly.

2. A badge that skips security review. Both reports said Runs on Atlassian lets a solo developer bypass enterprise security reviews entirely. Atlassian's page on the badge says nothing about security reviews or procurement, and notes that egress controls do not prevent misuse of access granted at installation. Atlassian's own enterprise certification still asks for SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001.

3. Marketplace data shows only legacy apps. A report argued that any app with enough installs to register is by definition a legacy app, so the API is blind to new entrants. In today's data 47 Jira listings first published in 2026 already have at least 100 installs. The API sees new apps; it mostly shows that they get very few installs.

4. Votes as validated demand. Both reports treated feature-request votes, and declined requests in particular, as measured demand. Our separate measurement found that votes convert poorly into installs, and one of the reports' top candidates rested on a request that Atlassian had already resolved natively.

5. Dates that moved. Secondary sources still quote revenue share increases on 1 January and 1 July 2026, and Connect end of support in December 2026. Both were moved, to 1 April and 1 October 2026, and to 31 January 2027. Guides that tell new vendors to aim for Cloud Fortified are also out of date, since the programme no longer takes new submissions.

Method

On 19 October 2026 we read every Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud listing from the public Marketplace API (REST v2): name, vendor, categories, totalInstalls, review count and average rating. For each listing we also read its latest and earliest public cloud version, which gave the payment model, the date of the last release and a first-release date. We counted Cloud Fortified apps with the API's own status filter. Concentration figures are sums of installs, which count installations, not distinct customers.

For the rules we read Atlassian's sources directly: the revenue share announcements of May, October and November 2025, the partner pricing FAQ, the documentation on selling on the Marketplace, Runs on Atlassian and Enterprise Certified, the Server end of support FAQ, the Data Center announcement for Marketplace apps, the Connect end of support announcements and the Jira Cloud rate-limiting page. Our starting points were two AI deep-research reports and our own August scan; none of their figures is used here without a fresh check.

We could not verify, and dropped: a claim that Marketplace bug bounty costs can reach a fixed daily amount, a limit of 128 KB for structured values in Forge storage, the number of apps carrying the Runs on Atlassian badge, which the API we used does not expose as a filter, and the revenue of any app.

Limitations

Installs are not sales. The public number includes free tiers and trials, its definition is not documented, and for apps that also sold Data Center versions it cannot be split by hosting. The first-release dates rest on a version record that appears to have been reset in early 2025 for many listings, so the 2026 cohort is an approximation. Category labels come from the older taxonomy still exposed by the API, and many new listings carry none. All figures are a single reading on one day; install counts change daily. The endpoint we used was announced for deprecation in 2024 and may stop working.

Sources

1. Atlassian Marketplace public API: REST v2 addons (Jira Cloud listings)
2. Atlassian Developer Community: Deprecation of Marketplace V2 APIs
3. Atlassian Developer: Platform Marketplace
4. Atlassian blog: Updates to Marketplace revenue share: 2026
5. Atlassian blog: Runs on Atlassian apps can now take home 100% of Marketplace revenue
6. Atlassian blog: Extended timelines for Marketplace revenue share changes
7. Atlassian Developer: Pricing, payment and billing FAQ
8. Atlassian Developer: Selling on Marketplace
9. Atlassian Developer: Runs on Atlassian
10. Atlassian Developer: Atlassian Enterprise Certified program
11. Atlassian: Server end of support FAQ
12. Atlassian blog: From Data Center to Cloud: the next chapter for Marketplace apps
13. Atlassian blog: Announcing Connect end of support: timeline and next steps
14. Atlassian Developer Community: Connect end of support extended to January 31, 2027
15. Atlassian Developer: Jira Cloud platform rate limiting

Questions and answers

What kind of apps sell best on the Atlassian Marketplace?

By installs, integrations with large tools such as GitHub, Figma and GitLab, admin and scripting toolkits, checklists, time tracking, test management and workflow extensions on Jira, and diagrams, tables and PDF export on Confluence. Installs include free tiers, so the list shows usage more reliably than revenue.

How many installs does a typical Atlassian Marketplace app have?

Few. On 19 October 2026 the median Jira Cloud app had 6 installs and the median Confluence Cloud app had 16. Only 228 Jira apps and 104 Confluence apps had 1,000 installs or more, and more than half of all listings had no review.

What revenue share does Atlassian take on Forge apps in 2026?

From 1 January 2026, 0% on eligible Forge earnings until the partner reaches $1 million in lifetime Forge revenue. Above that, the standard Forge rate is 17% from 1 October 2026; Connect apps pay 25%. To be eligible, an app must have no Connect modules, use OAuth and use Forge UI.

Is Cloud Fortified still worth applying for?

No longer possible for new apps. Atlassian's documentation says Cloud Fortified no longer accepts submissions and will be phased out by the end of 2026. Its successor, Atlassian Enterprise Certified, asks for an annual penetration test, a public status page and SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 compliance, among other requirements.

When does Atlassian Data Center end?

New customers could no longer buy Data Center subscriptions or Marketplace apps from 30 March 2026. Existing customers can buy until 30 March 2028, and all Data Center licences expire and become read-only on 28 March 2029. Bitbucket Data Center apps are exempt.

Do feature-request votes on Atlassian's tracker show demand for an app?

Not reliably. In a separate measurement we found that votes convert poorly into installs of the apps that answer them, and that the request's status matters more than its votes. Use the tracker for ideas and Marketplace installs as the check.

All research