The Marketplace App Strategy Every Enterprise Needs (But Few Have)

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Hello there!

I'm Elena from Elevatic.

Working with enterprise Atlassian environments, I've noticed a recurring pattern: organizations don't struggle because they have too many Marketplace apps, they struggle because they lack a strategy for managing them.

That's why I wanted to share some thoughts on app governance, adoption, and how enterprises can get more value from every app they install.

TL;DR

The problem: Most enterprises have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Atlassian Marketplace apps installed with no central ownership, no evaluation process, and no adoption strategy. The result isn't too many apps — it's the wrong apps, poorly deployed, with nobody accountable for their success.

What this article covers:

• Why unmanaged app portfolios are a ticking time bomb for enterprise IT
• How to audit and rationalize your current Marketplace footprint
• The security differences between Connect and Forge apps, and why they matter
• A practical framework for building an Atlassian app governance strategy from scratch

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You open your Atlassian admin console and see 140 apps installed across your instance. A significant number haven't been actively promoted to users. Several were installed without a rollout plan. And a handful were set up by team leads who lacked the IT support needed to drive real adoption.

Sound familiar?

This is the reality for most large organizations running Atlassian tools. The Marketplace is one of the most powerful ecosystems in enterprise software — home to over 8,000 apps extending Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, and Bitbucket in almost every conceivable direction. But that power goes unrealized when organizations install apps without a strategy for evaluating, deploying, and getting value from them.

The issue isn't that enterprises have too many apps. It's that they have apps without ownership, adoption plans, or a clear picture of the business value each one delivers. That's a governance problem and it's costing organizations not in license fees, but in missed potential.

This article walks through what a healthy marketplace app strategy looks like and how building one helps enterprises get dramatically more from the tools they invest in.

Why App Portfolios Drift Without Governance

A project manager flags a recurring problem: tickets keep getting assigned to team members who are out of office, causing delays and dropped handovers. Someone installs Out of Office Sync for Jira to automatically surface absence information from Outlook directly in Jira. It goes live with no rollout communication, no automation rules configured, and no designated owner. Six months later, half the team doesn't know it exists, assignees are still going dark on tickets, and the app gets blamed — when the real problem was never the app itself.

The average mid-to-large enterprise running Atlassian Cloud or Data Center has between 50 and 300 Marketplace apps installed. Many have never been formally onboarded with users. Fewer still have been evaluated against defined business outcomes. Almost none have formal ownership assigned to champion their adoption.

The patterns are consistent across organizations:

• No structured evaluation. Apps are installed based on a peer recommendation, without a process to assess fit, security, or deployment requirements.
• No adoption strategy. Installing an app and driving its adoption are completely different things. Without a rollout plan, even excellent tools underperform.
• No ownership. When the person who championed an app moves teams or leaves the company, so does the institutional knowledge of why it exists and how it should be used.
• Migration gaps. Data Center-to-Cloud migrations frequently surface apps that were never properly set up in the first place, a second chance to do it right that most organizations miss.

The result: an app portfolio that nobody fully trusts, where value is left on the table across the board.

What's Really at Stake: Five Governance Gaps That Cost Enterprises

1. Security Blind Spots from Unreviewed Apps
Every Marketplace app you install represents a trust decision. Connect apps — the majority of older Marketplace apps so far — operate with OAuth scopes and communicate with your Atlassian instance's data. When you install a Connect app without a security review, you are implicitly trusting a third-party vendor's infrastructure, data handling practices, and ongoing security posture.

Most enterprises don't have a process for that review. They also rarely revisit it over time — even as vendor ownership changes or new compliance requirements emerge.

A strong governance strategy doesn't mean avoiding third-party apps. It means knowing exactly which vendors you trust, why, and under what conditions. That's a competitive advantage in regulated industries and a procurement accelerator in enterprise sales cycles. As an example of vendor transparency in practice, you can explore Elevatic's Trust Center, which covers security, compliance, and resources in one place.

2. Adoption Gaps from Overlapping Tools
Walk through a typical enterprise Confluence environment, and you'll often find multiple apps serving similar purposes, different teams using different tools for the same job, with no shared standard and no cross-team visibility.

This isn't an argument for fewer tools. It's an argument for intentional standardization. When an organization decides deliberately that one app is the standard for a given use case — and backs that decision with rollout support, training, and executive visibility — adoption rates climb dramatically, and the app delivers its full value.

Governance creates the conditions for apps to succeed, not just exist.

3. Invisible Value from Poor Adoption Tracking
Atlassian Cloud app pricing scales with the number of users. An app that represents a meaningful investment at enterprise scale should be delivering meaningful, measurable value. But most organizations have no framework for tracking it, no usage benchmarks, no business outcome metrics and no feedback loops between IT and end users.

The result is that even high-quality apps get questioned at renewal time, because nobody documented the value they delivered. A governance framework solves this by building value tracking into the lifecycle from day one.

4. Procurement Friction from No Evaluation Process
Enterprise app procurement is often slower than it needs to be, not because of the apps themselves, but because there's no agreed-upon process for evaluating and approving them. Security reviews get invented from scratch each time. Stakeholder sign-off loops run long. Vendors can't predict timelines.

A defined app evaluation framework dramatically accelerates this. When procurement knows exactly which questions to ask and which boxes to check, good apps get approved faster and deployed sooner.

5. Compliance Exposure from Unaudited Data Flows
For enterprises operating under GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, or other frameworks, every app that processes or stores data is a potential compliance touchpoint. Without an audit trail of what data each app accesses and where it flows, demonstrating compliance becomes difficult and the audit conversation becomes reactive rather than confident.

Organizations with strong app governance answer compliance questions from a position of documented clarity. Those without it scramble.

How to Build an Atlassian App Portfolio Strategy

A mature 3rd-party app governance strategy has four components: inventory, evaluation, selection, and lifecycle management. Here's how to approach each.

Step 1: Conduct a Full App Inventory

Start with what you have. In Atlassian Cloud, navigate to Settings > Apps > Manage apps to see a full list of installed apps. For Data Center, this lives in Administration > Manage apps.

For each app, document:

• App name and vendor
• Current version and last update date
• Business owner and requesting team
• Active usage (user count, last activity, adoption rate)
• Permission scopes granted
• Annual cost and renewal date
• Data processed or stored externally
• Whether a formal rollout was ever completed

This inventory is the foundation of everything that follows. It will reveal which apps are working, which never got a fair launch, and which need a fresh adoption push rather than a replacement conversation.

Step 2: Evaluate Apps Against Business Outcomes

The right question when assessing an app isn't "is it being used?". It's "is it solving the problem it was installed to solve?" Low usage often reflects a deployment gap, not a product gap.

A structured app evaluation framework should assess:

• Business fit: Is this app solving a real, documented problem for a specific team or workflow? Is there a named sponsor who owns that outcome?
• Depth of capability: Does the app go meaningfully beyond what a generic approach would deliver? Enterprise teams have complex needs. The best Marketplace apps offer depth and configurability that basic approaches can't match.
• Vendor maturity: Is the vendor actively maintaining and developing the app? Do they have a support track record, a security posture, and a roadmap that aligns with where your organization is going?
• Integration fit: How well does the app integrate with the rest of your Atlassian ecosystem and your broader tech stack? The most valuable apps deepen connections among tools rather than create silos.
• Adoption readiness: What does a successful rollout look like? Does the vendor offer onboarding support, documentation, and training resources? The best vendor relationships don't end at purchase.

Step 3: Establish a Structured App Approval Process

Going forward, no app should be installed without a defined approval workflow. The process doesn't need to be bureaucratic, but it does need to be consistent.

A strong enterprise app approval checklist covers:

• Business justification and named sponsor
• Security review (OAuth scopes, vendor SOC 2 certification, data residency)
• Compliance review (GDPR, HIPAA, or applicable frameworks)
• Total cost of ownership at the current and projected user count
• Rollout plan and adoption milestones
• Owner assignment and success metrics
• Vendor support and escalation contacts

This process protects the organization and it also protects good apps from being unfairly evaluated. An app that goes through a rigorous process and is approved arrives with organizational confidence. That's the foundation of successful adoption.

Step 4: Lifecycle Management and Value Tracking

Approving an app is not the end of governance; it's the beginning. Enterprise app portfolios need ongoing lifecycle management to deliver sustained value.

• Quarterly adoption reviews. Track usage data against the adoption milestones set at deployment. If an app is underperforming, investigate whether it's a product issue or a deployment issue before drawing conclusions.
• Annual vendor reviews. Assess vendor health, roadmap alignment, support quality, and whether the app continues to meet evolving compliance requirements. Build a vendor relationship, not just a vendor transaction.
• Value documentation. Maintain a living record of the business outcomes each app has enabled: time saved, processes automated, errors reduced and user satisfaction scores. This documentation is critical at renewal time and for building the internal case for expanding usage.
• Expansion planning. The best enterprise apps grow with the organization. When an app delivers value to one team, governance creates the visibility needed to identify where it should be extended and to define the process for doing so efficiently.

Connect vs. Forge Apps: What Enterprise Buyers Need to Know

Not all Marketplace apps are built the same way, and the architectural difference between Connect and Forge apps has real implications for enterprise procurement and security reviews.

Watch the video

Connect Apps

Connect apps run on the vendor's external infrastructure and communicate with your Atlassian instance via REST APIs using OAuth. They have a mature vendor ecosystem.

Key enterprise procurement questions for Connect apps:

• Are OAuth scopes requested in proportion to the app's functionality?
• Do vendor data centers meet your data residency needs?
• What security certifications does the vendor hold (SOC 2, ISO 27001)?
• What are the vendor's data processing and breach notification policies?

Connect apps from certified vendors suit enterprises; governance just documents trust.

Forge Apps

Forge apps run inside Atlassian's infrastructure in sandboxed cloud functions, not on vendor servers.

Forge offers enterprise benefits:

• Data stays within Atlassian's infrastructure by default
• Atlassian's security and data residency policies apply
• More granular, declarative permissions
• Simpler compliance documentation

As Forge grows, apps built on it often pass enterprise security reviews faster. Knowing the app framework helps procurement.

Getting the Most from Your Marketplace Investment

The organizations that extract the most value from Atlassian Marketplace apps share a few consistent traits. They treat app selection as a strategic decision. They invest in rollout and adoption as seriously as they invest in evaluation. They build relationships with their vendors and treat the Marketplace as a curated ecosystem rather than a free-for-all.

They also recognize something important: the Atlassian platform's native capabilities and the Marketplace ecosystem are not in competition. Native features provide the foundation; Marketplace apps provide the specialized depth that enterprise workflows actually require. The best enterprise app strategies use both deliberate native and specialized apps where the use case demands more.

The right app, properly evaluated, properly deployed, and properly supported, doesn't add cost to an Atlassian environment. It multiplies the value of everything around it.

Ready to build an 3rd-party app governance framework that drives adoption and ROI?