Welcome to Atlassian Forge Series by TitanApps (part 2 of 5)
Welcome to part two of our "Why Use Atlassian Forge" series. In this installment, we compare Atlassian Forge and Atlassian Connect—the two primary platforms for building cloud apps in the Atlassian ecosystem. If you're developing apps for Jira, Confluence, or Bitbucket, understanding the differences between Forge and Connect is essential to making the right architectural decision for your team.
Each platform offers unique benefits, trade-offs, and constraints related to hosting, performance, security, and app maintenance. As Atlassian shifts toward a cloud-first future, it's important to evaluate not only what each platform offers today—but where it’s headed tomorrow.
1. Hosting & Data Residency
Forge apps are hosted entirely on Atlassian Cloud infrastructure. This eliminates the need to provision or manage external servers. Because the app runs in Atlassian's environment, it benefits from built-in support for data residency and compliance, including GDPR and HIPAA.
Apps built with Forge may also be eligible for the "Runs on Atlassian" badge—indicating zero data egress unless explicitly configured. This is a major benefit for teams that prioritize security, privacy, and maintenance-free infrastructure.
Connect, on the other hand, requires you to host your app on your own infrastructure. This means you’re responsible for uptime, scaling, and managing security. Since data flows between Jira and your external server, you also carry the compliance burden.
⚠️ Note: While Forge takes over hosting responsibilities, data integrity is still your responsibility as a developer. If something breaks, Atlassian can’t always recover the data unless proper backups are in place.
2. Performance & Scalability
Forge uses a serverless architecture where backend functions run on demand. It automatically scales based on usage. This model is great for apps with dynamic workloads and minimal DevOps overhead.
That said, Forge functions have runtime limits—such as a 15-minute cap on long-running compute. You may need to redesign parts of your logic using queues, batching, or background triggers if your app requires complex or continuous processing.
Connect gives you full control over performance since everything runs on your infrastructure. You can scale aggressively, use custom caching, and fine-tune databases. But you’ll also need a team to manage and secure the environment.
⚠️ Note: Forge’s storage model (Key-Value, Entity, RDBMS) affects performance. High-volume apps with complex data may still run faster on Connect—especially when caching or indexing is required.
3. Security & Authentication
Forge runs apps inside the Atlassian Cloud, so security and identity are tightly integrated. Apps inherit Atlassian’s platform protections, including the Security Bug Bounty program. You don’t need to implement your own authentication for internal APIs, and OAuth 2.0 is used when connecting to third-party services.
Connect requires you to manage your own security model. Authentication is typically handled with JWT (JSON Web Tokens) and your custom logic. While this gives you flexibility, it also means you’re responsible for any vulnerabilities or breaches.
⚠️ Note: Forge’s permission model restricts log access unless the user grants explicit permission. This can make debugging harder when a user disables logs.
⚠️ Note: Atlassian has started sunsetting legacy Connect features. Developers are encouraged to migrate apps to Forge or adopt Connect on Forge, a hybrid model combining the flexibility of Connect with the cloud-native advantages of Forge.
In the next article of our series, we’ll cover Forge pricing.
Understanding Atlassian Forge's cost structure is crucial for developers planning to build or migrate apps. While Forge apps are currently free to develop and host, Atlassian has announced plans to introduce a usage-based pricing model in the future.