When you install any Atlassian applications like JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket, you may want to extend the features of these tools. For example, if you installed JIRA, you may be using it for some time, but what if you want to add more features to it. The good thing is that when you talk about Atlassian tools, you have the option to always add more features to it using the Jira marketplace. So, to do more with Atlassian tools, you can do customizations. In Jira, you can do amazing customizations. But to add a totally new functionality that is otherwise not possible with just customizations can actually be done with the help of something called apps. Apps are nothing but add-ons that you can install in your instance of JIRA, Confluence, or maybe some other Atlassian application. And these apps are available on the Jira marketplace.
What is Jira Marketplace?
Jira marketplace is the marketplace where you have add-ons/apps available to install on Jira instance which have been developed by third-party or even there are add-ons developed by Atlassian which will provide you an additional functionality within Jira. For example, for test management, there are many third-party add-ons like Zephyr.
So this is the beauty of the Jira marketplace. You can always find the apps that may be very specific, and maybe you want to do something that is quite unique to your process or maybe your organization. So you can look for these apps or some possibilities on the marketplace because if you are doing something in your organization, or maybe you want to do something within your organization, there are chances that other people also want to do something similar, and the marketplace is a very good way to look for these additional modules, plugins, add-ons, apps which will let you basically bring in more features to your Atlassian apps.
The marketplace listing and these marketplace apps are either built or developed by Atlassian itself or by partners or vendors. Most of these vendors are actually Atlassian certified. So, if you are looking at apps like Zephyr or Script Runner or email this issue, these apps are actually developed by partners or vendors that Atlassian recommends. So, you can be assured that these apps will work fine for you.
How to use Jira Marketplace?
To understand how you can find more apps, you can always go to this link https://marketplace.atlassian.com/ and when you go to the link, you can see that you have a home page where you can actually take a look at various apps that you can evaluate.
If you want to add the time tracking capabilities in your Jira instance, you can take a look at the various apps that will probably provide this functionality. If you want to do test management with Jira, you can customize your Jira instance internally to manage your test cases if you are looking for a standard solution. But there are apps that can actually help you in implementing or testing or maybe bringing in test management capabilities, and you can do something which is unique. I recommend you to take a look at this marketplace page where you can find new apps, where you can discover apps that are actually popular.
If you look at the home page itself, you have some apps that are under this category called “Staff Picks”. These are the apps that Atlassian is actually recommending to you.
If you want to do test management with the Jira, you can see here that there is an app called Zephyr for Jira, which is quite good, and it is not the only app you can actually evaluate some other apps like Xray, which is also a very popular and very good app for doing your test management.
You have some apps like Email this Issue which is really good for managing your emails. When you are working with something like Jira Service Desk, you may have people emailing you, and you may want to process those emails. Maybe you want to look for a specific keyword like “urgent” or “ASAP” and process them faster, or maybe you want to use those keywords to set high priority or maybe a critical priority based on the process that you are following. Such apps like email this issue are very helpful in such cases. And there are thousands of apps that you can evaluate, and if you think those apps work for you, then just go ahead and purchase them. So, there are some apps that are actually free as well.
You can, of course, take a look at all the apps that are recommended by Atlassian. Still, if I am looking for apps for only Jira, I can actually click on that category on the left hand side. I can see that now I am presented with some great apps like ScriptRunner for Jira, which is one of the most popular and must have app for doing Jira administration. You have apps like Zephyr, which is also listed on the home page of the marketplace, you have apps like Tempo Timesheets which will let you do time tracking.
Are Jira marketplace apps free or paid?
Most of these apps are paid, but there are some free apps that you can always try to find. On the marketplace listing, you can always click on the category, or you can also click on the more filters to find only the free apps.
You can see that that you have 1000 apps that are free on Jira. So you can imagine that there are a lot of apps that are actually free. So, you can just take a look and evaluate them. Also, when you are working on Atlassian apps, you have the option to use the cloud version if they are compatible with your own server or maybe within the server. You can always filter based on the type of product that you are using or the type of deployment that you are using.
Final Thoughts
So that was all about the Jira marketplace. You can explore this marketplace for yourself and figure out which apps would be more suitable for your requirement. More and more apps keep on getting added to the marketplace, so there would be hardly any scenario for which Jira marketplace apps would not be there. So go ahead and start using the Jira marketplace to enhance functionalities on Jira.
