To kick things off, the Atlassian 23 event was a blast. New product and feature talks, discussions on teamwork, and the big banger – talks about AI and how it will eventually reshape the way we collaborate and organize our workflows – all an unforgettable experience. And we were excited to be a part of the fun.
The speakers were not the only thing worth mentioning though, as the ability to chat with our friends and colleagues was a godsend.
That being said, it’s hard to miss the overall vibe of the event which could be expressed in one short question: what’s next?
I’ve already touched on the impact AI will surely have in just a short amount of time. But there is also the question of countless competitors on the horizon. Will Asana, Clickup, or Monday.com be enough to change the status quo and remove the mighty titan (pun totally intended) from the spotlight? Spoiler: probably not.
The market of project management: Jira vs Asana, Monday, Clickup
Let’s not waste anyone’s time with clever ways of building up intrigue. Jira is at the top and isn’t going to lose positions anytime soon. I can easily prove the first half of this statement by simply looking at the money on the table.
Atlassian earnings have grown from $2 Billion in 2021 to $3.35 Billion in 2023 until March. We’ve seen 29.42% growth from 2020, 36.16% increase from 2021, and 28.93% increase from 2022.
What about the competition? The closest one would be Monday.com with $236 million followed by Asana with $142.6 million. And even then both of these companies have lost millions in cash flow whereas Atlassian lost only $350K.
What is Jira doing differently?
Jira’s greatest strength comes from its ability to help bigger companies to finetune their project management and portfolio management be it with the functionality of the app itself or the availability of solutions on the Marketplace.
Yaroslav Lazor, CEO at Railsware
One of the biggest selling points of Jira is its flexibility. All of the vendors on the Atlassian marketplace are only adding value to this concept. Even if there’s something Jira can’t do – there is an easily accessible app that can among the 4000 add-ons available.
I guess you could argue that Monday.com has a marketplace of its own but with only 5 featured top-selling apps it still has a lot of room to grow and colossal shoes to fill.
Realizing this, Jira is playing to its strengths by supporting vendors and further app development. With a 2.8 Billion revenue in 2022 they’ve paid their vendors $1 Billion in the last 18 months. Furthermore, they are making the development of new apps much simpler with the introduction of Forge, a development platform for building Jira and Confluence Cloud apps.
Speaking of cloud, Jira supports developers and vendors of cloud apps for a reason. The company is actively trying to move their clients to the cloud. Yes, big companies still prefer Data Center instances but with a continuous support of innovation in off-premises solutions some businesses might reconsider their strategies with time.
In addition to the apps from third-party providers, Jira is actively leveraging new trends like AI with the introduction of Atlassian Intelligence for the Jira Cloud family of products. Again, they are doing it in a very Jira way. They use the 20 years of collecting data about how business teams plan, track, and deliver work to create a feature that helps teams be more productive rather than doing certain things in their stead.
Atlassian’s AI will help with a lot of things – inside Jira especially – but the app in and of itself is a place where people are trying to solve structural issues and these people can’t hope for AI to “come and save the day” or make something great.
Yaroslav Lazor, CEO at Railsware
Conclusion
Competition is great. It moves the industry forward and I sometimes wish that a new player could bring a bit of chaos and make the colossal titan move faster (at least in terms of UI and UX). But let’s look the truth in the eye: right now Atlassian is the only company that can offer software capable of helping companies with thousands of employees effectively work and scale. Apps like Monday.com or even Asana are clearly made for smaller teams.
Standardization isn’t about the process. It’s about helping people follow it.
