The Future of Atlassian Forge: Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges

Atlassian Forge is still a relatively young framework, but in a short time it has become a central component of Atlassian’s cloud strategy. Anyone thinking about apps for the Atlassian Marketplace today cannot ignore Forge. This raises an exciting question: where is the platform heading in the coming years, and what does that mean for development teams and app vendors?

Forge as a Strategic Cornerstone

Atlassian has made the path clear: Forge is the new and future standard for cloud extensions. While Connect apps are still running, the roadmap shows clearly that Atlassian is focusing its investments on Forge. New modules, improved API coverage, and deeper integration into products like Jira, Confluence, and Trello are making the platform more attractive step by step.

For development teams, this means that Forge is not just an option but the direction Atlassian will be pursuing long term.

Trend 1: AI and Automation

One of the most important trends is the introduction of Gen AI into Atlassian’s product ecosystem. With Atlassian Intelligence, the first features are already here: suggesting content, summarizing tickets, or triggering automations. For Forge apps, this opens up new possibilities:

Extending existing AI capabilities (e.g., specialized analytics for specific industries)
Custom automations based on your team’s data (Atlassian calls it the “Teamwork Graph”)
AI-powered predictions, such as project progress or risk management (for the brave, who trust AI to make predictions)
Rovo AI agents can use Forge apps to perform custom actions. The options are versatile. Think of what people did with Scriptrunner and PowerScripts on Data Center. It’s a new world. Easier, faster, more flexible. And much cheaper.

The challenge will be to properly address data protection and compliance. But the potential is huge, and those who get in early can secure a clear competitive edge.

Trend 2: Integration into Hybrid Work Environments

Atlassian increasingly positions itself as a collaboration hub, a central node for teamwork within organizations. This means Forge apps that build bridges to tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or GitHub will become increasingly important.

A future vision might look like this: a Forge app that is not only visible in Jira but also posts information in Teams and triggers actions in Slack. In this way, Forge is evolving into a platform for cross-app user experiences — solutions that span multiple products.

We all know that there are apps on the marketplace who post messages on these platforms already. But with a Forge app, you can do whatever you want. You can have the Forge app be an interactive agent in the group chat, it can send rich visual content, and it can react to certain circumstances that you can freely configure and define.

Trend 3: Enterprise Readiness

With the end of the Data Center product line, the demands of large enterprise customers on Atlassian cloud solutions are increasing. Topics such as governance, scalability, and security are taking center stage.

What does this mean for Forge?

Enhanced security and compliance features to meet enterprise requirements
Better observability (monitoring, logging, error tracking)
Improved scalability and performance for large-scale deployments

This is particularly interesting for partners and developers targeting the enterprise market, which offers enormous growth potential.

Trend 4: The Marketplace in Transition

Forge is also transforming the Atlassian Marketplace. Since Forge apps are cloud-first and run directly in Atlassian’s infrastructure, they offer a different development model compared to traditional Connect apps. While this provides security and infrastructure benefits, it also introduces new technical considerations and constraints that developers must navigate.

However, competition will also increase. Successful vendors will differentiate less through “Does it work?” and more through quality, user experience, and support. The Marketplace will become more professional — and more demanding.

Trend 5: Customers increasingly become Forge developers and vibe-coders

During the Atlassian Team Conference in Barcelona, we saw Atlassian introducing “Vibe Coding with Forge”, which will allow non-development IT people to create simple but versatile and bespoke Forge apps for their own instances easily. Those people will use AI and prompting to create custom workflows and special connections to, for example, legacy software that they have in their environment.

We are already seeing this phenomenon in our own organization a lot. We have built a practice of helping those vibe-coding beginner developers when they are stuck. And they all get stuck at some point. This is a service that we enhance to our customers. If you have started vibe-coding something in the Atlassian ecosystem and you are stuck, please feel free to contact us. We’ll help you to resolve your problems. Drop us an email or simply schedule a call with us!

Challenges and Open Questions

Even though the direction is clear, some significant challenges remain with Atlassian Forge:

Pricing complexity: Forge’s current pricing model presents several challenges for app vendors. Logging costs can exceed compute costs, creating dangerous incentives to minimize logging. The lack of budgeting and alerting mechanisms makes cost management difficult. Additionally, Key-Value Storage (KVS) is expensive compared to the still-immature SQL storage options, and there’s no pay-per-use model in the marketplace for small customers with high usage.
Vendor lock-in: Forge runs exclusively on Atlassian’s infrastructure. This provides security for developers but also creates dependency.
Feature parity: How quickly can Atlassian make all relevant APIs and modules available through Forge?

These points will be decisive in determining how attractive Forge remains in the long term.

What Developers and Companies Should Prepare For

Forge is here to stay and is becoming the backbone of Atlassian’s cloud ecosystem.

Development teams need to engage early with trends such as AI, integrations, and enterprise features.
Companies should see Forge apps not just as small helpers but as serious building blocks of their digital strategy.
Marketplace vendors will have to differentiate themselves through quality, usability, and long-term support.

Those who invest in these areas now will not only keep pace in the Atlassian ecosystem but help shape its direction.

In short: the future of Forge is promising but also demanding. All the more reason why now is the right time to engage deeply with the platform and set the course for tomorrow.

Is your team planning a move to Forge? Do you want to modernize your app strategy? Our experienced Atlassian development teams can support you with architecture, development, and certification. And we can get you unstuck if you’ve started the vibe-coding journey on Forge.