Atlassian has now officially announced the deprecation of Atlassian Connect. In a blog post published on March 17, 2025, Keran McKenzie, Head of Product for the Ecosystem Platform, outlined a three-phase plan to transition app developers from Connect to Forge, their new app development platform.

What Does This Mean for Customers?

If you are using Jira Cloud or Confluence Cloud and have apps installed, they are likely still using Atlassian Connect. You will need to make sure that those apps are moving to Forge to ensure that your users can continue to use them after Q4 2026.

An app contains a list of modules. Generally speaking, for every extension an app uses (like a Confluence macro or a Jira Custom Field) they register a module on the Development Platform (Forge or Connect) they are using.

For the most extensions Atlassian provides an old Connect Module and a new Forge Module as an equivalent. Over the next months, every app vendor will need to move every single Connect module to the new Forge variant.

Atlassian will stop officially supporting Connect modules in multiple phases.

Phase One: No New Connect Apps (September 17, 2025)

At that date, Atlassian will stop accepting new Connect apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Existing Connect apps will be unaffected.

Phase Two: No More Connect Descriptor Updates (March 2026)

From this moment on, apps that haven’t started the migration to Forge will not be able to provide updates to their customers. This already can lead to issues for customers that rely on those apps as they might not able receieve updates from the responsible vendor.

Phase Three: Connect Enters End of Support (Q4 2026)

Then the support for Connect modules will end. If your still using apps with Connect modules that might break any time without the possibility to fix it properly.

How to prepare for this?

Being responsible for operation of your Atlassian products you want to make sure that your app portfolio is prepared for this change. By the end of 2026 all of your apps that are being used need to be migrated to Forge.

From outside it is hard to spot whether an app has already migrated to Forge or not. This is why we have updated our service forge-apps.com to show the current migration status of an app.

An app that has already moved all modules to Forge will be marked with a green Forge badge.
Apps that have started that migration will be marked with a yellow ‘Connect on Forge’ badge. Those have started the migration process. A percent indicating shows how many modules are already migrated.
Apps that are still running on Connect without having started the migration will be marked with a red ‘Connect’ badge.

Next steps

For your important apps you can check the status of the migration on a regular basis and should see a steady progress regarding the migration. If in doubt you should reach out to the responsible vendor.

Our Atlassian Experts at Seibert are happy to assist you with this assessment. Reach out to us via e-mail or schedule a meeting with us via our Calendly link. We can help you to assess the current status of your app portfolio hasslefree by providing a app safety report on a regular basis to make ready for the time after Q4 2026.