Definition
The Rising Star badge is Atlassian Marketplace's velocity-of-growth designation, awarded to apps showing the strongest relative install acceleration regardless of absolute volume. Unlike Bestseller (which favors mature, high-volume apps) or Spotlight (which is editorially curated), Rising Star surfaces apps in the steep portion of their growth curve — typically 6-18 months post-launch with strong week-over-week acceleration on installs and reviews. The badge rotates faster than Bestseller because growth percentages compress as install volume scales: an app that earns Rising Star at 500 installs per week will usually graduate out of the rotation within 2-3 quarters as its growth normalizes against a larger base. AppRanks tracks Rising Star assignments via Atlassian's `?marketingLabel=rising-star` endpoint and records gain/loss events with crawl-date attribution. The Shopify-side analogue is the New & Noteworthy rail and the WooCommerce Top New Extensions collection; both reward early-momentum apps with a similar visibility-vs-velocity tradeoff. Cross-platform, AppRanks unifies these into a single "emerging" event type so investor watchlists can span marketplaces.
Where you see it on AppRanks: Atlassian app page "Featured Placements" section, audit badge check.
Why this metric matters
Rising Star is the best leading indicator of which apps will convert to Bestseller in the next 6-12 months. For investors and partnership scouts, the Rising Star list is a validated shortlist of category challengers; for developers, watching Rising Star rotations surfaces emerging competitive threats before they show up in the Bestseller leaderboard. Earning Rising Star yourself is also the most explicit feedback signal that a recent product investment (pricing change, feature launch, integration) is moving real demand — Atlassian's algorithm only rewards sustained acceleration, not single-week spikes.
How AppRanks computes it
AppRanks polls Atlassian's `?marketingLabel=rising-star` daily and timestamps state transitions against the crawl date. The underlying growth-rate threshold is undocumented; AppRanks mirrors marketplace assignment without re-computing.
Use cases
- Investor watchlist: filter Rising Star apps by category, sort by months-since-launch, and the top quintile is your shortlist of candidates for partnership or acquisition outreach.
See also: Bestseller badge: the volume counterpart · Spotlight badge: the editorial counterpart · Browse Atlassian Rising Stars
External references: Atlassian marketing labels: Rising Star eligibility (developer docs) · Atlassian Marketplace home