Stride, Atlassian's Slack competitor, opens its API to all developers
The arrival of Stride, Atlassian's Slack competitor, was probably the company's biggest launch of 2017. While the company generally allows developers to easily integrate with its products, Stride's API remained …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Atlassian launched Stride in September 2017 as its Slack-like workplace communication service, the API stayed closed even though the company normally lets developers integrate freely with its products. Opening the API to all developers is Atlassian conceding that a chat tool without an integration surface can't compete — Slack had already built its moat here with the third-party App Directory and an $80M developer fund, plus a published platform roadmap and identity play.
The move matters because it tests whether Atlassian can close the ecosystem gap on feature parity alone, and the corpus already records how the contest ended: within months, Slack agreed to buy the HipChat and Stride assets outright, with Atlassian taking an equity stake instead of continuing the fight.
First-order effects
- Developers can now build and ship Stride integrations without special access, giving Atlassian's enterprise customers a path to connect existing tools to their chat workspace.
- Atlassian directly targets Slack's biggest structural advantage — its app catalog — by removing the gate that kept Stride's integration count near zero.
Second-order effects
- Slack's response pressure shifts from features to developer economics: its App Directory, developer fund, and 'Sign in with Slack' identity program become the benchmark any challenger must match, raising the cost of competing in work chat.
- Teams evaluating chat platforms gain a second credible option, forcing buyers to weigh integration ecosystems — not just pricing like Stride's $3/user/month tier — when standardizing.
Third-order effects
- Even with the API open, Atlassian exited direct competition within months, selling the HipChat and Stride assets to Slack and later building cross-platform automation into Jira Cloud that supports Slack and Microsoft Teams — evidence that work chat consolidates around whoever owns the developer ecosystem.
- If the pattern holds, chat platforms stop being standalone products and become distribution layers for third-party software, with integration breadth deciding winners before price does.
The trend: Workplace chat is consolidating around platform ecosystems where developer integrations, not messaging features, decide which products survive.