The Microsoft Marketplace is a vibrant bazaar of applications and solutions that are built on top of Azure in one way or another. While it's true that some of the Marketplace's SaaS offers are not entirely hosted on Azure, a significant number is. The Azure Marketplace has enormous potential and opportunities for growth, especially in the Azure Application offer area—an area that has recently become more appealing for agentic AI and bundling AI solutions.
The Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE platform provides analytics for our Enterprise tier customer. This platform drives the observability and governance features that our Enterprise customers use to monitor the health and availability of their Azure Managed Applications published on the Microsoft Marketplace and proactively get notified when there are issues impacting their offers and plans along with suggested mitigations which can be applied manually or automatically.
Each week, we provide a summary of the state of Azure solutions on the Microsoft Marketplace, highlighting the areas that are undergoing growth—or decline—using graphs spanning the last 6-12 months.
Azure Marketplace will be used to refer to the Microsoft Marketplace offers that are specific to Microsoft Azure.
NEW: Azure Virtual Machine Offers Growth by OS Platform
💡Did you know?
Many think that just because Azure is a Microsoft cloud service, Microsoft Windows virtual machines will be dominant force. That might have been the case in the beginning, but not so much anymore—this has changed a long time ago.
Linux, with its many variants, is now the dominant OS platform on Azure (as it is on all other hyperscalers and public cloud providers).
Azure Virtual Machine offers on the Microsoft Marketplace also reflect that reality clearly and decisively. The graph below depicts the growth of Azure Virtual Machine offers by their OS platform (Linux or Windows) over the past 16 months. Only about one fifth of VM offers on Azure are Windows!
The graph shows how the growth of Windows VM offers has not died, but it is increasing at a much slower pace than that of Linux. The graph also shows a little throttling taking place, most likely due to the various security measures that Microsoft has put in place to reduce the number of vulnerable VM offers in the Microsoft Marketplace. This is a good thing, and it usually results in a "hiccup", where offers are removed and fixed before being brought back. It's a win-win for publishers and their customers.
Offer Types Over Time
This graph shows the growth (and decline) of offers over time, based on the number of non-private offers published on the Azure Marketplace.
Virtual Machine is the #1 offer type in the Azure Marketplace, followed by SaaS offers. A distant third is Azure Application offers (consisting of Managed Application and Solution Template plan types). Managed Services come next, followed by Consulting Services (Professional Services). Last come Container offers which have not had a growth for years.
Offer Types Over Time (log² graph)
This graph is the same as the previous graph, except that it is a log² plot. It helps us see which offer types are trending better than others.
Consulting Services have been steadily increasing over time. While all other offer types have had increases over time, the leader—the Virtual Machine offer type—seems to be losing momentum to SaaS. This will become more apparent as we take a look at growth by plan type since offers can have one or more plans, and some offers—like Azure Applications—have more than one plan type. The one key difference is that Virtual Machine are back to their growth path based of this period's data.
Plan Types Over Time (log²)
SaaS has the largest number of plans published in the Azure Marketplace, having leapfrogged Virtual Machines to the top spot at the end of August 2025. This is expected due to the significant effort Microsoft is investing in promoting SaaS on Azure.
Another interesting observation is within the Azure Application offer type, where the Managed Application plan type took over from the Solution Template plan type. This is mainly due to the important capabilities that Managed Apps provide. They're monetizable, and they make it easy to support and maintain deployed solutions.
Container plans seem to have a dismal growth, perhaps due to services like Docker Hub being more popular and easier to use—not to mention cloud provider agnostic. There has been a 0% growth week-over-week for this period.
Virtual Machine vs. SaaS Plan Type Growth
Virtual Machines offers are increasing again after a period of steady decline in the past few weeks. The decline was most likely due to older images that have not been updated in a while—especially Windows images—failing the re-cerification checks and being pulled from the Marketplace after not getting updated during the grace period.
SaaS offers are back to their normal growth trends, with a delta of over a 100 plans in this period. Offers had a positive delta of over 30. This seems to indicate that last week tiny growth was an anomaly, and things seem to be back to normal.
Managed App vs. Solution Template Plan Type Growth (Azure Apps)
Let's zoom in on Azure Applications. Notice the steady increase in Managed Applications while Solution Template have become stagnant. This emphasizes the importance of Azure Managed Applications for monetization.
Managed Applications continue to grow in number while Solution Template remain steady, with little change. On the flip side, broken or semi-broken Azure Application offers continue to make their way to the Azure Marketplace, sneaking in past the Certification Process.
We continue to see healthy and error-free offers from ENSEMBLE customers, as expected.
Number and Percentage of Plans by Plan Type
Number and Percentage of Publishers by Offer Type
Number and Percentage of Publishers by Plan Type
Getting started with Azure Applications?
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ENSEMBLE changes the game by providing a visual, drag-and-drop editor for building CreateUiDefinition files. No more guessing JSON syntax or juggling schema references.
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