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 an 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.
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.
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.
Virtual Machine vs. SaaS Plan Type Growth
Managed App vs. Solution Template Plan Type Growth (Azure Apps)
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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Ready to Build Smarter?
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