When companies develop software, speed and scalability are everything. Yet, as organizations grow, complexity creeps in. Microservices multiply, ownership becomes unclear, and development slows. Atlassian Compass is changing that. Designed to bring visibility, consistency, and collaboration across engineering teams, Compass centralizes your software ecosystem. It helps every contributor, from platform engineers to developers, work smarter and faster.
Centralize Your Software Universe
As systems expand, it’s easy to lose track of who owns what. Compass solves this by centralizing all your software components in one catalog. Whether it’s microservices, libraries, APIs, or internal tools, Compass creates a living map of your software ecosystem. This single source of truth helps teams quickly identify ownership, dependencies, and health metrics. It eliminates endless searches for information and cuts down on context switching. With clear visibility into every component, engineers can make faster decisions, prioritize issues intelligently, and ensure accountability across teams.
Improve Software Health and Engineering Standards
Healthy software doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of continuous improvement and measurement. Compass makes this process measurable and actionable through Scorecards and Metrics that track engineering standards across your organization.
By automatically evaluating code quality, reliability, security, and compliance, teams can pinpoint weak areas before they turn into bottlenecks. These insights empower leaders to drive consistency, reduce incidents, and maintain reliability as systems scale. Compass effectively becomes your engineering health dashboard, helping you monitor and elevate standards without slowing delivery.
Simplify Onboarding and Boost Developer Experience
When new developers join, navigating complex systems can be overwhelming. Compass simplifies onboarding by providing immediate access to the tools, documentation, and context they need.
Instead of digging through wikis or spreadsheets, newcomers can explore connected components, see ownership details, and understand system dependencies right away. This accelerates time to contribution and enhances developer experience, creating an environment where engineers can focus on coding, not hunting for answers.
Bridge Strategy and Execution with Jira Integration
Compass integrates natively with Jira, as it is an Atlassian product itself, which brings strategic alignment to daily execution. By connecting Jira issues to Compass components, teams gain a real-time view of how their work impacts overall software health.
Imagine understanding the effect of your sprint backlog on critical services, or being able to justify investment in refactoring because Compass highlights declining health metrics. This seamless integration ensures that priorities are informed by data, not guesswork, helping teams make smarter trade-offs that balance delivery speed with system integrity.
Empower Continuous Improvement through Extensibility
Every organization’s tech stack is unique. That’s why Compass is built on Forge, Atlassian’s powerful extensibility platform. Teams can customize Compass to fit their workflows, build integrations with third-party tools, or create internal apps that enhance visibility and automation.
This flexibility allows engineering organizations to extend Compass beyond a catalog. It becomes a dynamic part of your internal developer platform, evolving as your engineering practices mature.
Standardize Best Practices with Software Templates
Consistency is a hallmark of high-performing engineering organizations. Compass enables teams to standardize best practices through reusable software templates. These templates include preset configurations, boilerplate code, and webhooks that align with your organization’s standards.
By using templates, teams can quickly create compliant, production-ready components, reducing repetitive work and ensuring every new service starts with the right foundation. It’s automation that reinforces good habits and accelerates delivery.
What do Compass Customers Say?
“One of the main things we ask ourselves for any new tooling is: “Does this actually make our developers happier?” With Compass, the answer is yes. Developers maintain autonomy over their services and they can scale with intuitive best practices. Their cognitive load has also reduced by taking things out of their heads and putting it in a unified place.”
“I think one of the biggest benefits we’ve found is it kind of provides a single pane of glass to that service. We can integrate it with things like GitHub, PagerDuty, and Sonar Cloud so we can get all the key metrics in one place. You can make smart decisions without having to look around.
Our platform team really likes the capability of creating templates from Compass. So we’ve got different service patterns that we use that are associated with templates. So when engineers are creating new services they can create it from the template, but there’s also the ability to add web hooks to those templates as well.”
From Chaos to Clarity in Modern Engineering
Atlassian Compass is more than a catalog; it’s a command center for modern software teams. It connects people, processes, and systems to eliminate inefficiencies and drive continuous improvement. Plus, its pricing is reasonable for a tool of this caliber.
For engineering organizations struggling with scattered tools, unclear ownership, and slow onboarding, Compass provides a unifying framework that brings order to the chaos. It gives teams the visibility they need to improve reliability, leaders the insights to optimize performance, and developers the environment to stay in flow.
In short, Compass helps you unlock developer productivity by aligning every layer of your engineering organization around shared goals, measurable outcomes, and a single source of truth. Because when teams can see clearly, they can build faster, safer, and better together. Contact our team today to learn more about how you can implement Compass for your team.
