Reddit is scaling, standardizing, and saving $300,000 per year with Jira and Confluence Whiteboards

Scaling and standardizing while staying true to Reddit’s roots

Since launching in 2005 with $100,000 in seed funding, Reddit has grown into a multi-billion dollar, global platform with hundreds of millions of active users. From 2021-2023 alone, Reddit’s staff has more than doubled from 750 to over 2,000 to support their scaling business. 

Like many fast-growing companies, their teams are trying to balance often-opposing forces: autonomy vs. standardization, scaling vs. maintaining an open and agile culture, and investing in growth vs. containing costs. They turned to Atlassian for help. 

Reddit was an early Atlassian cloud adopter, and teams across the company now rely on the tools to collaborate and deliver. “My world has changed from Data Center to Cloud. I’m no longer a part-time Java engineer/visualization/database engineer. I’m a system admin and an evangelist,” Senior System Engineer Matt Chester says. “Usage has really grown over the years. Our dev teams live and breathe in Jira.”  

Over time, individuals and teams also added other tools to their collection for project management and retrospectives. This proliferation of software increased costs and security risks, became harder to manage, and created silos between teams and their data. As the company planned ahead, savings, security, and connecting the enterprise became even higher priorities. 

Seeing user affinity for Atlassian products and how much the tools had helped Reddit grow, IT leadership opted to centralize with Atlassian’s team-centric suite of collaboration tools, including Jira, Confluence, Trello, and Atlas. Since making the switch to a centralized platform, Reddit has saved over $300,000 each year, making it easier for employees to collaborate, find information, and create an online community like none other.

Saying, “Sayonara!” to disparate tools for savings, security, collaboration, and simplicity

Reddit’s autonomous company culture has helped the company grow quickly and become a household name among social media users. This freedom has also come at a cost as the company scales. 

As usage of several tools purchased by individuals or small teams swelled, so did software expenses. Few of those tools were designed for larger enterprises, so they weren’t fully meeting Reddit’s needs. 

In addition to driving up costs, the sheer number of different tools and users was creating vulnerabilities – a high priority given Reddit’s focus on privacy and security. 

To solve these challenges, Senior Director of Corporate Technology Sean Joerg created a plan. “Sean has a vision to standardize tooling to stop the sprawl from a cost and security perspective,” Matt explains. “Disparate tooling takes a lot of extra work for both users and admins. So by shifting people into the same tools with some of the same frameworks, it becomes a lot easier.”

A single source of truth sparks over $300,000 each year in savings

Now that Reddit has completed the migration from disparate tools to Atlassian, teams across the company have one central platform with many productivity products to choose from based on their needs. 

Business teams such as Operations, HR, and Design turn to Jira for cross-functional work that requires project management, intake, and collaboration with other departments. For example, the Case Studies Team uses Jira to oversee the case study creation process. 

Sales can submit requests for a new case study through Jira or through an Advanced Form embedded right into Confluence. Then, the request is routed to the Case Studies and Data Science Teams so they can collaborate to gather data, compile it into multiple presentation types, and deliver the final products to stakeholders. “Cross-functional teams have found it easier to work with developers and technical teams in Atlassian because they don’t have to switch tools to create or manage tickets,” Matt says.

He adds that Design and Branding have also consolidated multiple tools and projects into one Jira workflow. “By centralizing tooling, they can now work in one place, see metrics about their work, and make it easier for people to interface with them.”

Integrations between all Atlassian tools and native features such as Confluence whiteboards have saved time for employees and money for the business. “The biggest impact of switching to Atlassian is the cost savings. We're saving over $300,000/year by moving from other tools to Atlassian,” Matt says. “Teams love how all the tools are connected. They can brainstorm using Confluence whiteboards, then open tickets from the whiteboard without leaving Confluence...Now, many teams — including Site Reliability Engineering, Technical Program Management, CorpTech, and Sales — are using it.”

Centralizing teams in Confluence has also been a game-changer for discoverability. “By bringing together all of this scattered information, people will know where to find what they need. A lot of times they don’t even have to switch tools to find it, because Confluence data is shown in Jira tickets,” Matt says. “Over time, our expectation is that Confluence will be our single source of truth for documentation moving forward.”

“It’s just easier when everyone is in Atlassian.”

Reddit’s migration and standardization with Atlassian tools has not only driven internal savings and efficiencies, but also helped the company deliver what their customers want and need: a community where they can come together to feel a sense of empowerment and belonging.

In fact, Reddit uses Atlassian cloud tools to create many of their users’ favorite features and initiatives, such as the r/Place collaborative art project. Over 7 million people participated in 2023 alone, working together to bring designs to life.