Atlassian Confluence: Features, Uses, and Pricing

Overview

Atlassian Confluence is collaborative workspace software for creating, organizing, sharing, and maintaining team knowledge. It gives organizations a common place for documentation, reference material, plans, and other information that people need to revisit. The practical answer to “what is Confluence used for?” ranges from building an internal knowledge base to documenting processes and decisions. Prospective users typically include team leads, contributors, readers, and administrators evaluating how shared information should be structured and governed. This page focuses on the core Confluence software rather than Atlassian’s broader product suite. In particular, Jira manages work and issue tracking, while Confluence centers on documents and organizational knowledge, although the two products can connect.

How teams create and maintain knowledge in Confluence

A useful Confluence workspace begins with a purpose and a structure. Contributors can create pages, live docs, whiteboards, databases, videos, and slides, then group related material into spaces and page trees. Templates can give recurring documents a consistent starting point, while databases provide more structure when information needs defined fields rather than a purely narrative page.

The structure matters after publication. A team can assign spaces to departments, products, projects, or enduring business functions, but it should decide that convention before the workspace grows. Clear page names, predictable parent pages, and limited duplication make information easier to find through navigation and search. Without those conventions, a capable search system can still return several plausible versions of the same policy or procedure.

Maintenance is a separate stage of the lifecycle. Version history preserves earlier page states, while status markers, archiving, content insights, audit logs, and automation can support review and cleanup processes. These mechanisms do not decide which page remains authoritative or when a subject-matter expert should review it. Teams still need owners, review intervals, and a defined method for marking obsolete material. For high-value documentation, an owner can periodically confirm accuracy, update the status, and archive superseded pages instead of leaving competing versions visible.

Rovo capabilities on eligible plans add AI-assisted search, chat, agents, summaries, and drafting. Their practical role is to help people retrieve or develop material from connected knowledge, not to replace access controls or human verification. Organizations should still review generated content before treating it as an approved policy, instruction, or record.

How collaboration, permissions, and administration work

Confluence separates content participation from workspace governance. Contributors can develop material together and readers can consume it, while administrators determine broader access and organizational settings. Paid plans can manage access at page and space level and support guests, public links, and anonymous access. A guest is restricted to one space, making that role more suitable for a narrowly defined external collaboration than for access across an entire internal knowledge base.

Public and anonymous sharing require deliberate policies. Anonymous access exposes content to anyone on the internet, so it is materially different from inviting an identified guest or sharing within an organization. Administrators should define which spaces may be public, who can change access, and what review is required before publication. Anonymous access is not available on the Free plan or in Atlassian Government Cloud.

Plan selection affects how much control administrators have. The Free plan allows up to 10 users but does not provide customizable permissions, so its shared editable model may be too broad for teams handling information with different access requirements. Larger installations also need to account for storage, site scale, support, auditing, and centralized administration rather than treating user count as the only decision factor.

The Confluence tool can enforce configured permissions and retain operational records, but it cannot create a sensible information architecture on its own. Administrators and content owners must establish naming conventions, space boundaries, ownership, review routines, and offboarding procedures. They should also test guest and public access with representative accounts instead of assuming that inherited or page-level settings produce the intended result.

Moving existing knowledge into or out of Confluence

Confluence Cloud documents import paths for Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and OneDrive documents. That gives teams several starting points for consolidating existing knowledge, but an import should be treated as a conversion rather than a guaranteed visual copy. Unsupported formatting or images may not survive intact, so teams should test representative files containing tables, embedded media, links, comments, and complex layouts before scheduling a larger move.

A migration plan should distinguish page content from the surrounding system. Attachments, permissions, page relationships, structured databases, and whiteboards may require different checks. In particular, importing a Confluence Cloud space does not retain whiteboard or database functionality. Teams should inventory those content types separately and decide whether they need rebuilding, another transfer method, or an archived reference copy.

For outbound portability, documented exports include Word, PDF, HTML, CSV, and XML, but format availability and the resulting structure depend on the content being exported. A PDF may suit a stable reading copy, while HTML or XML may be more relevant to a structured migration. CSV is associated with tabular data rather than a complete recreation of a space. Before committing to a format, administrators should export a small but representative set and verify text, attachments, hierarchy, links, permissions, and any data that must remain editable.

Deployment also shapes the migration process. Confluence is available as a cloud service and as the self-managed Data Center product, so teams should confirm which source and destination documentation applies to their environment. A staged transfer with a defined content freeze, validation checklist, owner sign-off, and fallback copy reduces the chance of losing context while pages are moved.