What Is Confluence?

What is Confluence?

Confluence is a powerful collaborative workspace and knowledge management platform developed by Atlassian. It enables teams to create, share, organize, and discuss work in a centralized location boosting productivity and promoting transparent information flow across the entire organization.

How Does Confluence Work?

Confluence is built around the concepts of Spaces and Pages. A Space acts like a large folder a dedicated workspace for a team, project, or topic. Within each Space, users create Pages to document information such as technical documentation, meeting notes, product requirements, and project plans.

One of Confluence's key strengths is real-time collaboration: multiple users can edit the same page simultaneously, leave inline comments, and use @mentions to engage teammates, accelerating feedback and alignment.

[Read more: Confluence: A Quick Overview]

Key Features of Confluence

Confluence offers a wide range of features to help teams effectively create, share, and manage knowledge:

• Flexible Content Creation & Organization: Easily create rich content with a WYSIWYG editor, leverage hundreds of built-in or custom templates, and structure information logically within Spaces and nested Pages.

• Powerful Real-Time Collaboration: Co-edit pages live, track changes instantly, comment inline, and use @mentions for smoother team communication and coordination.

• Centralized Knowledge & Documentation Management: Build and maintain a centralized knowledge base whether for internal teams or customer support-storing policies, how-tos, technical docs, and workflows in an organized and searchable format.

• Seamless Atlassian Integration & More: Tight integration with Jira allows linking issues and plans directly to relevant documentation, displaying Jira reports within Confluence. Additional integrations with apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Drive are available via Atlassian Marketplace.

• Smart, Fast Search: Robust search functionality helps users quickly locate pages, comments, and attachments across all accessible Spaces.

• Granular Permissions Control: Easily manage view and edit permissions at both the Space and Page levels ensuring sensitive content is protected and only accessible by authorized users.[Read more: Managing Permissions in Confluence]

• Automatic Notifications & Updates: Stay up-to-date with changes, comments, and task assignments on followed Pages or Spaces.

Who Should Use Confluence?

Confluence is a flexible platform that adds value to nearly every team or department within an organization:

• Product & Engineering Teams: Write technical documentation, product requirements, sprint notes, retrospectives.

• Marketing Teams: Plan campaigns, create content calendars, collaborate on deliverables.

• HR Teams: Centralize company policies, onboarding guides, and internal announcements.

• Customer Support Teams: Build and maintain self-service knowledge bases and troubleshooting documentation.

• Project Managers: Plan projects, capture meeting notes, track progress, and manage risks.

• Executives & Leadership: Share company strategies, OKRs, and performance updates.

In short, any team needing a shared, organized space to create, share information, and collaborate effectively will benefit from using Confluence.

Key Benefits of Using Confluence

Implementing Confluence brings several critical advantages to your organization:

• Centralized Knowledge Hub: Create a “single source of truth” for company-wide information eliminating silos and data fragmentation.

• Improved Collaboration & Communication: Facilitate seamless teamwork, idea sharing, and feedback across teams regardless of location.

• Boosted Productivity & Efficiency: Reduce time spent searching for information and help new employees onboard faster with clear documentation.

• Promotes a Culture of Transparency: Increase visibility into decisions, plans, and project documentation across the organization.

• Secure & Effective Document Management: Replace scattered file systems and long email threads with structured, searchable, and secure content.

• Ideal for Remote & Hybrid Work: Support geographically distributed or hybrid teams with an accessible, always-on collaboration platform.

• Better Decision-Making: With access to up-to-date and complete information, teams can make more informed decisions.

Common Use Cases for Confluence

Thanks to its flexibility, Confluence is used in a variety of scenarios:

• Creating and maintaining internal or customer-facing knowledge bases.

• Writing and managing project documentation, technical specs, and API docs.

• Recording meeting notes with attendees, discussions, decisions, and action items.

• Defining product plans, user stories, and product roadmaps.

• Publishing internal blogs, company updates, or important announcements.

• Creating dedicated Spaces for each department or project for focused collaboration.

• Designing onboarding workflows for new hires to get up to speed quickly.

• Planning and tracking team or individual OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

FAQs About Confluence

1. Is Confluence free to use?

   Yes. Confluence offers a Free plan for small teams (up to 10 users), including core features to get started. Paid plans Standard, Premium, and Enterprise provide advanced capabilities, larger storage, enhanced security, and additional admin controls suited for larger organizations.

   
   

2. How do Confluence and Jira work together? What’s the difference?

   Confluence and Jira are core products in the Atlassian suite designed to work hand-in-hand. Jira focuses on task tracking, project execution, and issue management the “doing” part of the work. Confluence supports planning, documenting, brainstorming, and knowledge sharing-the “thinking” and “storing” part.

You can embed Jira issues (or work items) directly into Confluence pages or link them to detailed documentation for better project context.

3. Can Confluence be used for personal projects?

   While designed for teams, Confluence can absolutely be used for personal productivity-such as note-taking, planning personal projects, writing, or organizing personal knowledge. The Free plan is a great starting point.

   
   

4. How can I keep Confluence organized and clutter-free?

   Maintaining a well-organized Confluence instance is key to long-term success. Best practices include:

   • Defining clear Space and Page hierarchy from the start

   • Using consistent page naming conventions

   • Leveraging labels to categorize content

   • Regularly reviewing and archiving outdated pages

   • Fostering a team culture of shared knowledge ownership

Pricing Consultation

By Candylio team