What Is Confluence?

Key takeaways

Confluence is software that centralizes team knowledge and collaboration in one workspace. 

• The platform supports project documentation, internal knowledge bases, and cross-team collaboration, making it useful across many industries and roles.

• Confluence is widely used with Jira to connect planning and execution, with teams documenting ideas in Confluence and tracking work in Jira.

• You can learn about how documentation in tools like Confluence plays a role in project management methodologies.

Explore Confluence’s features, benefits, and practical applications to envision how this collaborative team management tool could work within your organization. If you're ready to enhance your project manager skill set, enroll in the IBM IT Project Manager Professional Certificate. In as little as four months, you can learn about Agile methodology, project risk management, software architecture, stakeholder engagement, and more.

What is Confluence software?

Confluence is a collaborative workspace tool that offers easy onboarding and scaling as team dynamics shift, simple navigation to help everyone find what they need, and a central hub where teams can create, share, and organize information more efficiently. Alongside Jira and Trello, Confluence is among Atlassian’s core products. As such, it integrates seamlessly with other Atlassian tools to streamline workflows across various teams and projects.

With Confluence, every user can access the workspace to create dynamic pages, maintain structured knowledge bases, and foster more transparent collaboration in the workplace. Its versatility makes it suitable for all sorts of use cases, ranging from project management to internal wikis and beyond.

Whether you’re tracking a project’s progress, building a knowledge base for your organization, creating or managing content, or collaborating with teams in your workplace, Confluence gives you the tools you need to simplify your workflows and centralize your communication. 

What is Confluence used for?

Real-time notifications, comments, and editing facilitate streamlined teamwork, even among team members in different physical locations. AI tools empower you with improved insights and communication, and secure storage, plus integration with numerous apps makes it easy to bring the team together using a virtual platform. From aiding in collaboration to helping with developing knowledge bases, Confluence offers various features to drive organizational improvements. A few of the uses and advantages of Confluence include:

Knowledge base creation and management

• Build and maintain a searchable repository for your organization’s most critical information, which could include things like FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and onboarding resources.

• Use filters and keywords to improve navigation and make content more discoverable within Confluence.

Collaboration tools

• Facilitate real-time collaboration with features like simultaneous editing and live comments.

• Leave in-line feedback directly on pages within Confluence, making team engagement simpler and more accessible.

Page creation and organization

• Use Confluence’s drag-and-drop formatting to organize pages within its interface.

• Organize pages into spaces and hierarchies for easy navigation, helping to prevent important information from getting lost.

Search and indexing

• Confluence’s advanced search features and indexing make finding specific content faster and easier.

• Atlassian Intelligence can help improve the way you find information, while rule-based automation and other tools enhance your ability to gain key insights. 

How to use Confluence

Confluence can help teams of all kinds and sizes improve their workflows and collaboration. Its use cases extend to teams in information technology (IT), human resources (HR), project and product management, software development, and marketing, among others. Learn how to get started with Confluence and become more familiar with some of its advanced features and typical use cases.

Read more: What Is IT Management and How Does It Help Businesses?

Getting started

To start working with Confluence, first create a unique space for each project or department in your organization. Depending on your team’s needs, a single department (such as HR or marketing) might manage multiple projects within its own space. Similarly, a single project might involve collaboration across various departments, both in-house and remote. 

Staying organized

To stay organized, you can set up a homepage for each project by creating a new space or adding a page to an existing one. Instead of building pages from scratch, you can use Confluence templates to create project pages quickly. 

Additional methods 

For multidepartmental projects, page trees add an additional layer of organization. A page tree links related pages and allows team members to track content across departments and projects seamlessly. Labels and slash commands, such as “/layout,” add even more ways to organize your pages.

What is Confluence vs. Jira?

Confluence and Jira serve different but complementary roles in team workflows. Confluence is a hub for planning and capturing ideas, while Jira focuses on tracking and managing work as it progresses. 

Rather than replacing one another, the tools are designed to work together to connect strategy with execution. Teams can develop ideas and document plans in Confluence, then create and assign Jira tasks to carry that work forward. This integration also helps teams manage dependencies and keep projects moving by turning documented plans, risks, and updates into actionable tasks that are clearly communicated to stakeholders.

Explore advanced features of Confluence

Confluence aims to make your experience with the platform simple and straightforward with an intuitive structure that extends to its basic and advanced features. It also offers periodic updates. For example, in January 2025, Atlassian updated its features in Confluence Cloud with options like AI in Whiteboards to enhance brainstorming and the ability to create Jira tasks without having to tab-switch, further streamlining workflows. 

Once your organization has gotten started and organized its pages, maximize Confluence’s potential with some additional advanced tools:

Macros and templates

• Use macros, or predefined functionalities, to embed dynamic content like task lists, charts, and calendars.

• Use templates to streamline repetitive tasks, such as creating weekly meeting notes or other project needs.

Spaces and hierarchies

• Organize related pages into relevant spaces (such as “HR” or “Marketing”).

• Create hierarchies to link pages logically, with various subpages branching off from parent pages.

Integrations

• Confluence integrates with Jira for linking project tasks.

• Link with Trello for visualizing workflows.

• Connect Confluence to Slack for workplace communication.

Custom permissions

• All team members can view Confluence pages by default.

• Grant specific permissions for viewing or editing sensitive pages within your organization.

Common use cases for Confluence

Technical writers, project and product managers and team members, software engineers and developers, HR teams, and others all benefit from using this centralized hub and feature-rich platform. Well-known companies like Salesforce, Canva, and Audi are among Confluence’s users, as are higher educational institutions like Washington University in St. Louis and Illinois Tech, as well as smaller businesses and organizations. 

No matter the business size or type, some popular uses for Confluence include:

• Project documentation: Maintain a central place for your organization’s roadmap, including project goals, timelines, and deliverables.

• Company hub: Develop an internal knowledge repository for things like onboarding resources, policies, and training materials. You can also use this for announcements, newsletters, and other company-wide communication.

• Knowledge sharing: Empower cross-functional teams to share best practices and other domain-specific insights.

• Customer support: Use Confluence to create self-service portals for employees and step-by-step guides and FAQs for customers.

• Gathering feedback: Confluence can help organizations create and send out feedback surveys to clients. It can also gather survey responses and present the data to your team.

Confluence vs. other tools

Atlassian reports strong global adoption of its platform across organizations worldwide, from small teams to large enterprises [1]. To get a feel for whether Confluence is right for you, compare it to some other popular options: 

• Notion: While Notion emphasizes simplicity and customization, Confluence’s documentation and the ease with which you can share it set it apart, particularly if organizing documentation is a priority for your organization.

• Google Docs: Google Docs excels within the Google ecosystem, but Confluence offers added features such as Jira integration, access to hundreds of templates, an activity feed, and a collaborative visual whiteboard.

• Slack: Slack focuses on communication, making it better suited to quick updates, but Confluence excels in its version control, ability to share across platforms (including Slack), and stellar permission management for secure collaboration on shared documents.

• Basecamp: Basecamp is best for project tracking and task management, but it comes without the hierarchical organization and comprehensive features that Confluence offers.

• Monday.com: While Monday.com focuses on task and workflow tracking, Confluence provides more robust documentation and content management capabilities.

Continue exploring project management with our free resources

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• Find your role: Take the Project Management Career Quiz

• Watch on YouTube: IT Project Manager Career Path Explained

• Prepare for interviews: Project Manager Interview Preparation Guide

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