Confluence is Atlassian's team workspace and wiki platform, originally launched in 2004 and now the documentation hub for hundreds of thousands of organizations alongside its sibling Jira. It is the place where engineering, product, and operations teams capture institutional knowledge that does not belong in code: design specs, RFCs, postmortems, runbooks, onboarding guides, meeting notes, OKRs, and team handbooks. Pages are organized into spaces — usually one per team, project, or department — with permission controls and inheritance.
The editor supports rich text, code blocks with syntax highlighting, tables, mentions, inline comments, page templates, and embedded macros for everything from Jira issue lists and Loom videos to draw.io diagrams and Lucidchart whiteboards. Tight integration with Jira lets teams link spec pages to epics, see ticket status inline, and roll up project documentation alongside the work items themselves. Confluence Whiteboards (built-in) and Atlassian Intelligence (the company's AI layer) add brainstorming canvases, page summarization, and natural-language search across spaces — features that close the gap with newer tools like Notion.
Confluence is offered as a freemium product on Atlassian Cloud (10 users free, then per-user monthly pricing on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise tiers) and as Confluence Data Center for self-hosted deployments at large scale. The Server edition was retired in February 2024. For organizations already standardized on Jira and Bitbucket — particularly those with compliance or data-residency requirements that favor Data Center — Confluence remains the default knowledge base, despite stiffer competition from Notion, Coda, and GitBook in newer companies.
