Your guide to building an Atlassian knowledge base that actually works

Let’s be honest, most companies are sitting on a mountain of useful information. The catch? It’s scattered everywhere, buried in Slack DMs, living in random Google Docs, hidden in old support tickets, and locked away in the brains of your most senior teammates. When someone needs an answer, they’re usually stuck, which leads to the same questions being asked over and over and teams getting understandably frustrated.

A central knowledge base is the fix. It’s the single source of truth that helps both your internal teams and your customers find what they need, right when they need it. This guide will walk you through what an Atlassian knowledge base is, how to get it set up properly, and, most importantly, how to build on its strengths to offer the kind of instant, automated support everyone expects these days.

What is an Atlassian knowledge base?

First things first, an "Atlassian knowledge base" is a powerful, integrated solution you build by combining Atlassian's industry-leading tools, primarily Confluence. Think of it as the central library for all your company’s how-to guides, policies, and internal wikis.

The role of Confluence and Jira Service Management in your Atlassian knowledge base

To make this work, you need two key players: Confluence and Jira Service Management.

• Confluence: This is where you write, organize, and manage all your knowledge base articles. It’s your digital library, packed with features for collaborative editing, useful templates, and a page structure that helps keep everything perfectly organized. Your team can jump in to write articles, track changes, and make sure all the information is accurate.

• Jira Service Management (JSM): This is your help desk, the front door where employees or customers show up with questions. When you connect a Confluence space to a JSM project, the system becomes incredibly efficient. As someone types their question into the help portal, JSM automatically looks through your knowledge base and suggests relevant articles. It's a proven way to answer questions before a support ticket is even created.

Internal vs. external Atlassian knowledge bases

You can build an Atlassian knowledge base for two different audiences, and it’s good to know the distinction:

• Internal Knowledge Base: This one is just for your team. Think of it as the home for employee onboarding guides, HR policies, IT troubleshooting steps, and documentation on internal processes. The goal is to make your employees more efficient and able to find answers on their own.
• External Knowledge Base: This is for your customers. It’s your public help center, full of product guides, FAQs, setup instructions, and tutorials designed to help customers solve their own problems with ease.

The setup process is basically the same for both, but you’ll want to be mindful of permissions and make sure you’re writing with the right tone for each group.

How to set up your Atlassian knowledge base: A step-by-step guide

Getting started is refreshingly simple. Atlassian gives you everything you need to build a well-organized and searchable library of information. Here’s a quick walkthrough to get your first knowledge base space up and running.

Step 1: Create your Atlassian knowledge base space in Confluence

Everything begins in Confluence. When you’re ready to build your library, you’ll need to create a new "space." Confluence helps you out here by offering a dedicated "Knowledge Base" template right from the start.

When you choose this template, you’ll be asked to name your space (something obvious like "Customer Help Center" or "IT Support Docs" is perfect) and set the permissions. You can make it public for anyone to see or lock it down for specific users. From there, you can add a logo and tweak the look to fit your company's branding. This whole setup takes just a few minutes and gives you a professional starting point.

Step 2: Structure your Atlassian knowledge base content with parent pages and labels

A logical layout makes it much easier for people to browse and find what they’re looking for. Before you start writing articles, take a moment to think about the structure. Atlassian's flexibility allows you to create a system that grows with your company.

Pro Tip: A great way to organize is by creating a "parent" page for each major topic or product. Then, you can nest "child" pages underneath for specific guides and how-to articles. For example, you might have a parent page for "Billing" with child pages like "How to Update Your Credit Card" and "Understanding Your Invoice."

You should also make a habit of using labels. Labels are like tags that help you group content together across different sections. You can add labels like onboarding, billing, or troubleshooting to your articles to make them even easier to find via search.

Step 3: Write articles for your Atlassian knowledge base using templates

Consistency is a big deal if you want your knowledge base to look professional. The easiest way to nail this is by using templates. Confluence comes with a few pre-built templates for common articles, like a "How-to article" and a "Troubleshooting article."

Using templates makes sure every article follows a similar format, which helps users read and digest the information more easily. It also speeds things up for your team, since they can focus on writing helpful content while Confluence handles the structure.

Step 4: Link your Atlassian knowledge base space to Jira Service Management

Once you have a Confluence space with a few articles in it, the last step is connecting it to Jira Service Management. Just pop over to your JSM project settings, find the "Knowledge base" section, and link your new Confluence space. This is the step that turns on the smart search and ticket deflection features in your customer portal.

Key features and considerations for an Atlassian knowledge base

An Atlassian knowledge base gives you a solid, enterprise-grade foundation for self-service support. Knowing its strengths and how to expand upon them is key to getting the most out of it.

What works well: Core strengths of an Atlassian knowledge base

Atlassian really has the essentials down, and there's a lot to like about its native knowledge base setup.

• The search is remarkably smart: This is a major highlight. When a user starts typing in the JSM portal, the system instantly scans the linked Confluence space and pulls up relevant articles. It's a fantastic way to head off common questions and lighten the load on your support team.
• Version history and easy collaboration: Content needs to stay fresh, and Atlassian makes that easy. Confluence tracks every single change to a page, so you can easily see who changed what and when, and even roll back to an older version if you need to. That, plus its collaborative editor, makes it simple for teams to work together.
• You control who sees what: You have complete control over permissions. You can set them for an entire space (e.g., this whole section is for internal staff only) or get as specific as locking a single page to a certain group of users. This is perfect for managing both internal and external knowledge from one place.
• Templates and macros save time: The built-in templates are a huge help, and Confluence macros let you build more dynamic content. For instance, the "Content by Label" macro can automatically create a list of all pages with a specific label, which is great for building dynamic index pages.

This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of setting up and using a knowledge base in Jira Service Management.

Expanding your Atlassian knowledge base: Considerations for growth

While the core functionality is incredibly solid, you may want to consider additional tools as your support volume grows to reach the next level of automation.

• Further streamlining support workflows: JSM does an excellent job of suggesting articles. For teams looking to take this even further, an AI layer can help by providing direct answers from those articles, saving customers and agents from having to manually scan through documents.
• Integrating knowledge from other platforms: Your company's knowledge often starts in Confluence, but as you scale, you might also have data in Google Docs, Notion, or Slack threads. You can expand your Atlassian-centric setup by using tools that pull all these sources together into a single "brain."
• Managing high-volume content updates: Your knowledge base is a living asset. While Confluence makes editing easy, keeping a massive library current as you scale can become a significant ongoing management task. Smart tools can help identify exactly where documentation gaps exist based on real support tickets.
• Handling complex real-time data requests: A standard Confluence article is a great source of information. For more advanced use cases - like letting a customer check their specific order status - you can complement your Atlassian knowledge base with AI that integrates with live databases or platforms like Shopify.

How to supercharge your Atlassian knowledge base with AI

The best way to address growing needs isn't to change your Atlassian setup. You've already built a great, reliable foundation. The answer is to add a smart AI layer on top that works within the Atlassian ecosystem. This is exactly what tools like eesel AI are designed for, plugging directly into your existing stack to provide truly automated support.

Unify all your knowledge, not just your wiki

Instead of being limited to Confluence, eesel AI connects to over 100 sources right out of the box. You can connect it to your Confluence space, and also hook it up to Google Docs, Notion, past help desk tickets, and much more.

This creates a single, unified brain for your support AI that works alongside Jira. It can pull information from every corner of your company, making your Atlassian-led workflow even more powerful and accurate.

Go from manual search to automated resolution

Instead of just suggesting links to articles, eesel AI's agent reads the customer's question, understands the context by searching across all your connected knowledge, and gives a direct, conversational answer right in the chat.

It can fully resolve tickets on its own, add the right tags, close the ticket, or hand it off to a human agent when it’s something truly complex. This moves you from simple ticket deflection into true ticket automation, allowing your team to focus on high-impact work.

Pro Tip: With eesel AI's simulation mode, you can test the AI on thousands of your past tickets and see what its resolution rate would be before it ever interacts with a customer. You can start small by automating simple topics and expand its responsibilities as you get more comfortable.

Close Atlassian knowledge base gaps automatically

One of the best ways to keep an Atlassian knowledge base current is by analyzing your resolved tickets. When it notices an agent provides a great answer to a new question, eesel AI can automatically draft a new knowledge base article based on that interaction.

This turns your support team into a content-generating machine without any extra effort, helping you keep your Confluence library updated with proven, real-world answers.

Feature	Atlassian knowledge base (standard)	Atlassian KB + eesel AI
Knowledge sources	Comprehensive Confluence/Atlassian suite	Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, past tickets, etc.
Support workflow	Smart search & article suggestions	Automated answers & ticket resolution
Content creation	Manual article writing	Automatic draft generation from tickets
Setup time	Quick setup with built-in templates	Go live with an AI agent in minutes
Actions	Provides reliable static information	Looks up live data & takes triage actions

Build your Atlassian knowledge base foundation, then automate it

An Atlassian knowledge base is a fantastic starting point. Using Confluence and Jira Service Management together gives you a mature, trusted system for organizing information, deflecting common questions, and helping your agents find answers more quickly. It’s the standard choice for professional teams.

As your team grows and you look to provide instant, 24/7 support in 2026, you can further enhance this setup. By adding an AI automation layer like eesel AI, you can turn your reliable library into a proactive support agent. It learns from all your data, provides direct answers, and resolves issues automatically, unlocking the full value of the knowledge you've built in Jira.

Ready to see what your knowledge base is really capable of? Connect your Atlassian knowledge base to eesel AI in just a few minutes and find out how much more you can achieve.