What is Confluence? A complete overview for 2025

We’ve all been there. You know the answer to a question exists somewhere, but you can’t remember if it was in an email, a Slack thread, or that one Google Doc from six months ago. Hunting for information is a huge time sink, and it’s exactly the kind of problem that gets worse as a team grows.

This is where the idea of a "single source of truth" comes in. It’s a bit of a buzzword, but the concept is solid: having one central place for all your team’s knowledge makes work so much smoother. That’s the core mission of Atlassian Confluence, one of the most well-known platforms for building a shared company brain.

But what is Confluence, really? Is it just a glorified wiki, or something more? And more importantly, is it the right tool for every team, especially those on the front lines of support? Let’s dig in and get you a complete overview, covering the good, the bad, and what you really need to know for 2025.

What is Atlassian Confluence?

At its heart, Confluence is a collaborative workspace designed to help teams create, organize, and share knowledge. Think of it as a massive, interconnected digital notebook for your entire company. Its main job is to prevent important information from getting trapped in individual inboxes or scattered across a dozen different apps.

Teams use it for pretty much everything you can imagine:

• Mapping out project plans and product specs.

• Jotting down and sharing meeting notes so everyone stays in the loop.

• Building out a full company intranet with HR policies and official announcements.

• Creating internal knowledge bases for different departments, from engineering to marketing.

What makes it different from something like Google Docs is its structure. It’s not just a collection of disconnected documents. Confluence is built around a system of "spaces" and "pages" that link together, creating a web of information that’s easy to navigate (when it’s well-organized, at least). And while it works hand-in-glove with project management tools like Jira, its focus isn’t on tracking tasks, it’s on capturing the collective wisdom behind those tasks.

This video from Atlassian provides a great introduction to what Confluence is and how it helps teams collaborate.

Core features and use cases of Confluence

The real magic of Confluence is its flexibility. It provides a few simple building blocks that you can combine to create almost any kind of documentation your team needs.

Confluence building blocks: Pages, spaces, and databases

Everything in Confluence starts with Pages. A page is your canvas. It can be a straightforward text document, or it can be a rich page filled with images, tables, videos, and even live content embedded from other applications.

Pages are then organized into Spaces. You can think of a Space as a high-level folder for a specific team, project, or topic. Most companies set up Spaces for "Marketing," "Engineering," "HR," and so on. This structure is what keeps the platform from becoming a free-for-all and helps everyone know where to find things.

A visual representation of how Confluence organizes content into different Spaces for teams and projects.

A relatively new addition to the mix is Databases. This feature lets you add structured tables to your pages, kind of like a mini-spreadsheet or a simple database. It’s surprisingly useful for things like tracking competitor features or organizing user feedback in a way that you can easily sort, filter, and reference across different pages.

Collaboration and content creation in Confluence

Confluence was built from the ground up for teamwork. One of its most helpful features is a huge library of templates. Whether you need to create a project roadmap, a marketing plan, or just simple meeting notes, there’s likely a template for it. This saves a ton of time and helps maintain consistency in how your company documents things.

The extensive template library in Confluence helps teams maintain consistency and save time on documentation.

Just like in Google Docs, you get real-time editing. Multiple people can be in a page at the same time, writing and making changes together. You can see their cursors moving around, leave comments for feedback, and easily track every version of the document.

But maybe its biggest strength is its ecosystem of integrations. Confluence connects with thousands of other tools, including Jira, Slack, Trello, and Figma. This means you can pull live project statuses, updated designs, or relevant conversations right into your documents. It’s a huge help for reducing the amount of time you spend switching between tabs just to get the full picture.

An example of Confluence's powerful integration with Jira, allowing live project statuses to be embedded directly into documents.

A complete breakdown of Confluence pricing

Figuring out the right Confluence plan really comes down to your team’s size, budget, and how much administrative control you need. The pricing is tiered, so let’s look at what each level offers.

Feature	Free	Standard	Premium	Enterprise
Price (per user/mo)	$0	$5.16	$9.73	Contact Sales (Annual)
User Limit	10 users	150,000 users	150,000 users	150,000 users
Storage	2 GB	250 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited
Key Features	Basic pages, spaces, templates	Advanced permissions, guest access	Analytics, admin key, 99.9% uptime SLA	Atlassian Guard, multiple sites, 99.95% uptime SLA
Best For	Small teams or personal projects	Growing teams needing basic controls	Businesses needing scale and administrative oversight	Large enterprises with complex security and compliance needs

The Free plan is perfect for small teams of up to 10 people who are just dipping their toes in the water. Once you outgrow that or need more granular control, the Standard plan is the logical next step. It adds key features like advanced permissions and the ability to invite guests, making it a good fit for most growing businesses.

For companies that are scaling quickly, the Premium plan brings more to the table. You get analytics to see which pages are being viewed (and which are being ignored), better admin tools, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The Enterprise plan is designed for large corporations that have strict security, compliance, and data management requirements, offering advanced features like Atlassian Guard. Most tiers have monthly and annual billing options, with a discount if you pay for the year upfront.

The limitations of using Confluence for frontline support

Confluence is genuinely great for its core purpose: creating and storing long-form documentation. But the moment you try to use it as the primary knowledge source for a busy support team, you start to see the cracks. The system just wasn’t designed for the fast-paced, real-time nature of support.

Problem 1: The knowledge is trapped in another tab.

Your support agents spend their entire day inside your help desk, whether it’s Zendesk or Intercom. Your employees are living in Slack or Microsoft Teams. When they need an answer that lives in Confluence, the workflow is clunky. They have to stop what they’re doing, open a new tab, navigate to Confluence, try to guess the right search terms, find the article, and then copy and paste the information back into their conversation. Each step adds friction and time to every single ticket.

Problem 2: It’s a "pull" system, not a "push" one.

All the valuable information in Confluence just sits there, waiting for someone to come find it. It puts the entire burden on your agent to know that an answer probably exists, figure out the right keywords to find it, and then scan through an article to pull out the relevant snippet. The system can’t proactively suggest answers based on the customer’s question. It’s a completely manual process that relies on human memory and effort.

Problem 3: Keeping it updated is a guessing game.

How do you know if your documentation is actually effective? Confluence doesn’t have a way to tell you which questions customers are asking that your knowledge base doesn’t cover. You can’t easily spot knowledge gaps. And when an agent writes a brilliant, detailed response to a new or tricky question, that knowledge usually dies in the ticket. There’s no easy, automated way to capture that resolution and turn it into a new Confluence article for the rest of the team to use.

This old-school workflow is a recipe for inefficiency. For an agent, a single question can trigger a whole chain of frustrating steps: they read the customer’s question, get a hunch the answer is in Confluence, switch tabs, type in a few search terms, and hope for the best. If they find the right page, they copy the answer and go back. If not, they’re forced to interrupt a colleague or escalate the ticket, leaving the customer waiting even longer.

Supercharge Confluence with an AI knowledge layer

Here’s the thing: you don’t need to get rid of Confluence. All that knowledge you’ve painstakingly documented is incredibly valuable. The problem isn’t the content; it’s how you access it. The solution is to activate that knowledge by adding an AI knowledge layer that brings it directly into your team’s existing workflows.

This is exactly what eesel AI does. It acts as a smart bridge, connecting the information in your static knowledge base to the frontline tools where your team actually works.

Unify your Confluence knowledge in one place

eesel AI doesn’t just look at your Confluence knowledge base. It connects to all your other sources of company knowledge, like your past support tickets, saved macros, and even scattered Google Docs. This creates a single, comprehensive brain for the AI to learn from, ensuring it always has the complete context when generating answers.

Get your Confluence integration started in minutes

This isn’t a six-month implementation project. eesel AI is built to be self-serve. With one-click integrations, you can connect Confluence and your help desk in a few minutes and start seeing results almost right away. No developers or complex setup needed.

Turn your static Confluence docs into active help

Once connected, eesel AI transforms your passive documentation into an active assistant for your team.

• For your support agents: The AI Copilot works right inside their help desk, drafting accurate replies to customer questions by pulling information directly from your Confluence pages. Agents get the perfect answer suggested to them without ever needing to leave the ticket.

• For your employees: The AI Internal Chat allows staff to ask questions in Slack or MS Teams and get instant, correct answers sourced from your Confluence documentation. This deflects a huge number of common IT and HR tickets before they’re ever created.

• For your customers: You can even deploy the AI Agent to handle things on its own. It can autonomously resolve common customer tickets 24/7, using the information stored in Confluence to provide support without any human intervention.

Confluence is a powerful foundation that needs activation

Atlassian Confluence is an excellent tool for what it was built to do: create a centralized place for your team to build and organize knowledge. It’s a solid foundation for establishing a single source of truth.

But for your support and IT teams, that knowledge is only useful if it’s accessible in the moment it’s needed. It can’t be locked away on a digital shelf. To unlock the real value of your Confluence content, you need to activate it with an AI layer that brings answers directly to your team, right where they’re already working.

Don’t let all that hard work go to waste. See how eesel AI can breathe new life into your Confluence knowledge by starting a free trial or booking a demo today.