A practical guide to Confluence AI: Features, considerations, and alternatives

Let's be honest, for a lot of us, Confluence is basically our team's shared brain. It’s the digital home for everything: project plans, company policies, meeting notes, you name it. It's the one place everyone is supposed to check for the official story.

So, when Atlassian announced they were adding AI into the mix, it sounded like a dream come true. Imagine getting instant answers without digging through dozens of pages or bugging a coworker. The promise was massive: faster writing, smarter searching, and a more streamlined way to handle all that information.

But what’s it really like to use? This guide is a straightforward look at what Confluence's native AI can actually do. We'll cover the genuinely helpful features and also look at the specific considerations to keep in mind for your setup. Most importantly, we'll show you how to build an AI knowledge base that connects all your team's information, using complementary tools alongside Confluence.

What is Confluence AI?

So, what exactly is "Confluence AI"? It’s not a single tool you can buy off the shelf. Think of it as a set of AI features woven directly into the Confluence experience. This is all powered by a larger platform called Atlassian Intelligence, which is now evolving into a newer, more capable version named Rovo. Essentially, it’s the AI engine that Atlassian is plugging into all its products.

The main goal here is to help you work faster without ever leaving the Atlassian ecosystem. It uses powerful large language models (similar to the tech behind ChatGPT) and points them at your company's private data living in your Confluence pages and spaces. The idea is to serve up context-aware answers, help you draft documents from scratch, and summarize long, dense pages in seconds. If you're wondering "does Confluence have an AI tool," the answer is yes — and it's becoming more capable every year.

These features are available to teams using Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise plans, offering a sophisticated toolset for mature organizations. If you're not sure where to start, our guide on how to enable Confluence AI walks you through the setup process.

Key features of native Confluence AI

Atlassian Intelligence brings some powerful capabilities to the table. These are features that can definitely help streamline some of your day-to-day tasks right inside your Confluence pages.

Generate and transform content with Confluence AI

We’ve all been there: staring at a blank page with a blinking cursor mocking us. Confluence AI can help break through that writer's block. You can give it a simple prompt, like "/ai draft a marketing plan for the new product launch", and it will generate a structured outline for you to start editing and building upon. It’s a great way to get the ball rolling.

It's also a pretty handy writing assistant. Once you have some text down, you can highlight it and ask the AI to work its magic. Common tasks include:

• Improving the writing: It can clean up your phrasing and fix spelling and grammar mistakes.

• Changing the tone: You can instantly switch your text from a casual, brainstorming style to something more formal and professional for an official announcement.

• Adjusting the length: Ask it to make your text shorter for a quick summary or even expand on a point to add more detail.

Summarize pages, comments, and changes with Confluence AI

Ever come back from a vacation and felt like you needed to read a novel just to catch up on a single project? Confluence AI tries to solve this headache with its summarization features. You can get a quick, scannable summary of a long project document, a detailed technical specification, or even a messy, sprawling comment thread where everyone has an opinion.

There's also a feature called "Page Catch Up" which is a real lifesaver. It shows you a summary of what’s changed on a page since the last time you viewed it. For teams that collaborate heavily on documents, this means you can stay in sync without having to manually compare versions or ask "so, what did I miss?"

Search with Confluence AI using natural language Q&A

Traditional keyword searching can feel like a guessing game. You have to figure out the exact term someone might have used in a document from three years ago. Confluence AI lets you skip that. You can just ask a question in plain English, like, "What's our policy for expensing home office equipment?"

The AI will then scan your relevant Confluence spaces and give you a direct answer, pulling information from the most likely pages. A really nice touch is that it also cites its sources, linking back to the original pages it used to construct the answer. This lets you quickly verify the information or dive deeper if the summary isn't quite enough. For teams looking to extend this capability, you can learn how to use AI to search Confluence or Notion across your entire knowledge ecosystem.

This video provides a practical overview of how to use Atlassian Intelligence to accelerate your work within Confluence.

Create automations with Confluence AI

If you’re a fan of automating repetitive tasks, you can use natural language to set up simple rules within Confluence. For instance, you could tell it to "archive any pages in the '2023 Projects' space that haven't been updated in 6 months and notify the original author." The AI will then build that automation rule for you. It's a useful way to keep your Confluence instance from getting cluttered with outdated content without needing to be a workflow wizard.

Considerations for using Confluence AI

While the native features are a solid start, there are some considerations for teams who need their AI to work across multiple different platforms.

Ecosystem focus: Understanding the Atlassian focus

One thing to keep in mind is that Confluence AI is designed to work excellently with data that lives inside Confluence and other Atlassian products. This is perfect for teams who do the majority of their work within the Atlassian suite.

However, many teams also use a variety of other apps. For example, your project brief might be in Confluence, while customer feedback sits in a Slack channel, financial models are in Google Sheets, and design mockups are in Google Docs. To get a unified view across all these sources, you can easily pair Confluence with complementary tools that bridge these gaps.

Searching within attachments

At present, native features are primarily focused on the text content of your Confluence pages. If your team relies heavily on attached PDFs, Word documents, or spreadsheets, you might find that supplementing Confluence AI with an integration from the Marketplace helps ensure all your information is searchable.

So much of a company's valuable knowledge is found in files like contracts, research reports, and technical manuals. By using complementary tools, you can ensure your AI has access to the information inside these documents, making your knowledge base even more robust.

Confluence AI plan and access details

As we mentioned earlier, Atlassian has made its AI features available to customers on the Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise plans. These tiers are designed for teams that need high-level security, scalability, and advanced intelligence features.

On top of the tier-based pricing, Atlassian's AI engine, Rovo, uses a credit-based system for usage. This model is built to scale with your team's needs, ensuring that as your use of AI grows, the platform can support that increased demand.

How to build a true AI knowledge base with eesel AI

Confluence is a fantastic tool for documentation and collaboration. To make it even better, you can augment it with a complementary AI platform like eesel AI, which is specifically built to unify scattered knowledge.

Unify all your knowledge sources alongside Confluence

A tool like eesel AI is built to connect all the different apps your team uses every day. It integrates seamlessly with your Confluence spaces, and also connects to Google Docs, Notion, Slack, Zendesk, and over 100 other platforms where your team's work resides.

Crucially, eesel AI can index and understand the content inside attachments like PDFs and other documents. That critical market research report your team attached to a page last quarter? eesel can read it and use that information to answer questions instantly. This gives your AI a complete picture, allowing it to provide comprehensive answers based on your entire universe of information.

Get granular control with a customizable workflow engine

Good AI isn't just about answering questions; it's about behaving in a way that fits your team's culture and workflow. eesel AI works within your ecosystem to give you total control. You can define a custom persona and tone of voice, so your AI assistant sounds like a helpful team member.

The powerful prompt editor allows you to fine-tune exactly how the AI should respond in different scenarios. More importantly, you can define clear rules for when it should escalate a question to a human expert. This level of customization builds trust and makes an AI assistant a reliable part of your team's daily operations.

Go live in minutes with a self-serve setup

eesel AI is designed to be self-serve, meaning you can connect your knowledge sources and launch your first AI assistant in just a few minutes. It's a quick way to add more power to your existing Confluence setup.

You can even de-risk the entire process with a powerful simulation mode. This feature lets you test your AI on thousands of your company's historical questions or support tickets to see exactly how it will perform before you roll it out. You get clear, data-backed insights on its effectiveness from day one.

A quick look at Confluence AI pricing

Here’s a simple breakdown of Confluence’s pricing and where the native AI features come into play. Confluence offers these features in its most robust tiers to ensure high performance and security.

Friendly heads-up: While Confluence's per-user pricing is structured for enterprise needs, the Rovo AI uses a credit system for AI actions. In contrast, platforms like eesel AI offer transparent pricing based on interactions, providing another option for teams who prefer that model.

Plan	Price (per user/month)	Native AI Features
Free	$0 (up to 10 users)	❌ No
Standard	~$5.16	❌ No (Rovo is available with specific credit limits)
Premium	~$9.73	✅ Yes
Enterprise	Contact Sales	✅ Yes

Move beyond a siloed Confluence AI

Confluence is an excellent platform for creating and organizing your team’s knowledge, and its native AI features are an impressive step toward making that knowledge easier to access.

While native AI excels within the Atlassian ecosystem, pairing it with complementary tools allows you to tap into your company's collective intelligence across every platform you use. An AI that can see across Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, and all your other tools is the one that can provide the complete, accurate answers your team needs to move faster and make better decisions.

Ready to give your team instant answers from your entire knowledge ecosystem? Try eesel AI for free and build a truly unified knowledge base in minutes.

Learn more about Confluence AI: Confluence AI alternatives, Confluence AI pricing, Confluence AI chatbot, Confluence AI assistant, and Confluence AI copilot.