Atlassian Confluence review 2025: Is it the best knowledge base?

Let’s be honest, almost every growing team has heard of Atlassian Confluence. It’s the go-to workspace for building a company wiki, documenting project plans, and keeping everything in one place. On paper, it’s perfect.

But if you’ve used it for a while, you’ve probably felt the pain. Your clean, organized Confluence starts to feel like a digital attic, stuffed with valuable information that nobody can seem to find. We call it the "knowledge graveyard," where good documentation goes to be forgotten.

In this review, we’ll break down what Confluence does well, where it stumbles, and most importantly, how to fix its single biggest flaw: its search. Let’s get that knowledge out of the graveyard and back into your team’s hands.

What is Atlassian Confluence?

Atlassian calls Confluence a "remote-friendly team workspace," which is a fancy way of saying it’s meant to be your team’s single source of truth. It began life as a straightforward wiki, but now it’s used for just about everything: project plans, technical docs, meeting notes, you name it.

A huge reason for its popularity is how snugly it fits with Jira Software. If your team uses Jira to track tasks and projects, Confluence feels like a natural extension. For dev and IT teams, this connection is huge, you can link your documentation directly to your tickets and sprints. Think of it this way: Jira is for tracking the work, and Confluence is for explaining the why and how behind it.

Key features and capabilities

Confluence is more than just a place to write things down. Its features are grouped around helping you create content, work together, and manage all that knowledge.

Creating and organizing content

Getting organized in Confluence is all about its structure. It’s built to grow with you, which is great, but you need to understand the key pieces.

Spaces are your main containers: Think of Spaces as dedicated websites for different parts of your company. You can create a Space for the Marketing team, another for the Q4 Product Launch project, and a separate one for company-wide HR policies. Each one can have its own permissions and branding, keeping everything neat and tidy.

Pages are where the work happens: Inside each Space, you create Pages. These are the documents where you’ll write everything down. But they’re not just plain text, you can embed images, tables, project roadmaps, and videos to make your docs come to life.

Whiteboards for visual brainstorming: For those times when you need to think visually, Confluence has Whiteboards. They’re perfect for brainstorming, mapping out ideas, or drawing diagrams. It’s a nice touch that keeps you from having to jump over to another tool like Miro just to hash out a plan.

Templates to keep things consistent: To avoid reinventing the wheel every time, Confluence offers a huge library of templates. Whether you need a project plan, meeting notes, or a competitive analysis, there’s probably a template for it. This is a lifesaver for keeping documentation consistent across the whole company.

Working together on documents

Confluence is designed for teams, so collaboration is baked right in. You can have several people editing the same page at once, perfect for getting a document drafted quickly. You can also leave comments on the page or on specific sentences to ask questions, give feedback, or get an approval. Tagging a teammate with an @mention is easy, and you can even assign them tasks right from the page.

But it isn’t always smooth sailing. A frequent gripe you’ll see in reviews on sites like Gartner and G2 is that the real-time editing can get clumsy. When the connection lags, people can end up writing over each other’s work, which is a surefire way to lose good ideas and cause a lot of headaches.

One place for all your knowledge

The whole point of Confluence is to stop knowledge from getting stranded in random email threads, Slack DMs, or forgotten folders on someone’s laptop. It wants to be the single library your entire company turns to.

A big part of its strength comes from the Atlassian Marketplace, where you can find thousands of apps to connect Confluence with tools you already use. The built-in connections with Jira, Trello, Slack, and Google Docs are especially popular.

This is also where you can plug in AI tools to give Confluence a real boost. For example, connecting something like eesel AI for Confluence can turn all your static documentation into an active knowledge hub that can answer questions and help automate support, but more on that later.

Confluence Review: Pricing in 2025

Confluence has a few different pricing tiers, so it can work for teams of almost any size. The cost is per user, and you get a bit of a discount as you add more people.

Feature	Free	Standard	Premium
Price	$0	Starts at $6.40/user/month	Starts at $12.30/user/month
Max Users	10	100	100
Pages/Spaces	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Key Features	Basic content creation & collaboration	Permissions, 250 GB storage	Analytics, Automation, 24/7 support
Best for	Small teams or personal use	Growing teams needing more control	Businesses needing advanced insights & support

Pro tip: Keep an eye out for hidden costs. A common theme in user reviews is that you’ll likely need to buy apps from the Marketplace to get certain features you thought were included. Things like advanced analytics or specific workflows often require a paid plugin, and those costs can pile up, making your final bill much higher than the list price.

A Confluence review of the pros and cons

No tool is perfect, right? Here’s a straightforward look at where Confluence shines and where it really struggles.

What we like

• A home for all your documentation. When it works, it really works. Confluence is fantastic for creating a single source of truth that gets everyone on the same page and out of their information silos.

• The best Jira integration around. If your team lives in Jira, you can’t beat Confluence. Linking docs to development tasks, embedding progress reports, and creating Jira issues from a line of text is incredibly smooth.

• It grows with you. The Spaces and Pages structure is logical and can handle everything from a tiny team’s weekend project to a massive knowledge base for a global company.

• A great free plan. You can’t argue with free. The plan for up to 10 users with unlimited pages is a great way for small teams and startups to get started without spending a dime.

Where it falls short

• The search is just plain bad. This is the number one complaint about Confluence, and for good reason. The moment your knowledge base gets big, the built-in search becomes almost useless. It spits out old, irrelevant pages, forcing you to manually dig for information. It turns Confluence into a place where you write docs, but never find them again.

• It gets messy, fast. Without someone actively policing it, your Confluence can devolve into a chaotic mess of outdated pages and disorganized Spaces. Once people stop trusting the information, they stop using it altogether.

• Your knowledge is just sitting there. The information in Confluence is passive. It doesn’t do anything on its own. Your support team still has to manually find answers for customers, and employees still have to ask where to find the expense policy. The answers exist, but getting to them is all manual labor.

• Key features cost extra. Want better analytics or automation? Get ready to open your wallet for the Atlassian Marketplace. Many essential features are only available as paid add-ons, which can seriously inflate your bill.

You might notice a theme here. The biggest issues, bad search and passive knowledge, are exactly what modern AI is built to fix. Instead of making your team hunt for information, you can bring the answers directly to them.

Use Confluence better way with an AI layer

The good news is you don’t have to ditch Confluence and start over. You can fix its biggest problems by adding an AI tool on top. This lets you keep all the documentation you’ve already created and just makes it, well, useful.

Fix the search problem with AI-Powered Q&A

The easiest way to deal with Confluence’s awful search is to just stop using it. That’s where a tool like eesel AI can step in.

Instead of making people log into Confluence and guess the right keywords, they can just ask a question in plain English. Tools like eesel AI’s Internal Chat connect to your Confluence and let employees ask for information directly from Slack or Microsoft Teams. The AI finds the right answer in your docs and gives a quick summary, along with a link to the original page so you can check the source.

Suddenly, your team can find what they need without ever leaving their chat app. No more frustrating, dead-end searches.

Put your knowledge to work for support

Think about it: the answers to most customer questions and employee queries are probably already sitting in your Confluence pages. The problem is that your support agents and team members have to manually hunt for those answers, then copy and paste them into every ticket or chat. It’s repetitive, slow, and a huge waste of time.

An AI platform like eesel AI can connect to Confluence and use all that documentation to automate support. It reads your docs and learns how to answer questions on its own.

The workflow is pretty simple:

With a connection like this, your docs are no longer just sitting there. They become an active tool that can automatically resolve support tickets, draft replies for your agents, and make sure every answer is accurate and consistent.

Should you use it in 2025?

So, what’s the final call on Confluence? Well, it depends on what you need it for.

For creating and storing knowledge, Confluence is still one of the best tools out there, especially if your team is already using Jira. Its organized structure can be a lifesaver for taming information chaos.

But here’s the catch: all that organized knowledge doesn’t mean much if no one can find it or use it. The terrible search and the fact that your information just sits there passively are huge problems for any team that needs to move quickly. Wasting time digging for answers just isn’t an option.

Our advice is pretty simple: If you’re a-lready using Confluence (or plan to), but are tired of the search and want to actually use your documentation, you should pair it with an AI tool like eesel AI.

Pick the AI that fits perfectly for your team

Confluence is great for writing and organizing docs, but it stumbles when you need to find and use that information. The best fix isn’t to get rid of Confluence, but to make it smarter.

Stop letting your team’s hard work go to waste in a documentation graveyard. See how an AI layer can unlock the knowledge you already have and put it to work.

Ready to see for yourself? Try eesel for free or book a demo to learn more.