How to automate Confluence: A step-by-step guide for 2026

If your team uses Confluence, you know it’s more than just a wiki. It’s the brain of your company, the place where everything from first-draft meeting notes to polished project plans and crucial product specs lives. It’s a powerful single source of truth that scales as your team grows.

As your knowledge base expands, staying organized is key to maintaining efficiency. You might find yourself manually creating weekly report pages, checking in with teammates for updates, or tracking document reviews. These are the perfect tasks to streamline so you can focus on high-impact work.

This is exactly where automation can step in to make your workspace even more efficient. By setting up a few straightforward rules, you can allow Confluence to handle repetitive tasks for you.

This guide will walk you through exactly how to automate Confluence using its own built-in "Automation" feature. We’ll build a useful, real-world workflow together, step-by-step, so you can see how it works and start saving yourself some serious time.

How to automate Confluence: What you'll need to get started

Before we get started, let's make sure you have the right setup. Confluence Automation is a robust tool available on specific plans.

Here’s a quick checklist of what you need to have in place:

• A Confluence Cloud Premium or Enterprise plan: The automation feature is one of the premium perks Atlassian provides to help larger teams manage their content at scale. If you're on the Free or Standard plan, you might consider upgrading to access these features.

• Admin permissions: To create and manage rules, you can be a Site, Confluence, or Space admin. If you just want to set up automations for your immediate team, "Space admin" rights are all you need.

• A clear process in mind: The most effective automations solve a real, everyday need. Before you open the settings, think about a repetitive task you’d love to streamline.

How to automate Confluence with native rules (5 steps)

Alright, let's build something. To really understand how to automate Confluence, we're going to create a common and genuinely useful rule from scratch.

Our goal: Automatically send a message to a specific Slack channel whenever a page’s status is updated to "Ready for Review." This is a classic workflow for any team creating content, whether it's for internal documentation or product updates.

Step 1: Navigate to the automation settings

First, you need to know where these automation rules live. Confluence gives you two places to build them:

• Global automation: Found in the main Confluence administration settings. Rules you build here apply to every space across your site, making it great for company-wide policies.

• Space automation: Tucked away inside a specific space's settings. Rules you create here only affect that one space, making it perfect for team-specific playbooks.

For our example, we'll use Space automation. To get there, go to the space you want to work in, find Space settings in the sidebar, and then click on Automation.

Step 2: Choose your trigger

Every automation starts with a trigger. This is the event that kicks the whole process off. It’s the "WHEN" in the statement: "WHEN this happens, THEN do that."

Confluence gives you a great list of triggers, such as when a page is created, a comment is added, or a user is mentioned. For our workflow, we want the rule to activate the moment someone changes a page's status.

In the rule builder, click Create rule, and from the list of triggers, find and select Page status updated.

Step 3: Add conditions to refine your rule

Conditions ensure your rule only runs when specific criteria are met. We only want our rule to run when the status changes to "Ready for Review."

To set this up, add an If/else block condition. Inside this block, set the condition to check if the Page status field is a match for "Ready for Review." This ensures your Slack channel only gets a notification at the exact right moment.

Step 4: Define the action to perform

Now for the action: the "THEN" part of our equation.

Click Add action and choose the Send Slack message option. If you haven't connected Slack to Confluence before, you'll be prompted to do that first. Once connected, you can write the message using "smart values" - placeholders that pull in information from the page.

Example message: "Heads up, team! The page "{{page.title}}" is now ready for review. Here's the link: {{page.url}}"

Confluence will automatically swap the placeholders with the actual title and link, making the notification instantly useful for your team.

Step 5: Name and enable your rule

Give your rule a clear name like "Notify #reviews channel on status change." This helps you and other admins understand what the rule does at a glance.

Once you’re happy, hit the Turn it on button. Your automation is now live! If you ever need to troubleshoot, check the Audit Log for a complete history of your rule's activity.

Considerations for your Confluence automation journey

Confluence Automation is a powerful tool for cleaning up internal processes. As you build more rules, here are a few best practices and considerations to keep in mind:

• Leverage the Confluence API for advanced needs: While native automation covers many essential tasks, certain highly specialized actions can be handled via the Confluence API. This allows you to extend the platform's capabilities even further.

• Plan for your execution needs: Depending on your monthly execution limit (which varies by plan), it’s good to monitor how often your rules run. This ensures your most important workflows remain active and efficient throughout the month.

• Enhance knowledge accessibility with integrations: Confluence is an industry-leading repository for documentation. While it excels at managing pages, you can further enhance access to that knowledge by using complementary tools that help surface information across your different apps.

This video provides a deep dive into creating automations in Atlassian Confluence to help you get started.

A smarter way to automate your knowledge

Automating workflows is a fantastic way to boost productivity. To take things a step further, you can also automate access to the knowledge itself. Imagine delivering exact answers to your team right where they are already working.

That’s where eesel AI comes in. It is a complementary AI platform that securely connects to your company's apps, including Confluence, to act as a central resource that answers questions for your team instantly.

Here’s how it works alongside your Confluence setup:

It unifies your knowledge in one place eesel AI connects Confluence with your other tools like Google Docs, Notion, and Zendesk. This creates a unified source of truth, so your team doesn't have to search through multiple platforms to find what they need.

Get direct answers instantly With the AI Internal Chat, your team can ask the eesel AI bot a direct question right in Slack. Instead of searching through a long document, they get a concise answer with a link to the source Confluence page for more detail.

Simple setup for immediate value Connecting your Confluence space to eesel AI is a quick and straightforward process. Within minutes, you have a secure Q&A bot ready to help your team. It’s a great way to connect your knowledge and make your existing documentation even more accessible.

Final thoughts and next steps

Is Confluence's native automation worth your time? Absolutely. It’s a mature, reliable tool for standardizing how your team works and managing repetitive tasks. If you're on a Premium or Enterprise plan, it’s a powerful asset for your workspace.

By organizing your workflows with Confluence and enhancing knowledge access with complementary tools, you empower your team to spend less time searching for info and more time achieving their goals.

Ready to see how it works? You can connect your Confluence space and build an AI assistant for your team in just a few minutes. Get started with eesel AI for free.