How to automate Confluence: A step-by-step guide for 2025

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 messy first-draft meeting notes to polished project plans and crucial product specs lives. It’s supposed to be your single source of truth.

But as that brain gets bigger, it can also get a lot messier. Soon, you find yourself spending less time on creative work and more time on mind-numbing admin. You’re manually creating the same weekly report page, poking teammates to update their sections, and trying to keep track of which documents have been reviewed. It feels like you’ve become a full-time Confluence gardener, and the weeds are growing fast.

This is exactly where automation can step in and save your sanity. By setting up a few straightforward rules, you can teach Confluence to handle all that tedious busywork 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 our hands dirty, let’s make sure you have the right keys to the car. Confluence Automation is a fantastic tool, but it’s not available to everyone.

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

• A Confluence Cloud Premium or Enterprise plan: This is the big one. The automation feature is one of the main perks Atlassian uses to distinguish its higher-tier plans. If you’re on the Free or Standard plan, you won’t see the options we’re about to discuss.

• Admin permissions: You don’t necessarily need to be the super-admin for your entire company site. 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, having "Space admin" rights is all you need.

• A clear process in mind: This might be the most important part. The most effective automations are the ones that solve a real, nagging problem. Before you even open the settings, take a minute to think about a repetitive task you’d love to get off your plate for good.

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 a blog, 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, and the difference is important.

• Global automation: This lives in the main Confluence administration settings. Rules you build here are the "law of the land" and can apply to every single space across your site. This is great for big, company-wide policies, like a rule that archives any page that hasn’t been touched in a year.

• Space automation: This is tucked away inside a specific space’s settings. Rules you create here only affect that one space. Think of it as your team’s personal playbook.

For our example, we’ll use Space automation. It’s the perfect sandbox to build and test rules without accidentally spamming the entire company. To get there, just 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 single automation starts with a trigger. This is the event that kicks the whole process off. It’s the "WHEN" in the simple statement: "WHEN this happens, THEN do that."

Confluence gives you a nice list of triggers to choose from. A rule can be triggered when a page is created, when a comment is added, when a user is mentioned, and so on. For our workflow, we want the rule to spring into action the moment someone changes a page’s status.

So, 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

A trigger by itself is often a bit too… trigger-happy. A rule that fires every single time a page status is updated would drive your team crazy. The status might change from "Draft" to "In Progress" or from "Ready for Review" to "Published." You don’t want a notification for all of that.

This is where conditions come in. Conditions are your way of telling the rule, "Hey, only run if these specific things are also true." They let you narrow the focus.

We only want our rule to run when the status changes to "Ready for Review." To set this up, we’ll add an If/else block condition.

Inside this block, you’ll set the condition to check if the Page status field is a perfect match for "Ready for Review." This little check ensures your Slack channel only gets the notification at the exact right moment.

Step 4: Define the action to perform

Now for the fun part: the action. This is what you want Confluence to actually do after the trigger fires and your conditions are met. It’s the "THEN" part of our equation.

In our case, the action is to let the team know what’s up in Slack. 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 you’re connected, you can write the message that will be sent. This is where you can use "smart values," which are basically little placeholders that automatically pull in information from the page that triggered the rule.

Here’s a simple message you could use:

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

When your rule runs, Confluence will automatically swap "{{page.title}}" with the real title of the page and "{{page.url}}" with a direct link to it. This makes the notification instantly useful and saves everyone from having to go hunt for the document.

Step 5: Name and enable your rule

Last but not least, give your rule a name that makes sense. Future you (and any other admin) will be grateful. "Notify #reviews channel on status change" is a thousand times better than "Untitled rule #3." It tells you exactly what the rule does at a glance.

Once you’re happy with everything, hit the Turn it on button. That’s it! Your automation is now live and waiting for a page status to change.

If you ever need to see if your rule is working or figure out why it’s not, check the Audit Log. It’s a complete history of every time your rules have run, showing you what succeeded, what failed, and why. It’s your detective tool for troubleshooting.

Common mistakes and limitations to watch for

Confluence Automation is a great starting point, but it’s not a silver bullet. As you start building more rules, you’ll probably bump into a few frustrating limitations. It’s better to know about them upfront.

• Some actions are just missing. You’ll quickly find yourself looking for a simple action that feels like it should be there, but isn’t. A perfect example? You can’t use an automation rule to create a Confluence task on a page. The official workaround from Atlassian is to use the "Send web request" action to call the Confluence API. For most non-developers, that suggestion might as well be written in another language. It creates a confusing gap in what you can actually do.

• You can run out of juice. Automation isn’t an all-you-can-eat buffet. On the Premium plan, your rules have a monthly execution limit (often around 1,000 runs per user). If you have a large, active team and a few rules that trigger on common events like "page created," you can burn through that limit faster than you think. Once you hit the cap, all your automations just stop working until the first of next month.

• It keeps the knowledge locked up. This is less of a technical issue and more of a big-picture problem. Confluence Automation is designed to automate tasks inside of Confluence. It’s great at managing the containers of knowledge (the pages), but it does nothing to help you get the knowledge out of those containers. It can send your team a link, but they still have to stop what they’re doing, open a new tab, and start searching or reading to find the one piece of information they actually need.

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 solid step forward. But what if you could automate access to the knowledge itself? Imagine if, instead of just sending a link to a 20-page document, you could deliver the exact answer your team needs, right where they’re already working.

That’s the whole idea behind eesel AI. It’s an AI platform that securely connects to all of your company’s apps, including Confluence, to act as a central brain that can answer questions for your team instantly.

Here’s how it tackles the limitations we just talked about:

It pulls all your knowledge into one place.

eesel AI doesn’t stop at Confluence. It also plugs into Google Docs, Notion, Zendesk, and over 100 other tools your company uses. This breaks down the walls between your apps and creates a single, unified source of truth. No more wondering if the answer is in Confluence or that one Google Doc from six months ago.

Get answers, not just links.

With a tool like the AI Internal Chat, the workflow we built earlier gets a major upgrade. Instead of just getting a Slack notification with a link, a team member can ask the eesel AI bot a direct question right there in Slack.

For example, they could ask, "What’s our refund policy for customers in the EU?" The bot would instantly give them a clear, concise answer, along with a link to the exact Confluence page it used as a source. The knowledge comes directly to them.

Setup is genuinely simple.

While setting up even a single Confluence automation rule involves a five-step process of triggers, conditions, and actions, getting started with eesel AI is much simpler. You connect your Confluence space in a couple of clicks, and within minutes, you have a secure and powerful Q&A bot ready to help your team. You don’t have to build dozens of individual rules; you just connect your knowledge and let the AI handle the rest.

Final thoughts and next steps

So, is Confluence’s native automation worth your time? Absolutely. It’s a powerful tool for cleaning up your internal processes, standardizing how your team works, and getting rid of boring, repetitive tasks. If you’re on a Premium or Enterprise plan, you should definitely be using it.

But once you’ve organized your library, the next logical question is how to help people find the right book. Automating workflows is about making content management easier. Automating knowledge access is about making the knowledge itself more valuable.

By turning your static Confluence pages into a resource that can answer questions on demand, you empower your team to spend less time digging for information and more time getting things done.

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.