A practical guide to Jira automation for Confluence

Let’s be honest, your developers practically live inside Jira. Meanwhile, the rest of the company, from support to marketing, relies on Confluence for documentation and project updates. This split often creates a frustrating disconnect. Manually creating release notes or project summaries in Confluence every time a Jira ticket moves is tedious, slow, and a recipe for human error.

The good news is that Atlassian offers a built-in solution: Jira automation for Confluence. It promises to build a bridge between the two platforms by automatically creating pages and syncing information.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the two main ways to set this up natively. We’ll look at what they can do, where they fall short, and what they might cost you. We’ll also explore a more modern, AI-powered approach that goes beyond just creating pages to actually unify your company’s knowledge.

What is Jira automation for Confluence?

This isn’t a single feature you can just switch on. It’s about using Jira’s own automation engine to communicate with Confluence. Think of it as building a small bridge between the two apps using a straightforward set of rules made up of triggers, conditions, and actions.

What is Jira?

Jira is Atlassian’s powerhouse tool for project management and issue tracking. It’s the go-to for agile teams to plan sprints, track bugs, and manage complex projects. Everything revolves around "issues" (like tasks or bugs) that move through a workflow you can customize.

What is Confluence?

Confluence is the other side of the coin, a collaborative knowledge hub where teams create and organize their work. It acts as the central source of truth for everything from project plans and meeting notes to company policies. It’s the wiki that tries to keep everyone on the same page.

How does Jira automation for Confluence work?

At its core, Jira’s automation follows a simple "if this happens, then do that" logic. Every rule you build has three main parts:

• Trigger: This is the event that starts the rule. A common one is an issue being moved to the "Done" column.

• Condition: This is an optional filter to make the rule more specific. For example, the automation should only run if the issue is a "Bug."

• Action: This is what the automation actually does. In our case, it would be "Create Confluence page."

By combining these pieces, you can build workflows that link actions in Jira to outcomes in Confluence, hopefully saving time and keeping your documentation from getting stale.

Method 1: The built-in ‘Create Confluence page’ action

The most direct way to get started is with Jira’s native ‘Create Confluence page’ action. It’s built right into the automation rule builder and is designed for simple use cases where you don’t want to touch any code. It’s a decent starting point, but you might find its limitations have you looking for an alternative pretty quickly.

How to set up the native action

Setting up a basic rule is fairly simple. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. In your project, go to Project Settings, then click on Automation.

2. Click Create rule.

3. Pick a trigger, like Issue created or Issue transitioned.

4. If you need to, add a condition to narrow it down, like only running for a specific type of issue.

5. For the action, choose Create Confluence page.

6. Finally, tell it which Confluence space and parent page to use, and give it a title. You can use smart values like "{{issue.summary}}" to pull in the issue’s title automatically.

Limitations of this method

This is where the simple approach starts to feel a bit too simple. While it’s easy to get going, it doesn’t offer much in the way of flexibility.

First, you have very little control over the page’s content. The action is great at creating a blank page with a title, but it can’t pull in dynamic information from the Jira ticket, like the description, assignee, or comments, and put it in the body. You’re essentially just creating an empty shell that someone still has to fill out manually.

Second, there are well-known problems with templates. As countless users on the Atlassian Community forums have discovered, Confluence templates with variables often just don’t appear in the dropdown menu in Jira Automation. This makes it nearly impossible to create a pre-populated page with useful information, which is the whole point for most teams.

Finally, the action is completely rigid. It’s a one-time deal. It can create a page, but it can’t go back and update it, add comments, or do anything else. If you need more than a basic placeholder, this method won’t cut it.

Method 2: The API approach using ‘Send web request’

For teams that need more control, there’s the more advanced method: using the ‘Send web request’ action. This approach ditches the simple pre-built action and lets you talk directly to the Confluence REST API. It’s a lot more powerful, but it also brings a whole new level of complexity and potential headaches.

How the API method works

Instead of picking an action from a list, you have to build a raw API call to Confluence yourself. It’s a technical process that involves a few key steps, as users on Reddit and in community tutorials have figured out.

You’ll need to configure:

• Webhook URL: The specific Confluence API endpoint, which usually ends in "…/rest/api/content".

• Authentication: This means creating an API token in your Confluence settings and adding it to the rule as a specially encoded header.

• Custom Data Body (JSON): This is the tricky part. You have to write a JSON code block from scratch that defines the page’s title, space, parent, and all of its content using Confluence’s unique storage format.

You can use Jira’s smart values to pull in data. A typical JSON payload might look something like this:

"`json

{

"type": "page",

"title": "{{issue.key}}: {{issue.summary}}",

"space": {"key": "YOURSPACEKEY"},

"ancestors": [{"id": 12345678}],

"body": {

"storage": {  

  "value": "  

Description: {{issue.description}}

Assignee: {{issue.assignee.displayName}}

",

  "representation": "storage"  

}  

}

}

"`

Challenges of the API method

While powerful, this method is not for the faint of heart. It comes with some serious drawbacks that make it a non-starter for many teams.

There’s a big technical hurdle. You need a good handle on APIs, JSON, and Confluence’s weird, HTML-like storage format. This is usually beyond the skill set of a project manager, meaning they have to rely on a developer to set up and, more importantly, maintain these rules.

There’s also a security risk. Hardcoding API tokens directly into automation rules isn’t a great practice. If project permissions are too open, that token could be exposed. And if the person who created the token ever leaves the company, the automation will just quietly stop working one day.

Finally, these rules are fragile and a pain to maintain. Any small change to the Confluence API could break your automation. And trust me, trying to debug a typo in a JSON payload inside a tiny text box is a uniquely frustrating experience.

Jira and Confluence automation pricing

Before you go too far down either of these paths, it’s worth knowing that access to these features depends on your Jira and Confluence Cloud plan. Automation isn’t free, and the usage limits on the lower-tier plans can be a real roadblock for active teams.

For any kind of serious automation, you’ll likely need to be on a Standard or Premium plan, which is a cost you’ll want to factor in.

Feature availability by plan

Plan	Jira Automation	Confluence Automation	Key Limitations
Free	100 rule runs/month	10 rule runs/month	Very limited executions, not really usable for active teams.
Standard	1,700 rule runs/month	100 rule runs/month	Higher limits, but they’re shared across your entire site.
Premium	1,000 rule runs/user/month	1,000 rule runs/user/month	Pooled limits are much more flexible. Required for AI features.
Enterprise	Unlimited	Unlimited	No execution limits.

A smarter alternative: Connecting with AI

Creating a static Confluence page from a Jira ticket is a start, but it doesn’t solve the core problem. The real goal is to have a living, unified knowledge base that stays in sync without someone having to constantly babysit it. Fiddling with brittle API calls feels more like a clunky workaround than a modern solution.

This is where a tool like eesel AI changes the game. Instead of just pushing data from Jira to Confluence, eesel AI unifies the knowledge from both platforms into a single, intelligent source of truth.

This infographic illustrates how eesel AI unifies knowledge from various sources like Jira and Confluence to create a single source of truth, improving the Jira automation Confluence workflow.:

You can seamlessly connect all your knowledge sources, including Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Slack. It learns from all your existing documentation and conversations to provide accurate answers when your team needs them.

One of its best features is automated knowledge generation. eesel AI can analyze your resolved Jira tickets and automatically generate draft articles for Confluence based on successful solutions. This is a much smarter approach, ensuring your knowledge base is filled with content that has already proven to be useful, rather than empty pages that need to be filled in later.

Best of all, this is all done without the headaches of the API method. eesel AI offers one-click integrations that let you go live in minutes, not months, without asking a developer to write a single line of code.

Move from simple automation to intelligent knowledge

So, we’ve looked at the two native methods for Jira automation for Confluence: the simple but limited ‘Create Confluence page’ action, and the powerful but overly technical ‘Send web request’ method. Both can get the job done on a basic level, but they come with serious trade-offs in either functionality or ease of use.

The goal shouldn’t just be about creating more pages. It’s about efficiently managing and sharing knowledge between your tools. Instead of wrestling with fragile API calls and broken templates, AI-powered platforms offer a smarter, more scalable way to solve this problem.

This video demonstrates how to use automation rules between Jira and Confluence to streamline your task tracking workflow.

Stop wasting time on manual documentation and clunky workarounds. See how eesel AI can unify your knowledge across Jira, Confluence, and all your other apps. You can try it for free and start building a knowledge base that actually works for your team.