Confluence free ends at your eleventh colleague

52 puts Confluence in our Limited band, ninth of the ten tools we score in this category. It also holds rank 11, the bottom of our note-taking list, so the score sits above the rank. That is worth explaining rather than smoothing.

Rank measures how well a tool serves the job this category exists for, and Confluence is a team wiki rather than a note app: no local storage, no Markdown files, no backlinks, no offline mode. Score asks only how far zero dollars gets you, and on that narrow question ten users with unlimited pages for free is a genuine offer that a small company can run on for years.

Generosity at 64 reflects exactly that. Feature depth at 48 is where the category comparison bites: no offline mode, no local files, no graph, and page-level permissions starting on Standard.

Freedom at 38 is the low pillar. Your pages live in Atlassian's cloud with no offline copy and no self-hosting on this plan, and even costing the step up is harder than it should be, because only the Standard rate came from Atlassian's own plan page.

Sentiment at 50 rests on G2 4.1 and Capterra 4.5 (checked 24 July 2026), from the paying teams Atlassian sells to.

The free plan's boundaries (as of July 2026):

• 10 users maximum. The binding limit, and an easy one to forecast, since teams grow in ones rather than in bursts.
• 2 GB of file storage across the site. Fine for text, tight for anyone attaching decks and PDFs.
• Community support only. No business-hours support until Standard.
• No page-level permissions. These start on Standard, which means on free, anyone on your site can read any space. For a ten-person startup that is usually acceptable. For a team keeping HR notes, salary bands or customer contracts in the same wiki, it is not, and it is the free plan limit we would flag hardest.

Unlimited spaces and unlimited pages sit against those, and they are real. Nothing meters how much you write.

The category-level gaps matter as much as the plan gaps, and they apply on every tier. There is no offline mode, no local storage, no Markdown files and no backlinks or graph view, so if you came here from Obsidian or Logseq expecting your pages to exist as files you own, they do not. Confluence is a hosted wiki and it behaves like one. What it does that no standalone docs tool matches is the Jira integration, which is usually the actual reason a team is on it.

Standard is the first paid step, quoted by Atlassian's own plan page at around $6.05 per user per month for a small team. It adds page permissions, external collaboration, business-hours support, 250 GB of file storage and 100 automation rule runs per month.

Two things make that number less firm than it looks, and we would rather say so than present a clean figure. Atlassian uses tiered per-user pricing that falls as seat count rises, so the rate quoted for a small team is not what a 300-seat team pays. And Premium and Enterprise prices come from Atlassian's calculator rather than a fixed list price, so we hold no verified figures for them. Premium adds unlimited storage, analytics, admin insights, more automation and 24/7 support; Enterprise is annual billing only with multiple sites, SSO and data residency controls, and neither carries a price on this page because we have not verified one.

What people upgrade for is almost always one of two things: the eleventh user, or page permissions. The second is the one that catches teams by surprise, because it usually arrives as a compliance question rather than a growth one.

Yes, within limits, and we are placing it a step above where a score of 52 would normally land. The reason for the departure: unlimited spaces and pages for up to ten users with no expiry is a real free plan that a small company can run on for years, and the score is pulled down by category-fit pillars (no offline mode, no local files) rather than by anything that stops you working.

Who can live here indefinitely: a startup of ten or fewer, especially one already on Jira, where the integration is genuinely ahead of every standalone docs tool. A small agency documenting processes. Any team whose wiki is not holding anything that needs to be private from colleagues. Who cannot: a company about to hire its eleventh person, any team that needs page-level permissions, and anyone who wants an offline copy of their documentation, which this plan does not offer at all.

If ownership of the files is what you are after rather than a hosted wiki, AppFlowy's free plan is the open source team option and self-hosting removes its caps. Free Confluence alternatives ranks the swaps, and best free note-taking and docs tools covers the category.