Confluence review

A wiki that earns its place by sitting next to Jira

Confluence is Atlassian's team wiki: content lives in spaces, spaces hold page trees, and pages carry templates, inline comments, mentions, and version history. Its real advantage is Jira. Linking a requirements page to an epic, embedding a live issue table, and keeping both in the same permission model is something no standalone docs tool does as cleanly.

Jira teams, and three groups besides

• Engineering teams already running Jira
• Companies that need page-level permissions, audit trails, and admin controls
• Long-lived documentation like runbooks, specs, and onboarding guides
• Small teams of 10 or fewer who can sit on the free plan indefinitely

Ten free seats, then tiered per-user pricing from $6.05

As of July 2026, Confluence Cloud is free for up to 10 users with unlimited spaces and pages, 2 GB of total file storage, and community support. That is a real free tier, not a trial, and a ten-person startup can run its documentation on it for years.

Standard adds page permissions, external collaboration, and business-hours support with 250 GB of storage, quoted at roughly $6.05 per user per month for a small team. Atlassian's pricing is tiered, so the per-user rate drops as you add seats. Premium adds unlimited storage, analytics, and 24/7 support, and Enterprise is annual-only with multi-site and data residency options. Premium and Enterprise prices come from Atlassian's calculator rather than a published flat rate.

Search, the editor, and the 2 GB storage limit

• The editor is slower and more rigid than Notion's, and heavy pages get sluggish
• Search is a long-standing complaint. Finding the right page in a large instance is genuinely hard
• No offline access and no local storage, so a connection is mandatory
• 2 GB of storage on free is shared across the entire site, which images and attachments eat quickly
• Costs compound. Confluence alone is rarely the whole bill once Jira and marketplace apps are added

Last in this category, and not because it is bad

If your team lives in Jira, Confluence is the least friction you will find and the free 10-user plan is a genuine offer. If it does not, you are inheriting Atlassian's ecosystem and its interface habits for a wiki, and AppFlowy self-hosted or a Notion workspace will feel lighter. We rank it last in this category because it solves a team documentation problem rather than a note-taking one.