Confluence
Atlassian's team wiki, where Atlassian Intelligence summarises long pages and answers questions from your own documentation on request.
What you'd use it for
Keeping a team's decisions, specs and onboarding notes in one searchable place, with an assistant that can answer a question from what's already written instead of you hunting the sidebar.
- Summarise a long page into a short read without opening the whole thing
- Ask a plain-language question and get an answer pulled from pages your team has already written, with a link back to the source
- Turn rough meeting notes into a first draft of a proper page
- Look up a company-specific term or acronym on the spot instead of asking a colleague
- Link a page directly to its Jira ticket so the spec and the work item stay connected
The verdict
Confluence is the wiki for a team that already lives in Jira, where the AI can answer a question in seconds because someone wrote the decision down months ago — it rewards a habit it cannot create on its own. Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo are absent entirely on the Free plan, so the ten-person team evaluating the AI on that tier will not find any there to try. It suits an organisation past the free-tier cap that wants permissions, search and native Jira linking under one login more than it suits a solo operator or a small team just starting to write things down.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | A small team writing down what it knows for the first time. | Free forever for up to 10 users, pages, spaces, databases and templates, basic permissions -- and no Rovo or Atlassian Intelligence of any kind. |
| Standard | $6.70/user/month at 15 users, falling to $5.42 at 300 -- Atlassian's rate drops as the team grows | The first plan with any AI on it at all. This is the real gate. | Everything in Free, plus Rovo Search, Chat and Agents with 25 Rovo credits per user per month, free guest access, advanced permissions, admin insights. |
| Premium | $13.20/user/month at 15 users, falling to $10.44 at 300 | A team that has run out of Standard's Rovo credits, or needs unlimited pages and spaces. | Everything in Standard, plus 70 Rovo credits per user per month, unlimited pages and spaces, dynamic intranet, 250 automation steps per user per month, analytics. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing, annual billing only | Large organisations with compliance requirements. | Everything in Premium, plus 150 Rovo credits per user per month, cross-product insights with Atlassian Analytics and Data Lake, advanced admin and security, 99.95% uptime SLA. |
Read from Confluence's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An Atlassian account, email sign-up only
- No credit card for the Free plan, capped at 10 users
- A Standard plan or higher before Atlassian Intelligence or Rovo turn on at all
Minutes to a working space and a first page on the Free plan. Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo do not exist on that plan at all, so if the AI is why you came, budget the time to justify the move to Standard before you can try it.
Your first run Sign up with an email — no credit card needed on the Free plan — and you land straight in your new space's Overview page, ready to add your first page underneath it within minutes. Populating that space with anything a colleague would actually want to read takes a good deal longer.
Where it breaks
The per-user price is not a single number: Atlassian's rate falls as headcount rises, so the same plan costs $6.70 per user at fifteen users and $5.42 at three hundred. The figures quoted in most comparisons are the large-team rate. Enter your own headcount in the team-size box on the pricing page before budgeting.
Browser-based, with desktop and mobile apps that mirror the same cloud pages. Pairs naturally with Jira if you already run Atlassian tools.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for a small team or solo operator chasing an AI-first writing tool, since the Free plan ships with no Atlassian Intelligence or Rovo at all and Notion will get you further faster. Not for a team outside the Atlassian ecosystem, since the main edge over competitors is the native Jira link, which disappears if you don't use Jira.
Confluence has been the default “we should write that down somewhere” tool for a very long time, long enough that the AI layer arrived on top of an existing habit rather than creating a new one.
Atlassian Intelligence does two things worth naming separately. It summarises a page you don’t have time to read in full, and it answers a question by searching across everything your team has already written — release notes, onboarding docs, decision logs — instead of you hunting through the sidebar. Neither replaces the writing. Someone still has to put the decision in a page for the AI to find it later.
Where it actually sits
Ten users get in for free, which is generous compared to most of this category, but the free tier caps out fast for anything beyond a small team. The jump to Standard buys permissions worth having the moment more than one department shares a space — without them, everyone can edit everything, which is fine until it isn’t.
The AI gate is Free to Standard, not Standard to Premium
Read the plan cards and Premium looks like the AI plan. It is not. Rovo Search, Chat and Agents arrive on Standard, with 25 Rovo credits per user per month; Premium raises that to 70 and Enterprise to 150. Free has none at all.
So the decision is not whether to pay more for AI — it is whether to pay at all. And once you are paying, Premium is a volume upgrade on something you already have, not a switch. That matters because the usual advice for a team curious about the AI is “try the free tier first”, and on Confluence there is nothing there to try.
The per-user price is not a fixed number
Atlassian’s rate falls as the team grows, and the figure on the pricing page changes with the team-size box at the top. A fifteen-person team pays $6.70 per user per month for Standard and $13.20 for Premium. At three hundred users those become $5.42 and $10.44 — around a quarter less per seat.
Most published comparisons of Confluence quote the larger-team rate without saying so, which understates the cost for exactly the size of business reading this. Put your own headcount in the box before budgeting.
Against the alternatives
Notion is the obvious comparison and the honest answer is that Confluence wins on structure and permissions at scale, while Notion wins on speed of setup for a small team starting from nothing. If your company already lives in Jira, Confluence is the path of least resistance — the linking between a ticket and its spec is native, not bolted on. If you don’t use Jira, that advantage disappears and the decision comes down to which interface your team already tolerates.
Alternatives
Records & databasesAgentsNotion
Docs, wikis and databases in one workspace, with AI that can write inside a page and answer questions across everything the workspace holds.
Records & databasesAgentsClickUp
Tasks, docs, goals and dashboards in one workspace, with an AI layer that summarises, writes and answers questions across everything you have stored in it.
Asana
Project and task tracking with timelines, dashboards and forms, plus an AI layer that can triage incoming requests and draft status updates from real project data.
Get Confluence
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
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