Confluence Buyer’s Guide: Pricing, Advantages and more

Posted on 09.27.2021
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Written by Brody Larson
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Things you’ll learn

What is Confluence?

Confluence is leading collaboration and documentation system developed and provided by Atlassian.

Confluence vs Jira

While Jira is a leading issue tracking tool, Confluence is a leading collaboration and documentation system, that is tightly integrated with other tools in the Atlassian ecosystem, such as Jira. For teams that are using Jira for project management, software development or issue tracking, Confluence is a value driving addition, enabling users to capture and review information in real time.

How does Jira work with Confluence?

Jira Software integrates with Confluence by providing a place for teams to document and review all of their project information. This way all of the requirements, meetings notes and plans for a project can be captured in one place, linked to the Project and Issues in Jira.

Jira Service Management integrates with Confluence by providing a knowledge base for Agents and Customers, where information is made available based on the request. JSM also allows Agents to create new documents in the Confluence knowledge base directly from their issue in Jira if relevant documentation is missing.

Confluence Features List

We already explained how Jira and Confluence work together to help any and all teams collaborate, but what are some of the other features that we love about Confluence? Keep reading this Confluence guide to learn more about Confluence pricing.

Confluence Templates

Confluence comes shipped with almost 100 best practice templates out of the box to serve as a starting point for new and existing teams to leverage. Don’t start from scratch, take advantage of these templates to make writing and collaborating on documentation faster and more cohesive across the organization.

Collaboration

Confluence offers various features that help teams collaborate such as real-time editing, comments on pages or in-line, dynamic notifications and more.

Permissions

Whether you’re a growing team or a large enterprise, Confluence has a robust and layered permission scheme that enable administrators to ensure that the right users have access to the right information across your site.

Analytics

Confluence Data Center and Cloud Premium offer analytics and insights and the page, space and site level, to help administrators and content owners evaluate usage and help make decisions.

Integrations

Beyond the native integrations between Confluence and other Atlassian tools, there are hundreds of Marketplace Apps that make it seamless to integrate Confluence with other documentation tools such a Google Drive, SharePoint or OneDrive and business tools such as Lucid Charts.

How do I know which version of Confluence I need?

There are 3 main factors to consideration when trying to determine which version of Confluence will meet your needs:

  • Deployment: There are now two different deployment options available for Atlassian’s Confluence product, Cloud and Data Center. As you may already be aware, in October of 2020, Atlassian announced they were discounting their Server products, in favor of Cloud and Data Center. You can read more about their announcement here.
  • Feature Set: For Confluence Cloud, there are four different versions available, all with a different set of available features. We will outline them below.
  • User Tier: All Atlassian product licenses are based on # of Users, and most used a tiered system. We will highlight the price for many of the available User Tiers below.

Confluence Cloud vs Data Center

Confluence Cloud

Atlassian has taken a ‘Cloud first’ approach to their products, and encourages all new and existing customers to choose their Cloud offerings. Confluence Cloud is a highly available software-as-a-service that Atlassian hosts and is scalable, secure, reliable, and highly performant. Atlassian is continuously developing new features for the Cloud offerings, and they will soon be available for all sizes of teams.

Confluence Data Center

Unlike Confluence Cloud (which is a SaaS), Confluence Data Center is a self-managed offering, where you host Confluence on your own infrastructure. Other benefits of Confluence Data Center include: environment control, active clustering for high availability, SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect support, Atlassian-supported disaster recovery and advanced permissions capabilities for added security.

Reasons to choose Confluence Data Center

Compliance Requirements

If your organization must adhere to HIPAA, NIST 800 or FedRAMP Moderate, Confluence Cloud is not currently a viable option for you. These are all on Atlassian’s Cloud Roadmap but for organization’s that are looking to implement Confluence now and must comply with these regulatory requirements, Data Center is the appropriate deployment option.

User Tier

Confluence Cloud currently only supports up to 20,000 Users per site. Atlassian is working on supporting up to 35,000 Users per site, but may not be available until Q4 2022.

Confluence Pricing

Once you have decided on which deployment option (Cloud or Data Center) is appropriate for you, review the various pricing options below to determine which Confluence license is right for your organization.

Confluence Cloud Pricing

Confluence Free, Standard, Premium or Enterprise?

Before explaining the differences between the different versions of Confluence Cloud, note that Confluence Standard, Premium and Enterprise are all currently available for up to 20,000 users per site.

Confluence Free

For up to 10 Users, Atlassian offers a free version of Confluence Cloud, that comes with their basic set of features. Features not included in the free version of Confluence Cloud are things like: permissions, archiving, insights and audit logs.

Confluence Standard

The Standard version of Confluence comes with a robust set of features that meet the needs of most organizations. Remember all of the key features that we highlighted above? You’ll get all of those (besides analytics) and more with Confluence Standard.

Confluence Premium

Confluence Premium adds a specific set of features onto the Standard version of Confluence Cloud, such as: analytics, bulk archiving, permissions copying, a sandbox environment and unlimited storage.

Also worth noting, Atlassian will soon be releasing two new and very exciting features exclusively for Confluence Cloud Premium: external collaboration and automation.

Confluence Enterprise

Meant for large, enterprise organizations, Confluence Cloud Enterprise is available starting at the 1,000 User tier, and only offers Annual licenses, Monthly not available. With Confluence Cloud Enterprise, you are getting all of the features for the lower versions, plus some enterprise-enabling features such as: unlimited sites, Atlassian Access, and enhanced support and uptime. Need some more help with this Confluence guide? Contact us now.

Confluence Monthly Cloud Pricing

# of UsersStandard Price per UserPremium Price per User
1 – 100$5.00$10.00
101 – 250$4.00$7.00
251 – 1,000$3.00$5.50
1,001 – 2,500$2.75$5.00
2,501 – 5,000$2.50$4.75
5,001 – 7,500$2.50$4.50
7,501 – 10,000$2.25$4.25
10,001 – 15,000$2.10$3.75
15,001 – 20,000$1.90$3.50

Confluence Annual Cloud Pricing

# of UsersStandard PricePremium PriceEnterprise Price
10$500$1,000
50$2,500$5,000
100$5,000$10,000
500$18,500$34,250
1,000$33,500$61,750$92,625
2,000$61,000$112,000$167,500
5,000$137,000$256,000$383,000
10,000$256,000$474,000$711,000
20,000$465,000$837,000$1,255,000

Note, there are more user tiers available for Annual Confluence Cloud Pricing, we have highlighted these tiers to make the pricing scale more readable.

Confluence Data Center Pricing

There is only 1 pricing and feature level available for Confluence Data Center. All deployments of Confluence Data Center come with the entire feature bundle, and only annual licenses are available. This means that if you have determined that Confluence Data Center is right for your organization, the User Tier the only variable to consider that will impact your license cost.

# of UsersAnnual Price
500$27,000
1,000$48,000
2,000$84,000
5,000$210,000
10,000$230,000
20,000$270,000
40,000$350,000
40,001+$370,000

Note, there are more user tiers available for Confluence Data Center Pricing, we have highlighted these tiers to make the pricing scale more readable.

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Now What?

Still not sure if Confluence is right for your organization or you just have some doubts about this Confluence guide, or not sure which deployment option and version you should choose? Our dedicated and award-winning team can help you evaluate your next steps.

Get the conversation started!

Feel free to send us a message in the form below. We’re very approachable and would like to talk more about how we can meet your needs:

Get the conversation started!

Feel free to send us a message in the form below. We’re very approachable and would like to talk more about how we can meet your needs: