• Products
  • Get started
  • Documentation
  • Resources

Set up your knowledge base with Confluence

Jira Service Management leverages the power of Confluence to make knowledge creation and management seamless for your team. It does this by bringing the rich editing features of Confluence directly to your service project’s knowledge base.

To set up your knowledge base in Jira Service Management, at a minimum, you’ll need to have a Free plan of Confluence on the same site.

  • If you already have Confluence on your site, learn how to link knowledge base spaces to your service project. All your drafts and published pages from those Confluence spaces will appear in your service project.

  • If you do not already have Confluence on your site, you’ll need to manually add it. To add Confluence to your site from your service project, go to Knowledge base from your project sidebar navigation and follow the instructions. This will ensure that all the Confluence features you need for knowledge management will be available directly in Jira Service Management.

Choosing a Confluence plan to power your knowledge base

All core knowledge base capabilities are the same across Confluence cloud plans. Your agents’ access to your knowledge base does not depend on the Confluence plan you add to your site. The plan you choose only determines what features you’ll get in Confluence and how many users on your site can access these features.

Adding a Free plan of Confluence to your site

You can access core knowledge management capabilities in Jira Service Management by adding a Free plan of Confluence to your site. Your team only requires product access toJira Service Management and not to Confluence to create and manage knowledge base articles from your service project.

With a Free plan of Confluence added to your site:

  • All agents will be able to create, edit, and delete knowledge base articles without leaving your service project.

  • Up to 10 users on your site can get free product access to Confluence.

Your team can always access core knowledge management features from within your service project Any 10 users on your site can also use Confluence for knowledge base or other documentation needs.

So, if there are 25 agents in your team, they’ll all be able to create and manage knowledge base articles from the service project with their existing product access to Jira Service Management. In addition, there may be a content team within your HR organization that creates articles you may want to use in your HR service project. In this case, you could give up to 10 members of this content team the advantage of free product access to Confluence, as they probably wouldn’t need access to any other Jira Service Management functionality. You’ll only be paying for a Jira Service Management plan and not a Confluence plan, but still be getting the benefit of both for your agents and your content team members.

Or, suppose there are two content managers in your organization who need to approve knowledge base content. Product access to Confluence can help them manage content for the whole organization. And this will also let them view and work on knowledge base content. In this case, you’ll pay for 25 agents in your Jira Service Management plan and you can give the two content approvers free product access to Confluence.

There are some limitations of being on a Free plan of Confluence that you should be aware of:

  • Admins won’t be able to customize space permissions or enable anonymous access in Confluence

  • You also won’t have access to some security and compliance-related features like data residency, IP allowlisting, and audit logs.

You can read more about permissions and restrictions in the Free plan of Confluence

You won’t be able to choose a Free plan of Confluence if you make annual payments. Learn more about monthly and annual payments.

Adding a paid plan of Confluence to your site

You can choose a paid Confluence plan for your knowledge base if:

  • you want to give more than 10 users from your team product access to Confluence,

  • you want to access more advanced features that are only available in Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans of Confluence.

Learn more about features available in each Confluence cloud plan.

If you make annual payments, please note that when you add a paid plan of Confluence to your site, you’ll get free product access to Confluence for up to 1 user on your site. For any extra user who needs product access to Confluence, you’ll pay based on the respective user tier. This is because Atlassian Cloud products renewing annually are priced based on a distinct user tier and not on the exact number of users on your site. Learn more about users and user tiers.

In such cases, remember that your team can always access core knowledge management features from within your service project without having to access Confluence. So after assessing your team’s need, you can manage the number of billable Confluence users on your site accordingly. Learn how to remove Confluence product access for users on your site.

Assessing your existing Confluence plan

If you’re already on a paid Confluence plan, you can review it to make sure that the plan suits your team’s needs. With recent improvements to the knowledge base in Jira Service Management, all your agents will be able to create and manage knowledge base articles from your service project for free.

So if you’re using Confluence only for your knowledge base, you could potentially save by switching to a Free plan of Confluence (if you make monthly payments) or by managing user access. We recommend that you check how many of your users need to have product access to Confluence and adjust your user access and billing accordingly. To view and manage your users and plans, go to Settings  >  Billing >  Manage subscriptions. Learn how to remove Confluence product access for users on your site.

Additional Help