The core difference
Notion launched in 2013 with a straightforward premise: documents should do more than hold text. Pages in Notion can hold databases, kanban boards, calendars, galleries, and rich embeds. A single page can be a company wiki, a project tracker, and a CRM all at once. For small teams wanting to cut down on tool sprawl, that consolidation is worth real money. The tradeoff is that Notion requires thought. You have to design your workspace. A blank Notion page gives you nothing until you decide what to put there.
Confluence has been around since 2004. Atlassian built it for software teams that need structured, linkable documentation. Pages live in spaces. Spaces belong to teams. Everything has a clear home. It is not as flashy as Notion, and it is not trying to be. Its job is to hold engineering specs, product requirements, runbooks, and decision logs -- and to keep them connected to the Jira tickets where the actual work happens.
That Jira link is the thing. If your team runs Jira for project and issue tracking, Confluence is not just a good knowledge base -- it is the obvious one. Requirements docs reference live ticket data. Sprint retrospectives link to closed issues. A bug write-up in Confluence connects directly to the Jira ticket being fixed. Nothing else replicates that connection as cleanly.
If you use Jira, use Confluence. If you do not, Notion is almost certainly the better fit for teams under 50 people.
Quick verdict
Notion is for: Individuals, startups, and small teams that want one flexible workspace. Works well for companies where the same people write docs, manage projects, and take meeting notes. Good for non-technical teams. Gets unwieldy at enterprise scale without someone maintaining the structure.
Confluence is for: Software development teams and enterprises already running Jira. The Jira integration is the main draw. Cheaper per user than Notion and better suited to complex permission structures in large organizations. Less flexible but more structured from the start.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Notion | Confluence |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes -- unlimited pages for 1 user, limited team features | Yes -- up to 10 users |
| Paid starting price | Plus: $10/user/mo (billed annually) | Standard: $4.89/user/mo (billed annually) |
| Mid tier | Business: $15/user/mo | Premium: $8.15/user/mo |
| Guest access | 10 guests on free; unlimited on paid | Available on Standard and above |
| Databases / tables | Strong -- native databases with multiple views | Basic tables only -- not a database tool |
| Jira integration | Third-party connector -- limited depth | Native -- bidirectional, live ticket data in pages |
| AI features | Notion AI -- $10/user/mo add-on | Atlassian Intelligence -- included in Premium ($8.15/user/mo) |
| Marketplace / integrations | Solid third-party integrations via API | 3,000+ apps in Atlassian Marketplace |
| Mobile app | Strong -- full functionality on iOS and Android | Available -- less polished than Notion |
| Best for | Individuals, startups, small mixed-function teams | Engineering orgs, Jira users, large enterprises |
Pricing breakdown
Confluence is cheaper. That is worth saying plainly because it often gets overlooked. Confluence Standard runs $4.89 per user per month. Notion Plus runs $10 per user per month. At 20 users, that is a $122 per month difference -- $1,464 per year -- for what amounts to similar documentation functionality if you are not using Jira.
Pricing reality check (20-user team, billed annually): Notion Plus = $2,400/year. Confluence Standard = $1,173.60/year. Add Notion AI at $10/user/mo and you are at $4,800/year total. Atlassian Intelligence is included in Confluence Premium at $8.15/user/mo -- that is $1,956/year with AI included. Verify current pricing at notion.so and atlassian.com.
Notion free is generous for individuals -- one person gets unlimited pages and blocks. For teams, the free plan caps collaboration features noticeably. The Plus plan at $10/user/month is where most small teams end up.
Confluence free goes up to 10 users, which is a real option for a small team getting started. Standard at $4.89 is competitive. The jump to Premium at $8.15 is worth it mainly for AI features and more granular permissions. For teams where AI-assisted writing and summarization matter, Premium ends up cheaper per user than Notion Plus plus the AI add-on.
What Notion does well
Notion's real strength is consolidation. A small team can run their entire operation from one workspace -- client notes, project tracking, meeting records, and SOPs in one place. The alternative is three or four separate tools with information scattered across all of them. For a team of 5 to 20 without a dedicated ops person, that matters.
The database feature is what sets Notion apart from most documentation tools. A Notion database is not a spreadsheet -- it is a structured collection of pages viewable as a table, kanban board, calendar, or gallery. A CRM, content calendar, and project tracker can all live as databases in the same workspace. Confluence has no equivalent.
Templates cut setup time significantly. The template gallery has hundreds of community-built options for meeting notes, product roadmaps, OKR trackers, and employee handbooks. A new employee can be dropped into a working system in an afternoon.
The interface is clean. Most people figure out how to create and navigate pages on their first day without training -- which matters for non-technical teams where adoption is the real challenge.
Limitations worth knowing:
- Notion gets messy without governance. The same flexibility that makes it useful makes it easy for workspaces to sprawl into an unnavigable maze of pages nobody maintains. Someone has to own the structure.
- The Jira integration is third-party and limited. You can embed Jira views and link tickets, but it is not the same as the native Confluence connection. Engineering teams that rely heavily on Jira will feel that gap.
- Notion is not built for formal, hierarchical permissions. Managing who can see what gets complicated as the team grows.
- Notion AI costs extra. At $10/user/month on top of Plus, you are at $20/user/month before any other tooling.
What Confluence does well
The Jira connection is the main event. When your team tracks work in Jira, Confluence pages can embed live issue lists, reference specific tickets by key, and display sprint boards inline. A product requirements document can show the current status of every linked Jira ticket without anyone manually updating it. That is a real workflow advantage for software teams -- documentation stays tied to the work rather than drifting out of sync.
Confluence has solid page templates for technical documentation: architecture decision records, runbooks, incident reports, release notes, and product specs. These are built for the specific documents that engineering and product teams produce repeatedly. New team members follow established patterns from day one.
Permissions in Confluence are detailed. Space-level and page-level restrictions let you control exactly who can view and edit content. For organizations with sensitive documentation in legal, HR, or finance, that granularity matters. Notion's permission model is simpler and less flexible for complex org structures.
The Atlassian Marketplace has over 3,000 apps. Most target development and IT workflows, but the breadth means integrations exist for most common enterprise tools.
Limitations worth knowing:
- Confluence looks dated compared to Notion. The editor has improved, but the overall experience is less polished. Non-technical users often find it harder to navigate.
- There are no native databases. Confluence is a wiki, not a productivity platform. You can create tables and use macros, but it does not replace a project management tool the way Notion sometimes can.
- The mobile app is functional but not great. Teams that do significant work on phones will find Notion's mobile experience better.
- If you are not using Jira, Confluence's main advantage disappears. At that point you are paying for a wiki that is less flexible and less polished than Notion -- at a lower price, but the value case weakens.
Notion is better at almost everything except one: being natively connected to Jira. For software teams, that one thing is often the whole decision.
Which tool to pick
Choose Notion when: Your team is under 50 people and not running Jira. You want one tool for docs, wikis, project tracking, and meeting notes. You have people who will maintain the workspace structure. Non-technical team members need to use it daily.
Choose Confluence when: You are already using Jira -- full stop. The native integration alone justifies the decision. You are a software development team that needs structured technical documentation. You manage a large organization with complex permission requirements, or you want AI features included without a per-user add-on fee (Premium tier).
The nuance: Cost alone should not drive this decision. The price gap is real but not enormous. The more important question is how your team works. Notion rewards teams that invest in building a well-organized workspace. Confluence rewards teams already bought into the Atlassian toolchain.
One honest note: plenty of teams use both. Engineering uses Confluence for technical specs tied to Jira. Marketing, ops, and sales use Notion for everything else. That is not ideal -- it is another tool to maintain -- but for some organizations it beats forcing one tool to do a job it handles poorly.
What neither tool connects automatically
Both Notion and Confluence manage documentation well. Pages stay organized. Search finds what you wrote six months ago. Teams can collaborate on the same document without version chaos. That is useful, and both tools earn their place on that merit.
Neither platform wires your knowledge base to the rest of your business automatically.
A new client signs in your CRM. That should create a Notion project page with their details pre-filled and the right team members notified. It does not -- not without custom automation. A new employee gets added to your HRIS. That should generate their onboarding wiki page, assign them the right Confluence spaces, and send them a welcome with links. Also does not happen on its own. A job closes in your field service software. That should trigger a Confluence page update logging the details for future reference. Still requires someone to do it manually.
These are the gaps that slow teams down. The knowledge base holds the information once someone puts it there. Getting the right information there automatically -- triggered by events in other systems -- requires a custom integration layer that neither Notion nor Confluence builds for you. Both offer APIs. Neither builds you a workflow that connects a CRM event to a new Notion page with the right template and the right people tagged.
Building exactly those connections is what Aplos AI does. We work on top of whichever documentation tool you already use and close the manual gaps the platform leaves open.
Your team manually creates project pages, onboarding docs, and client wikis that could be auto-generated from your existing systems. We build the automations that wire your tools together -- from CRM to knowledge base to the right person, without the copy-paste.
Get a Free Automation Audit →The verdict
Use Confluence if you run Jira. The native integration is worth more than any feature advantage Notion has, and the lower per-user price is a bonus.
Use Notion if you do not run Jira. It is a better product for most small and mid-size teams -- more flexible, cleaner interface, and capable enough to replace multiple tools with one workspace. The higher price is real but the consolidation savings often offset it.
In either case, the documentation tool is only as good as the information that gets into it. The part neither Notion nor Confluence solves is the automatic creation and updating of pages when things happen in other parts of your business. That handoff from external event to the right wiki page is where teams lose time every day. Automation fixes it.