Confluence Alternative
Your Confluence Has Become a Digital Graveyard
You started with the best intentions. Now you have thousands of pages nobody can find, outdated docs everyone ignores, and a search function that returns everything except what you need.
The Confluence Problem Everyone Knows But Nobody Talks About
Confluence is one of the most popular wiki tools in the world. It's deeply integrated with Jira, it's been around for nearly two decades, and millions of teams use it daily.
But here's what Atlassian won't tell you: Confluence is designed for storing documents, not for helping people find and use information. And that difference matters more than you think.
Search Is a Nightmare
Confluence's search is notorious for returning hundreds of irrelevant results—or nothing at all. Users resort to bookmarking pages, asking colleagues, or just giving up and creating duplicate content.
Content Graveyard
Without effort to maintain it, Confluence quickly becomes a digital graveyard of outdated, forgotten documents. Nobody knows what's current, what's deprecated, or what's just plain wrong.
Overwhelming Interface
New users find Confluence cluttered and confusing. The learning curve is steep, large pages load slowly, and the mobile experience is frustrating. People avoid using it entirely.
Costs Add Up Fast
At $5.50/user/month for Standard (after 10 free users), costs scale quickly. A 50-person team pays $3,300/year. Enterprise and Data Center pricing reaches $28,000+/year.
The Real Issue: Confluence Is Built for Storage, Not Consumption
Confluence excels at one thing: letting people create and store documents. It's basically a fancy wiki with Jira integration. But storing information and helping people use information are two very different problems.
Think about what happens when someone lands on a Confluence page:
What Happens When Someone Needs Help
Case Study
How DevStack Cut Onboarding Time by 68%
DevStack, a 200-person software company, had been using Confluence for five years. Their wiki had grown to over 3,000 pages across dozens of spaces. New engineers took an average of 3 weeks to get productive because they couldn't find the documentation they needed.
"Our Confluence had become a maze," says their VP of Engineering. "People would spend hours searching for setup instructions, only to find three different versions—all outdated."
Before: Confluence Wiki
After: Interactive Guides
Engineer Productivity Over First 30 Days
"We converted our top 20 Confluence pages into interactive guides. New engineers now complete onboarding in days instead of weeks. They actually follow the steps instead of skimming and missing things."
Confluence vs. Interactive Guides
Different tools for different problems. Here's how they compare.
| Feature | Confluence | Stepsies |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Document storage | Guided learning |
| Content format | Long-form wiki pages | Step-by-step guides |
| Search experience | Overwhelming results | Direct links to guides |
| Content freshness | Hard to maintain | Easy to update |
| User engagement | Passive reading | Active progression |
| Completion tracking | Basic pageviews | Step-by-step analytics |
| Learning curve | Steep | Minimal |
| Free tier | 10 users max | Unlimited guides |
When to Use Interactive Guides vs. Confluence
Both tools have their place. Here's how to think about it.
Keep Confluence For
- • Meeting notes and project documentation
- • Technical specifications and architecture docs
- • Internal team wikis and knowledge sharing
- • Jira-integrated project tracking
- • Reference material that doesn't require action
Use Stepsies For
- • New employee onboarding workflows
- • How-to guides and tutorials
- • Customer-facing help documentation
- • Process documentation that requires following steps
- • Training materials where completion matters
How to Migrate Your Best Content
You don't need to abandon Confluence entirely. The smart approach is to identify which content would work better as interactive guides and migrate just that.
Audit your most-viewed pages
Check Confluence analytics to find your top 20 most-visited pages. These are prime candidates for conversion—they're clearly important, but are they actually helping people?
Identify "how-to" content
Any page that walks through a process step-by-step is a perfect fit for interactive guides. Setup instructions, troubleshooting flows, onboarding checklists—these all convert well.
Convert with AI import
Use Stepsies' AI import feature to automatically convert your Confluence pages into step-by-step guides. Review and refine each step for clarity.
Link from Confluence
Update your original Confluence pages to link to the new interactive guides. This way, existing bookmarks still work, but users get a better experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I completely replace Confluence?
Not necessarily. Confluence is still useful for meeting notes, specs, and reference documentation. The key is using interactive guides for content where completion and comprehension matter—like onboarding, how-to guides, and training.
Can I import my Confluence pages directly?
Yes. You can copy content from Confluence or use our AI import feature to automatically convert pages into step-by-step guides. The AI breaks long documents into logical steps.
How does pricing compare?
Confluence Standard starts at $5.50/user/month after 10 free users. Stepsies offers a free plan with unlimited guides, and paid plans are significantly cheaper than Confluence for most team sizes.
Does Stepsies integrate with Jira?
Stepsies guides can be linked from anywhere, including Jira tickets. While we don't have a native Jira integration like Confluence, you can easily share guide links in issues and comments.
What about permissions and access control?
Stepsies supports public guides, private guides, and password-protected guides. For team-based access control, our paid plans include workspace permissions.
Turn your Confluence graveyard into guides people actually use
Start converting your most important Confluence pages into interactive guides. See why teams are supplementing (or replacing) Confluence with something that works.
No credit card required. Convert your first page in minutes.