Is Confluence free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Free for up to 10 users with a 2 GB storage cap. Standard runs about $6.40 per user per month and Premium about $12.30, both billed on total users rather than active ones. Data Center for self-hosting starts around $30,000 a year. The number that surprises people is the floor: at 200 seats Standard is roughly $15,000 a year for a wiki. Prices checked 2026-08-03.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you run Jira. The integration is real, the two-way links save genuine time, and no alternative reproduces it — that is what you are buying and it is worth something. Stay if you are inside the free tier, which covers a surprising number of small teams. Stay if compliance needs audit logs, data residency and an enterprise agreement, where Atlassian is simply further ahead. And stay if your wiki is load-bearing for a regulated process; a migration that loses page history is not worth the saving.
What you are locked into
Higher than the export button suggests. Pages export to HTML, XML or PDF, so the words come out. What does not come out cleanly is everything that made them useful: Jira macros, page trees, inline comments, permissions inherited from spaces, and the templates people built their process around. Teams that write plain pages migrate in a weekend. Teams that built workflows out of macros are migrating a system, not documents.
If you would rather not pay: BookStack
BookStack
Shelves, books, chapters, pages — a wiki organised like a library.
Free and open source. A small VPS runs it comfortably.
See all 5 Confluence alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Atlassian before you commit. More wikis & internal docs decisions on Macrostack.