Is Confluence free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —10 users per site
• —2 GB of file storage
• —One site
• —3 active whiteboards per user
• —50 automation steps per month for the whole subscription
• —No Atlassian Rovo credits, analytics, or admin controls
• —No page or space permissions beyond the defaults, and Guard SSO requires a separate subscription

Where the wall is

The eleventh user, and it is a hard stop rather than a nudge. What makes it expensive is that Atlassian bills on total users rather than active ones, so the contractor who read three pages last spring is a seat you keep paying for. The 2 GB storage cap arrives second, usually via attachments.

After that: Standard at $5.42 per user per month with 250 GB of storage and 100 automation steps per user; Premium at $10.44 per user per month with unlimited storage, 250 automation steps per user and Atlassian Analytics. Enterprise adds up to 150 sites and is billed annually. Per-user rates step down as seat counts rise.

Can you self-host Confluence? Paid plans only

Data Center is the only self-managed edition and it is enterprise-priced and annual — Confluence Server was discontinued in 2024. Free self-hosted wikis in this category are BookStack, Outline, Wiki.js and DokuWiki.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

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