Confluence vs Powabase: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Confluence and Powabase — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Confluence
Atlassian
Confluence is Atlassian's collaborative team workspace for documentation, knowledge bases, and project collaboration with Jira integration.
Key features
- Rich Collaborative Editor: A WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing pages with real-time collaboration, inline comments, page versioning, change history, and draft handling to manage content lifecycle and review.
- Spaces and Page Organization: Hierarchical spaces and page trees with customizable templates and blueprints to structure team, project, and department documentation for discoverability and governance.
- Jira and Third-Party Integrations: Deep, first-class integration with Jira (issues, roadmaps, release notes) plus marketplace apps and REST API access to embed, sync, and automate content across toolchains.
- Permissions and Security Controls: Granular access controls at space and page level, SSO and SAML support, audit logs, and admin controls suitable for enterprise compliance and user management.
- Macros and Dynamic Embeds: Built-in macros and widgets to embed dynamic content (Jira issues, code snippets, diagrams, calendars) and extend pages with configurable functionality without custom code.
- Search and Knowledge Discovery: Full-text and metadata search across spaces, pages, attachments, and labels, with page analytics and content recommendations to help teams find and reuse knowledge.
- Team workspace for pages, documentation, and knowledge base content
- Confluence REST API for content creation, update, and retrieval (supports API tokens/scoped tokens)
- Jira integrations for linking issues and project context
- Support for publishing from Markdown and other tooling (e.g., md2conf CLI)
- Support for diagram/image publishing via REST API (used by Archi scripts and other tooling)
- Self-hosted Server/Data Center distributions and Cloud offering
- Container deployment options (Docker images and docker-compose samples)
- Configurable Tomcat/CATALINA_OPTS startup parameters and JVM memory tuning (-Xms/-Xmx)
- Persistent data volumes (default container path /var/atlassian/confluence) and host UID/GID build args for file permissions
- Requires relational database backend (MySQL/PostgreSQL) via JDBC
Best for
- Company Knowledge Base: Centralizing policies, procedures, runbooks, and FAQs in organized spaces to provide employees fast access to authoritative internal knowledge.
- Product and Engineering Docs: Publishing requirements, design decisions, API docs, and release notes linked to Jira issues so engineering and product teams maintain traceability between work and documentation.
- Meeting Notes and Decision Records: Capturing meeting agendas, notes, action items, and decisions on pages that are versioned and commentable for transparent follow-up and accountability.
- Onboarding and HR Documentation: Creating onboarding checklists, role-specific guides, and training materials that new hires and managers can follow and update collaboratively.
- Documentation Publishing Pipeline: Automating content updates and publishing via REST API or CI integrations (Markdown/AsciiDoc converters and publisher plugins) to sync docs from repositories into Confluence spaces.
- Architecture and Design Sharing: Posting diagrams, specifications, and architectural decisions alongside contextual documentation to support reviews and cross-team collaboration.
- Internal documentation and knowledge base for engineering, product, and support teams
- Project collaboration and specification pages linked to Jira issues
- Automated publishing pipelines: convert Markdown or diagrams into Confluence pages via CLI or CI/CD
- Self-hosted deployments for on-prem compliance using Docker or traditional installers
- Embedding and distributing diagrams and artifacts programmatically using the REST API
Powabase
Powabase
Backend-as-a-Service combining per-project Postgres, storage, auth, realtime, RAG pipeline and agent runtime for AI apps.
Key features
- Per-Project Postgres Provisioning: Automatically provisions an isolated Postgres instance (with pgvector) per project, providing persistent storage and a vector store for RAG workflows.
- Integrated BaaS Surfaces: Built-in auth (GoTrue-compatible), storage, REST (PostgREST) and realtime features that are compatible with Supabase client libraries for seamless developer experience.
- Document Extraction and Indexing Pipeline: On upload, documents are extracted, converted to embeddings and indexed for retrieval-augmented generation and fast semantic search.
- Agent Runtime and Tooling: Hosts an agent runtime that runs agents and enables them to call external tools over plain HTTP or the MCP protocol, simplifying tool integration.
- HTTP-First API Surface: Exposes agents, orchestrations, workflows, sources and knowledge bases as plain HTTP endpoints under /api/, requiring no special SDK to drive platform features.
- Orchestration and Workflows: Provides workflow and orchestration primitives to coordinate multi-agent processes, human-in-the-loop steps, and automated pipelines.
- Self-Host or Managed Deployment: Offers both self-hosting options for data control and a hosted service for quick onboarding and lower operational overhead.
- Per-project Postgres with pgvector for vector storage and full SQL access