Confluence vs Outline
This is the pairing most teams land on when the wiki itself is fine and the invoice is not. Both tools do the same core job well: spaces, nested pages, comments, search, permissions. They differ on one axis that compounds every time you hire, which is how they bill. Confluence charges per seat inside volume bands. Outline charges a flat rate per band, so the price does not move between 11 people and 100.
Pick Outline if you are above roughly 15 people and growing, want a fast modern editor, and can live with a source-available licence: $79 a month covers 11 to 100 users, and the Confluence importer works on every tier. Stay on Confluence if Jira is your system of record and you rely on live JQL tables or epic links, if you are still inside the free 10-user tier, or if procurement requires an OSI-approved licence, which BSL 1.1 is not.
Side by side
Confluence vs Outline at a glance
| Confluence | Outline | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Per seat, in volume bands | ✓ Flat rate per band, headcount-insensitive |
| Free plan | ✓ 10 users, 2 GB, indefinitely | 30-day trial, then read-only until you pay |
| Entry paid price | Standard $6.70/user/mo, Premium $13.20/user/mo (monthly, 11-user default) | $10/mo total for 1–10 people |
| Cost at 40 people | Scales with every seat; Premium annual bands run into four figures | ✓ $79/mo, the same as at 11 people |
| Cost at 150 people | Standard monthly drops to $5.10/user for 101–250 | $249/mo for 101–200 |
| Import from Confluence | n/a | ✓ Official importer, all tiers, plus Notion and Markdown |
| Jira integration | ✓ Live JQL tables, epic links, generated release notes | ✗ Basic linking only, nothing live |
| Macros and Marketplace apps | ✓ Large ecosystem: approvals, exporters, portals | ✗ No equivalent marketplace |
| Self-hosting | Data Center only, read-only after 2029-03-28 | ✓ Free, and not on a deprecation clock |
| Licence | Proprietary | BSL 1.1, converts to Apache 2.0 after 4 years; ✗ not OSI-approved |
| Self-host prerequisites | ✓ Bundled installer, one database | ✗ Needs S3-compatible storage plus an external auth provider |
| Built-in AI allowance | Rovo credits: 25/seat/mo on Standard, 10 per chat | Optional AI answers on paid plans, no credit ledger to manage |
| Best for | Enterprise governance and anything Jira-coupled | A general team wiki whose headcount is growing |
Sources: Confluence pricing · Outline pricing · Atlassian on Data Center end of life. Compiled July 2026.
Where Outline wins
The bill stops tracking headcount
This is the whole argument, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. Outline's own pricing page lists three cloud bands: $10 a month for 1 to 10 team members, $79 for 11 to 100, and $249 for 101 to 200. Those are totals, not per-user rates, which is worth stating plainly because most comparison articles misreport Outline as "$10 per user per month". A 40-person team pays $79 a month, and so does an 80-person team. Confluence, by contrast, prices per seat within volume bands: Atlassian's own pricing data shows Premium annual at $1,780 a year up to 10 users, $2,730 for 11 to 15, and $4,510 for 16 to 25. The practical effect is that on Confluence a hiring plan is also a budget line, and on Outline it is not.
The importer is not paywalled
Outline ships official importers for Confluence, Notion and Markdown, and they work on every tier. That sounds like table stakes until you compare it with the field: Docmost has a good Confluence importer, but it lives in the Business tier, so the free self-hosted edition cannot use it. BookStack and Wiki.js have no Confluence importer at all. Being able to trial a real import on a $10 plan before committing is a meaningful de-risking step, and it is the reason Outline tends to survive an evaluation that BookStack does not.
Writing in it is faster
Harder to quantify, so treat the specifics as observation rather than benchmark: Outline is a lighter application than Confluence, pages open quickly, and the editor is a keyboard-first block editor with slash commands and instant search. Teams that moved report people actually writing more, which is the only wiki metric that matters. The honest counterpoint is that "modern editor" is also what Confluence Cloud has been shipping toward, so this gap is narrower in 2026 than the listicles suggest.
Self-hosting has no expiry date
Outline can be self-hosted for free, indefinitely. Confluence's self-hosted path is Data Center, and Atlassian has published its end: new licence sales stop March 30, 2026, expansions stop March 30, 2028, and on March 28, 2029 licences expire and the instance goes read-only. If your reason for self-hosting is data residency or air-gapped operation, that is not a preference Confluence can keep serving.
Where Confluence still wins
The Jira coupling is the thing Outline has not rebuilt and shows no sign of trying to. In Confluence you embed a live JQL table that updates as the sprint moves, link a page to an epic and have the relationship visible from both sides, and generate release notes from issues in a fix version. Outline links to a Jira ticket the way it links to any URL. If your engineering process runs through that loop, replacing it means rebuilding it by hand in dashboards, and the licence saving evaporates into engineering time. The same applies to the Marketplace: Comala approval workflows, Scroll exporters for regulated PDF output and Refined portals have no Outline equivalents.
The pricing case for staying is narrower but real, and it runs at both ends of the range. Under 10 users, Confluence Cloud is free forever while Outline gives you 30 days and then makes the knowledge base read-only until a card is added, so the cheapest option for a five-person startup is Confluence. And a team sitting just inside a Confluence volume band, say 12 people on an 11-to-15 band, pays nothing for its next three hires; the band structure that punishes you for crossing a boundary rewards you for sitting inside one. Add the licence question, and for a public-sector buyer with an OSI-approved-only policy, Outline's BSL 1.1 is simply not selectable regardless of price.
Migrating Confluence to Outline
The path most teams take:
1. Inventory first. Export a list of spaces and count what uses macros, Jira embeds or Marketplace apps. Page text and attachments migrate cleanly; that layer does not. Anything with a live JQL table needs a decision before you start, not during.
2. Import into a trial workspace. Run Outline's Confluence importer on the $10 plan against your real export, not a sample. This is where you find the page trees that flatten and the tables that need touching up, and it costs $10 to find out.
3. Run both for one cycle. Keep Confluence readable and make Outline the only place new pages are written. Expect to pay for both for a month or two; a migration that tries to avoid the overlap is the one that gets abandoned halfway.
4. What does not move. Page version history mostly stays behind, along with inline comment threads, macro output, Jira embeds and Marketplace app content. Keep the Confluence instance readable for a quarter after the switch rather than cancelling on cutover day.
Common questions
FAQ: Confluence vs Outline
Is Outline cheaper than Confluence?
Above about 15 people, yes, and the gap widens with headcount. Outline Cloud bills a flat rate per band: $10 a month for 1 to 10 people, $79 for 11 to 100, $249 for 101 to 200. Confluence bills per seat inside volume bands, so a 40-person team on Premium annual runs into the thousands per year while Outline stays at $79 a month, or $948 a year, for the same 40 people. Below 10 users Confluence is actually cheaper, because its free tier covers 10 users and Outline only gives you a 30-day trial before the knowledge base goes read-only.
Is Outline open source?
Not in the strict sense. Outline is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1, which converts to Apache 2.0 four years after each release. You can read the code and self-host it for free, but BSL 1.1 is not approved by the Open Source Initiative, so Outline will fail a procurement policy that requires an OSI-approved licence. Public-sector buyers hit this most often. If OSI approval is a hard requirement, XWiki under LGPL 2.1 or BookStack under MIT are the alternatives to look at instead.
Does Outline import from Confluence?
Yes. Outline ships official importers for Confluence, Notion and Markdown files, and they are available on all tiers rather than gated behind a paid plan the way Docmost's Confluence importer is. Pages, nested page trees and attachments come across reliably. What does not survive is the Confluence-specific layer: macros, Jira issue embeds, live JQL tables, and anything rendered by a Marketplace app all need rebuilding or dropping. Inventory those before you start, because they are the part of the migration that takes real time.