12 posts tagged with "comparison"

Developers, technical writers, and data scientists think in Markdown. READMEs, API docs, pull request descriptions, and design specs are all written in it. But Confluence — where most of that knowledge ends up living — has no native Markdown support. Pasting Markdown into the WYSIWYG editor produces broken tables, literal asterisks, and lost formatting. This guide walks through the options so you can pick the right Markdown approach for your team without trial and error.

Jira and Confluence are the two products most people picture when they hear "Atlassian." They are frequently sold together, deeply integrated, and yet regularly confused — even by teams that use both every day. This guide explains what each is actually for, where each one shines and struggles, and how to decide which tool a given piece of work belongs in. The goal is to give you a mental model you can apply to any task, not a feature checklist.

Text-based diagramming — writing a few lines of code that render into a diagram — is how modern teams keep diagrams in sync with their documentation. No more drawing boxes by hand in Visio, exporting screenshots, and pasting them into Confluence where they go stale. With text-based diagrams, you edit the source and the diagram redraws instantly.

But there are three major text-based diagramming languages, and they are not interchangeable. Each has different strengths, different syntax, and different ideal use cases. This guide compares Mermaid, PlantUML, and Graphviz so you can choose the right one (or combination) for your Confluence team.

Teams use Confluence to document architecture, processes, and organizational structures. But Confluence doesn't render graphs or charts natively — you need a marketplace app.

We built Graphviz Charts for Confluence to bring the power of Graphviz and DOT language to Confluence pages. In this post, we compare it against every alternative.

Developer teams use Confluence differently than marketing or HR. You document APIs, share architecture diagrams, write runbooks, and collaborate on code reviews. The default Confluence editor works, but it wasn't built for technical documentation.

This guide covers the best Confluence apps for developers in 2026, organized by use case. We built several of these apps at NGPILOT, so we'll be transparent about where our apps fit and where competitors offer better solutions.

Need diagram tools for Confluence without paying for a large team? NGPILOT's three diagramming apps — Mermaid Plus, Excalidraw Plus, and Graphviz Charts — are all free for up to 10 users. This guide compares them so you can pick the right free diagram plugin for your Confluence.

Adding diagrams to Confluence pages helps teams communicate architecture, processes, and workflows visually. This guide covers the three main approaches to creating diagrams in Confluence and helps you choose the right tool for your needs.

Confluence ships with a fixed set of system fonts. For most teams that works fine, but if your company has brand guidelines, an accessibility requirement for specific typefaces, or simply wants documentation that looks polished and professional, the default typography falls short.

The Atlassian Marketplace now offers several apps that let you use custom fonts on your Confluence pages. But with different feature sets, pricing models, and levels of maturity, choosing the right one takes more than a quick glance at star ratings.

This post compares the leading Confluence custom font apps side by side so you can make an informed decision for your team.

Confluence stores every page as XML in a format called "Confluence storage format." Most users never see it. But if you have ever tried to fix a broken macro, remove hidden formatting artifacts, or bulk-edit repetitive markup, you know the rich text editor alone is not enough. You need direct access to the underlying source.

At NGPILOT, we built two apps for exactly this purpose: Raw Storage Source Editor for Confluence (free) and Raw Storage Source Editor Pro for Confluence (paid). Both let you open, view, and edit the raw XML behind any Confluence page. This post compares them feature by feature so you can pick the right one for your team.

When teams need to add diagrams to Confluence, two tools come up again and again: Excalidraw and draw.io (also known as diagrams.net). Both are popular Confluence diagram apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, but they take fundamentally different approaches to visual communication — and picking the wrong one wastes time and licensing budget.

The short version: for live whiteboarding, brainstorming, and freeform sketching, Excalidraw wins. For formal, finalized diagrams (UML, network topology, BPMN), draw.io is the better fit. Most teams end up needing both — and the rest of this post is the honest, feature-by-feature comparison so you can make the right call for your workflow.