31 posts tagged with "diagrams"

Confluence chat can write your page, summarize the thread, and answer questions about the space. What it couldn't do — until now — is draw. If you asked for "a flowchart of our deployment process," you got a text description of a flowchart, and someone still had to open an editor and build it.

The AI agent in Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence closes that gap: it creates, reads, updates, and converts Mermaid diagrams directly on Confluence pages and blog posts, from chat.

Every Confluence team ends up choosing a diagram tool, and most start by asking the wrong question: does it support Mermaid? These days, two answers exist. Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence is built around Mermaid — all 30 Mermaid v12 diagram types, a code editor with live preview, one-click templates for every type, and a Rovo AI agent that works on the page. draw.io is the most-installed diagramming app on the Atlassian Marketplace, with deep shape libraries, whiteboarding, and a Mermaid importer added to its editor.

Both are good tools. This guide compares how they behave in Confluence specifically — how a diagram is created, what is stored on the page, what happens when you need to change it six months later, and what it costs.

Mermaid 12 is the biggest release the diagram language has had in years — and as of today it is live in all three NGPILOT diagram apps: Enhanced Markdown for Confluence, Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, and Mermaid Plus Diagrams for Jira. You get the headline feature immediately: UML use case diagrams, the diagram type Confluence and Jira teams have been asking for since requirements documents moved out of dedicated UML tools.

Meeting notes, project briefs, planning docs — most Confluence pages already start life as a Markdown-ish outline: a title, some headings, bullets underneath. A mind map is just that outline seen from above. This guide shows how to get from the outline you already have to an interactive mind map on the page, without drawing anything and without learning diagram syntax.

Jira is where the work happens — but the process behind the work usually lives in someone's head or in a stale Confluence page nobody opens. A flowchart on the Jira issue itself fixes that: bug triage paths, approval chains, and escalation procedures become visual, unambiguous, and impossible to miss.

Jira Cloud gives you two ways to get there, and they serve different needs. This guide walks through both, then gives you three copy-paste Mermaid flowchart examples for the scenarios Jira teams hit most: bug triage, approval workflows, and incident escalation.

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.

Every team that adopts Jira diagrams hits the same moment: you discover Mermaid supports 30 diagram types, you get excited, and then you realize you have no idea which ones to actually use during a sprint. Most of them never get drawn. The diagrams that earn their keep are the ones that make a standup faster, an onboarding doc clearer, or a ticket unambiguous — and those are a small, repeatable subset.

This post is the workflow guide we wish we'd had: the four diagram types a sprint team actually uses, each with a real scenario and copy-paste syntax you can drop straight into a Jira issue. The full 30-type reference follows, so the same page works as both a sprint playbook and a complete catalog.

Every architecture review ends the same way: the team sketches a system on a whiteboard, someone takes a blurry phone photo, and the diagram is never seen again. The next sprint a new engineer joins, asks how the system fits together, and the whiteboard gets redrawn from memory — different every time.

The fix is to capture the architecture sketch on the ticket it describes, editable by anyone on the team, versioned with the issue. That's what Excalidraw Diagrams plus Whiteboards for Jira does: it adds a full drawing canvas to every Jira issue, with 229 bundled shape libraries and freehand drawing. The same experience is available in Confluence via Excalidraw plus Whiteboards for Confluence. This guide walks through running an architecture session that produces a saved, shareable diagram.

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.