23 posts tagged with "Diagrams"

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.

No, Confluence does not support Mermaid diagrams natively. There is no built-in macro or feature that renders Mermaid syntax in Confluence pages. To add Mermaid diagrams to Confluence, you need a Marketplace app.

This guide covers how to set up Mermaid in Confluence and which diagram types you can create.

Sequence diagrams are one of the most widely used diagram types in software documentation. They show exactly how participants -- users, services, databases, external APIs -- exchange messages over time. For Confluence teams, embedding sequence diagrams directly on wiki pages means architecture docs, API specifications, and incident post-mortems stay in one place instead of scattered across external tools.

Mermaid's text-based syntax makes sequence diagrams fast to write and easy to update, but the syntax has its own set of rules that can trip you up. This FAQ answers the questions Confluence users ask most often about building sequence diagrams with Mermaid, with expanded explanations, working code examples, and copy-paste templates you can drop straight into a Mermaid Plus macro.

Graphviz has been the backbone of automated graph visualization for over three decades. Originally developed at AT&T Labs, it powers dependency graphs in build systems, call graphs in profilers, and database schemas in ORMs -- anywhere that diagrams need to be generated from structured data rather than drawn by hand. Graphviz Charts for Confluence brings that same engine directly into your Confluence pages, letting you write DOT language descriptions and get polished, auto-laid-out diagrams without leaving your wiki.

Mermaid is the most popular text-based diagramming language for technical documentation. One line of code generates a flowchart. A few more produce a sequence diagram, ER diagram, or Gantt chart. Teams using Confluence can embed Mermaid diagrams directly on their pages, keeping diagrams alongside the documentation they illustrate.

Architecture diagrams are the backbone of technical documentation. They show how services communicate, where data flows, and which infrastructure components underpin your system. When a new engineer joins your team, the first thing they look for is an architecture diagram. When something breaks in production, the incident response starts at the same diagram.

Yet many teams store their architecture diagrams in external tools -- draw.io, Lucidchart, or even desktop applications -- detached from the documentation where they matter most. Confluence is where your runbooks live, where architecture decision records are written, and where post-mortem discussions happen. Keeping your architecture diagrams inside Confluence eliminates context-switching and ensures diagrams evolve alongside the written documentation they illustrate.

This guide walks through three ways to create architecture diagrams directly in Confluence, using NGPILOT apps designed for different workflows. Every Mermaid example is copy-paste ready, so you can insert it into a Confluence page and see the result immediately.