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.
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.
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.
Class diagrams are the standard way to model object-oriented systems. They show the classes in your codebase, their attributes and methods, and the relationships between them -- inheritance hierarchies, composition, aggregation, and simple associations. Whether you are documenting a domain model, onboarding new engineers onto a codebase, or collaborating on a design before writing a single line of code, a UML class diagram communicates structure faster than paragraphs of prose.
If your team uses Confluence for technical documentation, embedding class diagrams directly on your pages keeps your design docs next to your architecture decisions, runbooks, and sprint planning notes. With Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, you can write class diagrams in plain text and render them instantly, no external drawing tool required.
An ER diagram (entity-relationship diagram) visualizes a database schema — the tables, columns, primary and foreign keys, and the relationships between them. If your team documents data models, API contracts, or system architecture in Confluence, embedding ER diagrams directly on the page keeps the schema next to the prose instead of stranded in an external tool as a stale screenshot.
Confluence has no built-in ER diagram support, so you add it with a Marketplace app. The approach below uses Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, which renders ER diagrams from plain text — meaning diagrams version, diff, and search alongside the rest of your documentation.
erDiagram syntax — entities, attributes, key types, cardinalityEntity-Relationship (ER) diagrams are the standard way to visualize database schemas. They show the tables in your database, the columns in each table, primary and foreign key constraints, and the relationships between tables -- one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. Whether you are designing a new database from scratch, documenting an existing schema for onboarding, or collaborating on a data model before writing migration scripts, an ER diagram communicates structure faster than any amount of prose.