3 posts tagged with "plantuml"

Every team that migrated to Confluence Cloud with a wiki full of PlantUML diagrams hits the same wall: the macro they used on Data Center does not exist in Cloud, and there is no native PlantUML support to fall back on. The source text is usually still there, sitting in page storage — it just has nothing to render it.

Quick answer: there are three working methods in Confluence Cloud. Convert PlantUML into an editable Excalidraw whiteboard with an AI agent (best for diagrams you still maintain), render externally and embed an image (fine for frozen history), or write new diagrams in Mermaid (best for everything you have not created yet). This post shows all three.

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.

Developers write in Markdown. Confluence doesn't. Every engineering team that moves from GitHub wikis, README files, or Hugo docs to Confluence hits the same wall — the rich text editor feels slow, and there's no way to write in the format they already know.

Several marketplace apps bring Markdown to Confluence, but they take different approaches. Some embed Markdown as macros. Others import Markdown files. A few offer live editing. We built Enhanced Markdown for Confluence to give teams a full WYSIWYG Markdown editor with code highlighting, charts, UML diagrams, and table merging — all inside the Confluence page editor. In this post we compare it against every alternative.