SharePoint vs Confluence: Intranet And Knowledge Base Compared

In the SharePoint vs Confluence decision, SharePoint is the better fit when you run on Microsoft 365 and need document management, a company intranet and records controls at no extra license cost. Confluence is the better fit when your teams live in Jira and want a fast, wiki-first knowledge base for engineering, product and project documentation. Many organizations end up using both, with SharePoint as the official intranet and file store and Confluence as the working wiki for technical teams.

This guide, SharePoint vs Confluence: Intranet And Knowledge Base Compared, walks through how the two platforms differ on content model, intranet features, integrations, licensing, AI search and permissions, using pricing and lifecycle dates verified as of October 2026.

The Core Difference: Document Management vs Wiki-First Knowledge Base

The two tools start from different assumptions about what “content” is. SharePoint is built around files. Its basic unit is the document library: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files with version history, check-in and check-out, metadata columns, content types, retention labels and approval flows. Pages exist, but much of an organization’s real SharePoint content lives in libraries.

Confluence is built around pages. Its basic unit is a page inside a space, written in the browser, organized in a page tree, and edited by many people at once. Files can be attached, but the expectation is that knowledge gets written directly as pages: how-to articles, runbooks, meeting notes, requirements, decision logs and retrospectives.

That difference drives most of the practical tradeoffs. If your knowledge mostly takes the form of formal documents that need versioning, approvals and retention, SharePoint maps to how you already work. If it takes the form of living notes that teams update weekly, Confluence usually gets more writing done with less friction.

Authoring Experience

Confluence’s editor is its strongest feature. Templates for common page types, inline comments, macros for Jira issues, tables of contents, page trees and real-time co-editing make it easy for non-specialists to produce structured documentation. Page history is clear and restoring an old version is simple.

SharePoint pages use a web part model that is better suited to designed, publishable pages (news posts, landing pages, department homepages) than to long technical articles. For collaborative writing, most SharePoint users co-author Word documents stored in a library, or use Microsoft Loop pages, rather than writing directly in SharePoint pages.

Storage And File Handling

SharePoint storage is pooled at the tenant level. Microsoft Learn lists 1 TB per organization plus 10 GB per license purchased for Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans, a 25 TB limit per site, and a 250 GB limit per uploaded file. For heavy file workloads, that capacity and the native Office integration are hard to match.

Confluence Cloud storage depends on the plan. Atlassian’s plan documentation lists 2 GB on Free, 250 GB on Standard and unlimited file storage on Premium. That is plenty for a wiki, but Confluence is not designed to replace a file server.

Intranet: SharePoint Communication Sites And Viva Connections vs Confluence Spaces

For a company-wide intranet, SharePoint has the more complete toolkit. A SharePoint intranet is usually built from communication sites for departments and announcements, hub sites that group related sites under shared navigation and search, a home site that acts as the front door, and news posts that roll up across sites. Audience targeting lets you show different news and links to different groups.

Viva Connections extends that intranet into Microsoft Teams. Microsoft describes it as a personalized landing page with a dashboard of task cards, a news reader that pulls SharePoint news from across the organization, and a curated resources list. It is reachable from the Teams app, the web and mobile, and it detects an existing SharePoint home site automatically. One licensing detail matters: Microsoft Learn states that creating a Connections experience requires an Enterprise (E), Frontline (F) or Academic (A) license type, and that tenants on those licenses get one experience, with additional experiences (up to 50) requiring a Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license for every user.

Confluence can serve as a lightweight intranet. Teams often create a company space with policies, onboarding guides, org announcements and blog posts, and the space homepage becomes the de facto front door. It works well for smaller or engineering-led companies. What it lacks compared with SharePoint is branded multi-site navigation, audience-targeted news, a native Teams dashboard and tight ties to email and the rest of the employee workday.

If the intranet is your main goal, our guide on why every business needs a well-designed SharePoint intranet covers site architecture and governance in more detail.

Integrations: Jira vs Microsoft 365 And Teams

Integration is often the deciding factor, because each tool is strongest inside its own suite.

Confluence And Jira

Confluence and Jira share the same Atlassian cloud platform, accounts and admin. You can embed live Jira issue lists in a page, create issues from highlighted text, link requirements pages to epics, and generate release notes from Jira data. For software teams, that link between “what we decided” in Confluence and “what we are building” in Jira is the main reason Confluence wins. Jira Service Management can also use Confluence spaces as the knowledge base behind a help center.

If you are also weighing your work tracking tool, see our comparison of Azure DevOps vs Jira, since that choice usually settles this one.

SharePoint And Microsoft 365

SharePoint is the storage layer behind Microsoft Teams files and works natively with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Power Automate, Power Apps and Microsoft Purview. Every Teams team gets a SharePoint site, so files shared in a channel already live in SharePoint with its permissions and retention. For organizations whose daily work happens in Teams and Outlook, SharePoint requires little change in behavior.

Both platforms connect across the divide. Atlassian offers apps for Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft offers connectors that bring external content into Microsoft 365 search. These bridges help, but neither tool feels as native in the other’s ecosystem as it does in its own.

Licensing And Cost (As Of October 2026)

The cost comparison is lopsided in a way that shapes many decisions: most organizations already pay for SharePoint.

SharePoint Pricing

SharePoint is included in Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans. As of October 2026, Microsoft’s US list prices on annual commitment are $7.00 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, $23.50 for Business Standard with Copilot and $32.00 for Business Premium with Copilot, all of which include SharePoint. If you already license Microsoft 365, adding a SharePoint intranet or knowledge base costs implementation time rather than new seats. Enterprise agreements and CSP partners often price differently from list, so confirm with your reseller.

Confluence Pricing

Confluence Cloud is licensed per user. Atlassian raised cloud list prices effective October 13, 2026. Its published pricing tables now show Confluence Standard at $7.15 per user per month and Premium at $14.10 per user per month for the 1 to 100 user tier, with lower per-user rates at higher tiers (for example $4.05 Standard and $8.15 Premium in the 251 to 1,000 tier). The Free plan covers up to 10 users with 2 GB of storage and no customizable permissions. Enterprise pricing is quoted by Atlassian. These are list prices; annual billing, Atlassian Solution Partners and volume deals can change the effective rate.

For a 100-person company already on Microsoft 365, Confluence Standard adds roughly $715 per month at list price. That is a reasonable spend if it meaningfully improves documentation, but it is a real line item that SharePoint does not add.

Atlassian’s Cloud Shift And Data Center End Of Life

If you run Confluence on your own servers, the platform question is also a migration question. Atlassian ended Server support in February 2024 and has announced the end of Data Center. According to Atlassian’s published timeline, sales of new Data Center subscriptions to new customers ended March 30, 2026. Existing customers can buy new Data Center licenses and expansions until March 30, 2028. Data Center reaches end of life on March 28, 2029, when licenses expire and become read-only.

That gives self-hosted Confluence customers a hard deadline to move to Confluence Cloud, move to another platform, or accept a read-only archive. It is a natural moment to ask whether the knowledge base should stay in Atlassian’s cloud or consolidate into Microsoft 365. Factors to weigh include data residency requirements (Confluence Cloud offers data residency controls on paid plans), Marketplace app availability in cloud, and the effort of rebuilding macros and page trees in SharePoint, which often does not translate cleanly.

SharePoint has a related on-premises story. SharePoint Server Subscription Edition remains available, but Microsoft’s new intranet and AI features, including Viva Connections and Microsoft 365 Copilot, are delivered through SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

Search And AI: Microsoft 365 Copilot vs Rovo

Both vendors now treat AI search over company knowledge as a core feature, and the quality of your content structure matters more than ever, because AI answers are only as good as what they can find and what users are allowed to see.

Microsoft 365 Copilot And SharePoint

Microsoft 365 Copilot grounds answers in content the user can access across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and Outlook, and SharePoint sites can host agents scoped to specific sites or libraries. Copilot is included in the Business Standard with Copilot and Business Premium with Copilot bundles, and Microsoft lists Microsoft 365 Copilot Business as an add-on at $18.00 per user per month (paid yearly) under an introductory offer running July 1 to December 31, 2026, against a standard price of $21.00. Enterprise customers license Copilot separately. Because Copilot respects existing permissions, oversharing in SharePoint becomes visible quickly, so most deployments start with a permissions and sensitivity label review.

Rovo And Confluence

Rovo is Atlassian’s AI layer for search, chat and agents across Confluence, Jira and connected third-party tools. Atlassian’s plan documentation lists AI features including Rovo on Confluence Standard, Premium and Enterprise, with higher usage quotas on the upper tiers. Atlassian has also announced usage-based billing for AI beyond included allowances, so check current Rovo usage limits before budgeting heavy use. Rovo’s advantage is context from Jira: it can answer questions that connect a design page to the issues and releases behind it.

In practice, the better AI assistant is usually the one sitting on top of where your knowledge already lives. Teams documenting in Confluence get more from Rovo; teams storing documents in SharePoint and talking in Teams get more from Copilot. For a broader look at assistants, see our Copilot vs ChatGPT comparison.

Permissions And Governance

SharePoint permissions run through Microsoft Entra ID users and groups, Microsoft 365 groups and site-level roles, with inheritance down to libraries, folders and individual files. On top of that sit Microsoft Purview features such as sensitivity labels, retention policies, eDiscovery and data loss prevention. For regulated industries, this compliance depth is a major reason to keep official records in SharePoint. The tradeoff is complexity: broken inheritance and “anyone with the link” sharing are common sources of oversharing.

Confluence permissions are simpler. Admins set global permissions, space permissions control who can view or edit a space, and page restrictions limit individual pages. Atlassian’s documentation notes that the Free plan does not allow customizable permissions, while Premium adds an admin key to bypass content restrictions and a tool to inspect permissions, along with usage analytics. Identity can be centralized through Atlassian Guard and single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID or other providers.

Side-By-Side Comparison

Factor	SharePoint	Confluence
Core model	Document libraries plus pages	Wiki pages in spaces
Best at	Document management, intranet, records	Team documentation, knowledge base
Intranet tools	Communication sites, hub sites, home site, Viva Connections	Company space, blogs, space homepages
Native integrations	Microsoft 365, Teams, Office, Power Platform, Purview	Jira, Jira Service Management, Loom, Marketplace apps
Licensing	Included in Microsoft 365 plans	Per user: Free (10 users), Standard, Premium, Enterprise
List price, Oct 2026	Business Basic from $7.00 per user per month	Standard $7.15, Premium $14.10 per user per month (1 to 100 users)
Storage	1 TB plus 10 GB per license, pooled	2 GB Free, 250 GB Standard, unlimited Premium
AI	Microsoft 365 Copilot and SharePoint agents	Rovo search, chat and agents
Permissions	Entra ID groups, inheritance, Purview labels	Global, space and page restrictions
Self-hosted option	SharePoint Server Subscription Edition	Data Center, end of life March 28, 2029
Learning curve	Higher for site owners	Lower for authors

When To Choose SharePoint

• You already license Microsoft 365 and want to avoid another per-user subscription.
• Your knowledge is mostly formal documents that need versioning, approvals, retention or legal hold.
• You need a branded company intranet with targeted news and a front door inside Teams.
• Compliance requirements point to Microsoft Purview labels, DLP and eDiscovery.
• Most employees are outside engineering and spend their day in Outlook, Teams and Office.

When To Choose Confluence

• Your teams plan work in Jira and want documentation linked to issues, epics and releases.
• You want a fast, page-based knowledge base that non-specialists will actually write in.
• Your content is living documentation: runbooks, specs, decision records, retrospectives.
• You run Jira Service Management and need a knowledge base behind your help center.
• You are not standardized on Microsoft 365, or you use Google Workspace for files.

Using SharePoint And Confluence Together

Running both is common and often sensible, as long as each tool has a clear job. A typical split puts the company intranet, HR and finance policies, contracts and other official records in SharePoint, and engineering, product and IT documentation in Confluence. The risk is duplicate or conflicting content, so write down a simple rule (“policies live in SharePoint, team how-tos live in Confluence”) and enforce it.

A few practices make a two-tool setup work. Use one identity provider for both, typically Microsoft Entra ID with single sign-on. Link rather than copy: a Confluence page can point to the authoritative SharePoint policy. Bring Confluence content into Microsoft 365 search and Copilot through a connector, or connect Microsoft content to Rovo, so people can find answers without knowing which tool holds them. Review licenses each year, since some Confluence users may only need occasional read access.

Migration And Adoption Considerations

Moving from Confluence to SharePoint, or the reverse, is rarely a straight copy. Confluence macros, Jira embeds and page trees have no direct SharePoint equivalent, and SharePoint document libraries and metadata do not map neatly into Confluence spaces. Plan for a content audit first: archive stale pages, assign owners, and decide what should be rebuilt rather than moved.

Adoption matters more than features. A SharePoint intranet that nobody updates, or a Confluence space with hundreds of orphaned pages, will fail regardless of the platform. Assign content owners per site or space, set review dates for important pages, and measure usage with each platform’s analytics.

What To Ask A Partner

• How many intranet or knowledge base projects like ours have you delivered, on which platform, and can we speak to a client?
• How will you handle Confluence macros, attachments and page history in a migration?
• What permissions and oversharing review will you run before we turn on Copilot or Rovo?
• What governance model (site owners, content review, archiving) do you leave behind after launch?

If you are comparing Microsoft’s file tools against other suites, our SharePoint vs Google Drive comparison covers the file storage side of the decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SharePoint Or Confluence Better For A Knowledge Base?

Confluence is usually better for a team-written knowledge base because its page editor, templates and Jira links make documentation easy to create and maintain. SharePoint is better when the knowledge base is mostly formal documents that need approvals, retention and Microsoft 365 compliance controls.

Can Confluence Replace A SharePoint Intranet?

For small or engineering-led companies, a Confluence company space can serve as a simple intranet. Larger organizations usually find a SharePoint intranet stronger, because it offers hub sites, audience-targeted news, a home site and Viva Connections inside Teams.

Is SharePoint Free With Microsoft 365?

SharePoint is included in Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium and the enterprise plans, so there is no separate seat cost. You still pay for setup, design and governance, and some add-ons such as Copilot or extra Viva licenses cost more.

When Does Confluence Data Center Reach End Of Life?

Atlassian has set March 28, 2029 as the Data Center end-of-life date, when licenses expire and become read-only. New customer sales ended March 30, 2026, and existing customers can buy licenses and expansions until March 30, 2028.

Confluence vs SharePoint: Which Works Better With Microsoft Teams?

SharePoint, because it is the storage layer behind Teams files and powers Viva Connections. Confluence offers a Teams app for sharing and previewing pages, but it is an integration rather than a native part of Teams.

Conclusion

The SharePoint vs Confluence choice comes down to where your people already work and what kind of knowledge you keep. Microsoft 365 organizations with document-heavy, compliance-sensitive content and a need for a company intranet should start with SharePoint. Jira-centered teams that need a living wiki should pick Confluence, and self-hosted Confluence customers should plan their cloud or platform move well before the 2029 Data Center deadline. Running both with clear boundaries is a valid outcome.

If you need help designing or migrating, our list of top SharePoint consulting companies is a good place to start, and the Microsoft Azure hub collects our guides, comparisons and partner rankings across the Microsoft cloud.