Notion vs Confluence
Two documentation giants with very different philosophies. Which one fits your team, and what gaps do they leave?
The Core Difference: Flexibility vs Structure
Notion and Confluence both tackle knowledge management and team collaboration, but they take pretty different paths to get there.
Notion wants to be your everything-app. Notes, tasks, databases, calendars, wikis, you name it. Its block-based editor gives you tons of freedom to customize, which is great until your workspace turns into a tangled mess (ask me how I know). They rolled out AI agents in September 2025 and finally added offline mode in August 2025, though honestly the offline support still feels half-baked compared to true local-first tools.
Confluence is the Atlassian solution, built by the same folks behind Jira. It prioritizes structure and enterprise security over flexibility. You get less creative freedom, but larger teams tend to appreciate the predictability. And if your dev team already lives in Jira, the tight integration is a real selling point.
One thing neither tool does well? Actually showing people how to do something with visuals. When you need proper step-by-step process documentation, you'll likely find yourself looking elsewhere.
Platform Overview
Three tools that tackle documentation in different ways.
Notion aims to be your flexible all-in-one workspace.
Block-based editing, databases, wikis, project management. Their new AI agents (Sept 2025) can handle tasks autonomously. Offline mode landed but needs manual setup. Costs climb fast at scale, especially since the May 2025 AI pricing shakeup.
Confluence focuses on structured enterprise docs.
Tight Jira integration, detailed permissions, audit trails. Made for large teams in regulated industries. The search? Widely criticized. And the October 2025 price hikes didn't win them any fans.
Glitter AI builds visual step-by-step guides for you.
Record your screen while talking through a process, and AI turns that into a polished guide with screenshots. Great for SOPs, training materials, and any documentation where you need to show people exactly what to click. About 11x faster than doing it by hand.
At a Glance
Quick comparison of the key differences.
What Both Are Missing: Visual Process Documentation
Look, Notion and Confluence are solid for text-based documentation. Wikis, meeting notes, project plans, they've got that covered.
But here's the thing. When someone on your team asks "How do I do X?" a wall of text usually isn't the answer.
Visual step-by-step guides with actual screenshots work way better for stuff like:
- Employee onboarding
- Software training
- Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
- Customer support articles
The problem? Neither Notion nor Confluence generates these for you. You're stuck manually screenshotting, cropping, annotating, and inserting images. Over and over. For every process. And heaven help you when something in the workflow changes.
Glitter AI fills this gap. Record your screen once while explaining what you're doing, and you get a finished step-by-step guide with screenshots and descriptions. Drop it into Notion or Confluence and you're done.
Document Creation
How do these tools approach creating documentation?How does document creation work?
Block-based editor.
Drag blocks around for text, images, databases, embeds. Tons of flexibility, though every document requires manual assembly.
Traditional page editor.
Feels like a word processor. Draft/publish workflow keeps you from accidentally publishing half-finished work. Comes with templates for common doc types.
Automatic from recording.
Hit record, walk through the process while talking, and AI builds a step-by-step guide with screenshots. What used to take hours now takes minutes.
Can it create visual step-by-step guides?
Manual only.
You're on your own for screenshots. Take them, upload them, crop them, annotate them, write the explanations. Rinse and repeat for every step.
Manual only.
Same story as Notion. All manual. You can find marketplace plugins that help, but they cost extra.
Automatic.
Walk through the process while narrating. Glitter grabs screenshots, turns your voice into written instructions, and outputs a guide ready to publish.
How easy is it to keep documentation updated?
Manual updates.
Process changes? You're back to editing pages by hand. For visual guides, that means re-capturing screenshots and rewriting steps.
Manual updates.
Version history is nice for tracking what changed, but actually updating visual content is still a manual slog.
Quick re-record or edit.
Something changed? Just re-record that section, or tweak individual steps. Much faster than starting from scratch.
Organization & Features
How do they keep content organized and findable?How is content organized?
Infinitely nestable pages and databases.
Build custom views (table, board, gallery, calendar). Very flexible, though it can spiral into chaos without some ground rules.
Hierarchical spaces and pages.
Clear tree structure. Less freedom, but large teams appreciate knowing exactly where things live. New hires pick it up faster.
Folders and guides.
Straightforward folder organization. Meant to embed in whatever knowledge base you're already using (Notion, Confluence, or something else).
What about search and discoverability?
Solid search with AI help.
Quick search with type filtering. AI-enhanced on Business plans. Can bog down in massive workspaces, but generally outperforms Confluence here.
Search? A common frustration.
Users regularly call the search "broken" or "terrible." Even exact title matches fail sometimes. Attachments don't get indexed reliably.
Searchable guides.
Full-text search across all your guides. Since voice narration becomes written text, everything is searchable (unlike video-only tools).
Pricing & Plans
See how pricing compares across all three tools./mo
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Notion – Pricing Takeaways:
- AI only on Business+, $20/user/mo minimum for AI access
- Forced AI upgrade, removed standalone AI add-on (May 2025)
- Costs scale fast, 20 users = $200-400/mo minimum
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Confluence – Pricing Takeaways:
- Price hikes, Oct 2025 increase upset customers
- Hidden costs, marketplace apps bill per total users
- SSO costs extra, requires Atlassian Guard add-on
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Glitter AI – Pricing Takeaways:
- Pay per creator, no viewer fees for embedded guides
- Embed anywhere, works with Notion, Confluence, help centers
- Complements rather than replaces your wiki
What Users Are Complaining About
Neither tool is perfect, and customers aren't shy about voicing their frustrations. Here's what keeps coming up.
Notion's Pain Points
Pricing Changes (May 2025): Notion killed the standalone AI add-on and shoved it into their Business plan at $20/user/mo. If you were happily paying $10/mo on Plus, well, now you're looking at doubling that just to keep AI access. Long-time customers feel like they got the old bait-and-switch treatment.
"Let's be honest: this isn't a gift - it's a ransom. Pay more to keep what you already paid for... These so-called 'plan adjustments' are really contract breaches disguised as updates." - CEO of Swiss Tech Company (Open Letter to Notion CEO), Reddit, May 2025
Performance at Scale: Once you've got thousands of database entries, things start crawling. Users complain about lag when navigating between pages, editing content, or loading anything remotely complex.
"Fake" Offline Mode: They finally shipped offline mode in August 2025, but it's pretty limited. You have to manually select which pages to cache, and you can't create databases offline. If you're coming from something like Obsidian, this feels underwhelming.
Support Quality: There are plenty of reports about support tickets sitting unanswered for days or even weeks. You might get an automated "we received your request" email, but actual human help? That seems to be hit or miss.
Confluence's Pain Points
Search is Broken: This might be the most universal gripe. People struggle to find documents even when they type in exact titles. Attachments don't get indexed reliably, which means chunks of your knowledge base become invisible.
"The search function on confluence is absolute shit, you can't even exclude instead of include... sometimes you are treasure hunting and want to find what someone else wrote on a topic not within your own spaces." - Reddit User, September 2025
Price Hikes (October 2025): Atlassian jacked up Cloud pricing, and some enterprise customers got hit hard. One company saw their annual bill balloon from $150k to $500k over three years. That's the kind of increase that makes you start shopping around.
"The problem really is Atlassian. They are an awful company to deal with. They suck you in and then raise prices exorbitantly. Our confluence prices have gone from 150k to 500k per year in 3 years. We are looking for an exit, but struggling to find an alternative." - Reddit User, April 2025
Hidden Marketplace Costs: Third-party apps charge based on your total Confluence user count, not how many people actually use the app. Got 500 Confluence users but only 10 need that diagramming plugin? Too bad, you're paying for 500 licenses.
Editor Instability: Tables act weird. Copy-paste strips formatting. Edits sometimes vanish or merge incorrectly. And in December 2025, a PDF export bug completely broke image exports for a while.
SSO Isn't Included: Want SAML SSO? You'll need to buy Atlassian Guard separately, even on Standard and Premium. A lot of mid-sized companies don't see that coming until they're already committed.
Use Them Together
Here's the thing: Glitter AI isn't trying to replace Notion or Confluence. It's designed to plug into what you already have.
Notion or Confluence should still be your home for wikis, meeting notes, project documentation, and general knowledge management.
Glitter AI handles the visual stuff. SOPs, training materials, how-to articles. Create your step-by-step guides there, then embed them right into your wiki.
A lot of teams actually run all three: Confluence for the enterprise documentation that needs governance, Notion for more flexible project workspaces, and Glitter AI for process guides that live inside both.
So... which one should you choose?
These tools tackle different problems. Here's how to think about it.Choose Notion if you...
Pick Notion if you want a flexible all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, and wikis. Works best for small to mid-sized teams who like to customize things. Solid databases. Clean, modern interface. The new AI agents (Sept 2025) can automate tasks for you.
Don't choose Notion if you...
Think twice about Notion if you need enterprise-grade security or tight Jira integration. Costs also stack up fast for larger teams, especially after AI moved to Business plans only (May 2025). And performance can suffer at scale.
Choose Confluence if you...
Pick Confluence if you're an enterprise already in the Atlassian ecosystem, need strict security and compliance, or have a large team. Better base pricing at scale, and the Jira integration is tough to match for dev teams.
Don't choose Confluence if you...
Avoid Confluence if you prefer flexibility over structure or want a more modern, customizable interface. The search function is notoriously frustrating. And watch for hidden costs: marketplace apps and Atlassian Guard for SSO add up. The October 2025 price hikes didn't help either.
Choose Glitter AI if you...
Go with Glitter AI if you need visual step-by-step guides for processes, training, or SOPs. It works alongside Notion and Confluence rather than replacing them. Record once, embed your guides anywhere.
Don't choose Glitter AI if you...
Skip Glitter AI if you need a general knowledge base or wiki. Stick with Notion or Confluence for that, and layer in Glitter when you need visual guides.
Real customer reviews
Genuine feedback from real customers ❤️
This software is mind-blowing! After 2+ months, it's an invaluable asset to my company. The transcription quality is out of this world, and the new image editing tools are so fluid and better than [competitor name redacted]. ...you've saved me so much time; I'm elated and highly anticipate subscribing for another year!
Tim M.
May 3, 2025
Our company has asked each department to use AI tools to increase productivity, and this has made a huge difference. One of our leaders had originally sent a link to check out Glitter AI, and we love it! We're now using it for clients as well as internal staff.
Kim W.
December 18, 2024
This is exactly the documentation solution that we've been looking for. Every software system requires operating instructions, and you make them so easy to create! It's perfect for employee training purposes.
Erez A.
January 9, 2025
Glitter is really cool! The step-by-step guide it created was exactly what we needed for our corporate Salesforce setup, which was a literal mess. Just having a video isn't great because it's a nightmare to update all the fields for billing. This tool is saving us so much time!
Dustin R.
March 8, 2025
This is amazing! I just used the desktop app to make a quick guide for a Photoshop tool that I can use in my class. It would have taken me at least 30 minutes before and I just did it in about 5 minutes. Thanks for such a great tool!
Sarah
January 28, 2025
I tested 2 products today to solve the problem of rapidly creating 60+ articles to onboard our customers, and Glitter AI is excellent! It's really easy to use and edit. The output is so easy to import into our CMS for our Knowledge Hub; it's fantastic.
Emily W.
February 15, 2025
Really love this product! We use Guru for documentation at our company. With Glitter, I can do a quick walkthrough, and it creates a guide that can be pasted right into Guru, which saves us from undocumented tasks.
Jens A.
April 12, 2025
So far, I'm liking Glitter a great deal; it's very intuitive and useful. Our school district has an old method for online help for our student information system. Glitter is a great way to save many, MANY, person-hours of work, and our IT person is excited about it too!
John
January 9, 2025
This software is mind-blowing! After 2+ months, it's an invaluable asset to my company. The transcription quality is out of this world, and the new image editing tools are so fluid and better than [competitor name redacted]. ...you've saved me so much time; I'm elated and highly anticipate subscribing for another year!
Tim M.
May 3, 2025
Our company has asked each department to use AI tools to increase productivity, and this has made a huge difference. One of our leaders had originally sent a link to check out Glitter AI, and we love it! We're now using it for clients as well as internal staff.
Kim W.
December 18, 2024
This is exactly the documentation solution that we've been looking for. Every software system requires operating instructions, and you make them so easy to create! It's perfect for employee training purposes.
Erez A.
January 9, 2025
Glitter is really cool! The step-by-step guide it created was exactly what we needed for our corporate Salesforce setup, which was a literal mess. Just having a video isn't great because it's a nightmare to update all the fields for billing. This tool is saving us so much time!
Dustin R.
March 8, 2025
This is amazing! I just used the desktop app to make a quick guide for a Photoshop tool that I can use in my class. It would have taken me at least 30 minutes before and I just did it in about 5 minutes. Thanks for such a great tool!
Sarah
January 28, 2025
I tested 2 products today to solve the problem of rapidly creating 60+ articles to onboard our customers, and Glitter AI is excellent! It's really easy to use and edit. The output is so easy to import into our CMS for our Knowledge Hub; it's fantastic.
Emily W.
February 15, 2025
Really love this product! We use Guru for documentation at our company. With Glitter, I can do a quick walkthrough, and it creates a guide that can be pasted right into Guru, which saves us from undocumented tasks.
Jens A.
April 12, 2025
So far, I'm liking Glitter a great deal; it's very intuitive and useful. Our school district has an old method for online help for our student information system. Glitter is a great way to save many, MANY, person-hours of work, and our IT person is excited about it too!
John
January 9, 2025
This software is mind-blowing! After 2+ months, it's an invaluable asset to my company. The transcription quality is out of this world, and the new image editing tools are so fluid and better than [competitor name redacted]. ...you've saved me so much time; I'm elated and highly anticipate subscribing for another year!
Tim M.
May 3, 2025
Our company has asked each department to use AI tools to increase productivity, and this has made a huge difference. One of our leaders had originally sent a link to check out Glitter AI, and we love it! We're now using it for clients as well as internal staff.
Kim W.
December 18, 2024
This is exactly the documentation solution that we've been looking for. Every software system requires operating instructions, and you make them so easy to create! It's perfect for employee training purposes.
Erez A.
January 9, 2025
Glitter is really cool! The step-by-step guide it created was exactly what we needed for our corporate Salesforce setup, which was a literal mess. Just having a video isn't great because it's a nightmare to update all the fields for billing. This tool is saving us so much time!
Dustin R.
March 8, 2025
This is amazing! I just used the desktop app to make a quick guide for a Photoshop tool that I can use in my class. It would have taken me at least 30 minutes before and I just did it in about 5 minutes. Thanks for such a great tool!
Sarah
January 28, 2025
I tested 2 products today to solve the problem of rapidly creating 60+ articles to onboard our customers, and Glitter AI is excellent! It's really easy to use and edit. The output is so easy to import into our CMS for our Knowledge Hub; it's fantastic.
Emily W.
February 15, 2025
Really love this product! We use Guru for documentation at our company. With Glitter, I can do a quick walkthrough, and it creates a guide that can be pasted right into Guru, which saves us from undocumented tasks.
Jens A.
April 12, 2025
So far, I'm liking Glitter a great deal; it's very intuitive and useful. Our school district has an old method for online help for our student information system. Glitter is a great way to save many, MANY, person-hours of work, and our IT person is excited about it too!
John
January 9, 2025
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Notion and Confluence?
Notion is built around flexibility. Block-based editing, databases, notes, and wikis that you can customize however you want. Confluence takes a more structured approach, emphasizing enterprise documentation with tight Jira integration and detailed permissions. In short: Notion gives you creative freedom, Confluence gives you governance. Neither auto-generates visual step-by-step guides, which is the gap Glitter AI fills.
Is Notion or Confluence better for large teams?
For big enterprises, Confluence tends to win out. It costs less per user at scale ($5.67/user annually vs Notion's $10-20), has tighter security controls, and plays nicely with Jira. That said, keep an eye on hidden costs like marketplace apps and Atlassian Guard for SSO. Notion is often a better fit for smaller teams that value flexibility. Glitter AI works alongside either, adding visual guides you can embed wherever.
Can I use Glitter AI with Notion or Confluence?
Absolutely. Glitter AI guides embed directly into both platforms. Build your step-by-step visual guides in Glitter, then drop them into your wiki pages. Plenty of teams run all three side by side.
Which is cheaper: Notion or Confluence?
If you have fewer than 10 people, Confluence is free (Notion's free tier is individuals only). For paid teams, Confluence runs cheaper: roughly $113/month for 20 users on Standard (annual billing) compared to $200-400 for Notion. Just watch for Confluence add-on costs like marketplace apps and Atlassian Guard. Glitter AI charges per creator ($16-20/mo) and doesn't charge for viewers on embedded guides.
Do Notion and Confluence have AI features?
They do, but with caveats. Notion AI only comes with Business plans ($20/user/mo annually), and as of May 2025 there's no standalone AI add-on anymore. Confluence bundles AI (Atlassian Intelligence) into Premium ($10.83/user/mo annually) and Enterprise. What neither can do is automatically turn a screen recording into a visual step-by-step guide. That's Glitter AI's specialty.
Can Notion replace Confluence?
It depends on your needs. Notion handles docs, wikis, and project management pretty well for many teams. But Confluence offers deeper Jira integration, stronger enterprise security, and better pricing at scale. A lot of enterprises stick with Confluence for governance and compliance, even when individual employees would prefer Notion's more modern feel.
Which tool is best for process documentation?
If you need visual step-by-step guides for SOPs, training, or how-tos, Glitter AI is probably your best option. It generates polished guides from recordings automatically. For text-heavy wikis and general process documentation, Notion or Confluence work well. A common setup: visual guides from Glitter embedded inside Notion or Confluence pages.
What about security and compliance?
Both Notion and Confluence carry SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications. Confluence also offers HIPAA compliance (with a BAA), data residency options, and fine-grained access controls. One gotcha: SAML SSO on Confluence requires buying Atlassian Guard separately for Standard/Premium. Notion only includes SSO on Business/Enterprise. Neither uses customer data to train AI. Glitter AI is SOC 2 Type II compliant and includes AI on all plans.
Can I migrate between Notion and Confluence?
You can, but expect some manual work. Both support exporting to Markdown and other formats, though databases, formatting quirks, and page structures rarely come through cleanly. If you've got a large knowledge base, budget real time for the migration.
Which should I choose for my team?
Go with Notion if you want flexibility and an all-in-one workspace (works best for small to mid-sized teams). Pick Confluence if enterprise security and Jira integration matter most (better for larger teams). Use Glitter AI for visual step-by-step guides regardless of team size. A lot of teams end up mixing and matching since these tools solve different problems.