SharePoint vs Confluence

SharePoint vs Confluence is usually two questions wearing one name: what runs the intranet, and what holds the team documentation. SharePoint is the intranet and document platform of Microsoft 365 — communication sites, news, hub navigation, document libraries with co-authoring, and the substrate under Teams and OneDrive — governed by Purview and Entra like everything else in the suite. Confluence is Atlassian's wiki: the fastest way for a team to write and organise living documentation, with the Jira integration that engineering organisations depend on. For a Microsoft 365 company, SharePoint is the intranet answer and Confluence is a defensible choice for engineering knowledge if Jira is already there.

What SharePoint is and how information architecture, hub sites, and communication sites fit is in What is SharePoint. The file-sync sibling comparison is OneDrive vs Dropbox.

Where each one comes from

Confluence (2004) is Atlassian's team wiki: spaces, a page tree, a rich editor with macros, templates for everything from meeting notes to decision records, inline and page comments, page history, and deep links into Jira issues and boards. Confluence Cloud added whiteboards, databases, and Atlassian Intelligence (AI). It excels at documentation that many people edit continuously — runbooks, design docs, onboarding, decision logs — and it is the default knowledge base for software teams.

SharePoint is the content platform of Microsoft 365: sites (team and communication), document libraries with versioning, metadata, and co-authoring in Office, modern pages and news, hub sites for navigation, Viva Connections for the employee experience layer, search across the tenant, and — through Microsoft 365 groups — the file storage behind every Team. Governance comes from permissions, sensitivity labels, retention, DLP, and eDiscovery in Purview, and identity from Entra. It is the intranet and document management system; page-based wiki editing is not its strength.

Decision criteria

| Criterion | SharePoint | Confluence | | --- | --- | --- | | Intranet, news, corporate comms | Excellent; communication sites, hubs, Viva Connections, Viva Amplify | Possible; not designed for it | | Team documentation / wiki | Adequate; pages are heavier; OneNote and Loop fill the gap | Excellent; purpose-built | | Document management | Libraries, versioning, metadata, co-authoring in Word/Excel/PowerPoint | Attachments; embeds Office files; not a DMS | | Editing experience | Web parts, sections; slower page authoring | Fast, keyboard-friendly, macros, templates | | Search | Microsoft Search across M365; Copilot grounding | Confluence search; Atlassian Intelligence | | Jira / dev tools | Jira Cloud web part and Teams apps; weaker | Native and deep | | Governance & compliance | Purview retention, DLP, eDiscovery, labels; Entra permissions | Atlassian Guard, data residency, audit; compliance via partners | | AI | Copilot grounded on SharePoint content | Atlassian Intelligence / Rovo | | Price | Included in all M365 plans | Per user; Guard extra |

Cost model

SharePoint is included in every Microsoft 365 plan (Business Basic upward and all Enterprise and Frontline plans) with pooled tenant storage; SharePoint Advanced Management is an add-on or included with Copilot. Confluence Cloud is per user per month with Free (limited), Standard, Premium, and Enterprise tiers, plus Atlassian Guard for SSO enforcement, SCIM, and audit at enterprise scale. For a company already on Microsoft 365, Confluence is a second subscription — small per user, meaningful across an organisation, and best scoped to the teams that genuinely live in it.

Choose SharePoint if

• The requirement is an intranet: news, policy publishing, hub navigation, an employee front door with Viva Connections.
• Documents are the unit of work — contracts, policies, controlled documents — and versioning, metadata, co-authoring, and retention matter.
• Compliance: content must sit under Purview retention, DLP, eDiscovery, and sensitivity labels.
• Copilot: SharePoint content is what Copilot grounds on; Confluence content is not unless connected via a Graph connector.

Choose Confluence if

• Engineering and product teams already run on Jira and need documentation that links to it.
• The content is living documentation — runbooks, architecture decision records, onboarding guides — edited by many people daily.
• The wiki editing experience is a productivity issue that OneNote, Loop, or SharePoint pages have failed to solve.
• The organisation is not Microsoft 365-centric, or Atlassian is already the platform.

Run both if

Confluence for engineering knowledge, SharePoint for the intranet and everything document-shaped, with Entra SSO and SCIM into Atlassian, a Microsoft Graph connector so Confluence shows up in Microsoft Search and Copilot, and a clear rule about what lives where. This is the most common configuration in Microsoft 365 companies with a large engineering function, and it works as long as the boundary is explicit. The search administration guide covers the connector side.

What people get wrong

Building the corporate intranet in Confluence because the engineers liked it — it becomes a wiki nobody outside engineering can navigate. Using SharePoint pages as a wiki and blaming SharePoint when authoring is slow. Leaving Confluence outside the compliance perimeter and discovering it during litigation. And migrating Confluence to SharePoint page-for-page: the content models differ, and the guide to document libraries versus pages is the place to plan what becomes a document, a page, or a Loop workspace.