Atlassian System of Work: why Confluence is becoming the center of teamwork

​Atlassian System of Work: Jira is no longer ‘just for developers’

For almost 2 decades, the general public associated Atlassian software only with Jira. ‘It’s something that software developers use at work.’ Something hard to understand, let alone use. If you weren’t writing code, you probably assumed it wasn’t for you.

Today, that mental model is out of date. Just look at how they support the Williams F1 team or how they advertise themselves on their own website. There’s no more world revolving around one product – there’s Atlassian as a whole.

​After years of developing and talking about individual products, the story naturally morphed into a cohesive System of Work – a comprehensive platform that can be tailored to every customer and connect different teams, goals, and workflows. Atlassian is no longer selling ‘project tracking for software development’, but rather a place for everyone inside the company.

This new philosophy is centered around four ideas:

• align work to goals,
• plan and track together,
• unleash collective knowledge,
• realize the full power of AI teammates.

And it’s not just a fantasy, but rather a direct response to what’s happening in the market. Atlassian has always been good at spotting the big trends and capitalizing on them.

According to Flexera’s newest IT Priorities Report 2026, 87% of IT decision-makers are moving away from point tools and consolidating into platforms to improve visibility and governance across their organizations.

​The shift from a bunch of products to a connected platform aligns with the customers’ rising expectations from their Jira, Confluence, and Marketplace apps. So we should throw away the old assumption that ‘Jira is for developers,’ as if everyone else should work elsewhere.

But this shift also gives us a new balance of power among the different tools within this larger whole.

Confluence as a core workspace for every team

Since their IPO in 2015, Atlassian has been unleashing the potential of every team. According to last year’s Q2 Shareholder Letter, Jira’s technical vs. business user diversity is roughly 52/48, Jira Service Management is 51/49, and Confluence is exactly 50/50.

It took them 10 years to finally overcome the old perception and achieve a perfect split!

A year later, an update confirms that 50% of Atlassian’s users are in finance, HR, marketing, and other non-technical teams. It’s not a prediction anymore – it is a fact, already visible in the numbers.

​Most of these users are new to the game and don’t know what was going on 5-10 years ago. They bring totally different ways of working and information needs to the software they use. Their universe consists of text, multimedia, and tabular data rather than code and workflows. They might use Jira for planning and tracking, but Confluence is where their work actually happens.

For them, moving the cards around on a Kanban board is one of the most boring and mundane things to do. For them, work is the artifacts, data, discussions, and decisions.

This mindset makes Confluence much more than a documentation dump or a knowledge base. Now, it’s a living space where these teams spend most of their working time. This means a totally different logic of how they approach using the Atlassian tools.

​Atlassian Teamwork Collection flips the table for Jira

The Atlassian State of Teams 2025 report showed that 40% of knowledge workers have their direct collaborators in a different job function. For cross-functional teams, a shared context is gold, most of which lives outside their Jira projects. Jira solves for ‘who’s doing what and when’, but what’s actually getting done (deliverables), how it’s getting done (documentation), and the outcomes live elsewhere. Other players in the market also see this and make similar moves: there are Monday Workdocs, Slack canvases, etc., etc., etc.

In Confluence Cloud, there are pages, live docs, whiteboards, and databases, coupled with a powerful search engine and the ability to embed content from many other tools and sources. All this makes it an ultimate workspace for team collaboration, live documentation & knowledge sharing – not just a static ‘wiki’ that everyone hates to log into. That’s why we see customers of all sizes repeatedly having more seats in Confluence than in Jira. Even when only a small portion of users actually create new content, the rest benefit greatly from access to it and the ability to search for or pull information with Rovo.

Rovo: the game changer

Yeah, that’s right. There’s also Rovo in the mix now.

It’s the reason why Atlassian now describes Jira as merely ‘the system of record for work’, while Confluence is ‘the workspace where human and AI teammates can collaborate together.’ Rovo enables this collaboration by pulling context from both Atlassian and connected third-party tools right into the teams’ content and workflows.

Aligning work with goals, planning and tracking together, or realizing the power of AI teammates is impossible without first unleashing collective knowledge. Both humans and AI do better when information is shared, structured, and connected. Confluence is the place designed to store and work with that information – that’s why it becomes more important than ever.

The idea of connecting different teams across the company on a single platform really resonates with us at Stiltsoft.

​Bring everyone on the same page in Confluence: the key to effective collaboration

Yet, there’s still a lot of work to do until we can fully realize the potential of a unified platform.

The average knowledge worker spends 25% of their time looking for the information they need to do their work. That’s 2 hours a day.

SaaS portfolios are getting leaner as companies consolidate, but an average team still uses 11 apps every single day. Half of the workers can’t find what they need across all of them, so they ask people on Slack or book calls – even for something simple, like a project status.

According to the State of Teams 2025, 50% of leaders say their teams unknowingly work on the same things, and only 20% feel confident they have an effective process to quickly inform other teams of decisions that may impact their work.

This doesn’t sound surprising with such a level of data fragmentation. Here’s our take on how we can fix it.

Finance, human resources, marketing, IT, project management office, and leadership – they all need to access reliable data right where they meet and work together. Bringing information from various sources into Confluence, combining it there for analysis, and presenting it in a visually appealing way helps reduce silos and makes up-to-date knowledge available to both people and AI.

In turn, this will allow teams:

• to work together without losing context,
• to share their results and lessons learned with the entire company,
• to secure sensitive data with a robust permission system, where only authorized users can see a protected space or page (or even a single table column).

Confluence can become the source of truth for insights and decisions. To unlock this, teams need to build interactive content using data from across spaces and other connected tools. This will literally keep everyone on the same (Confluence) page!

​How to use Confluence and Jira together: from planning to reporting

‘But what about Jira? There are already dashboards in there that we use a lot.’

Jira dashboards contain the data that teams report on and can share with their stakeholders. But not everyone’s a Jira user, and there are ‘haters’ among senior leaders who create a separate folder in their inbox to store Jira notifications and never open them.

Also, there’s no way to add more context, comments, or feedback to these dashboards. As a workaround, teams take screenshots or export data to Excel for presentation elsewhere. This workflow causes information to become outdated before the meeting even starts, as the link to the data source gets untied. Users have to manually update such reports, which is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.

We prefer interactive, dynamic, and customizable Confluence pages that contain Jira data instead. For example:

• Add an overview of the in-progress and completed tasks associated with each project on its corresponding Confluence page.
• Create a Gantt roadmap on a Confluence page that shows deadlines and milestones for a product release, development project, or marketing campaign.
• Categorize work items in a filter based on status, priority, assignee, labels, or a custom field.

In Confluence, teams can dig into these views, ask questions, add comments, and provide feedback. The leadership can see the data along with this additional context in one place.

​Summary: Jira and Confluence -> Atlassian System of Work

If you still picture Atlassian as ‘tools for developers,’ you’re looking at an old photograph. The numbers, the product roadmap, and the way customers actually work all point in the same direction: the System of Work now spans the entire organization, and Confluence is moving into the center of that picture.

Jira will remain the backbone for tracking work, but it’s no longer the only place that matters. Confluence is where cross-functional teams share context, surface findings, discuss trade-offs, and record decisions – and where AI teammates can work with knowledge that isn’t buried across dozens of tools.

For vendors, partners, and customers alike, this creates a huge opportunity: stop treating Confluence as a static knowledge base and start treating it as the place where work actually happens. When you bring more data and analysis capabilities to Confluence pages with an app like Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence, you’re not just making nicer reports. You’re helping teams see the same picture, in the same place, at the same time – and that’s what the System of Work is really all about.

As the Atlassian Ecosystem is extending far beyond tech teams, we already have some of those newcomers as our customers, and we’re welcoming more to join in the future.

​

FAQ

What is the Atlassian System of Work?

The System of Work is Atlassian’s name for a connected way of running an organization across its tools. Instead of treating Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo as isolated products, Atlassian positions them as parts of one operating model built around four ideas:

1. Align work to goals – connect everyday tasks and projects to clear business outcomes.
2. Plan and track work together – keep everyone on the same page about who’s doing what and when.
3. Unleash collective knowledge – capture and share the information, decisions, and lessons that usually stay in people’s heads or scattered tools.
4. Realize the full power of AI teammates – use AI agents that can actually understand your work because they’re plugged into your tools and knowledge.

In this model, Jira is the system of record for work, where issues and workflows live. Confluence is the collaborative workspace where teams write, explain, discuss, report, and structure knowledge for both humans and AI. Together, they form a unified platform for every team, not just a project tracker for developers.

What is Atlassian Teamwork Collection?

The Atlassian Teamwork Collection is a bundled offering that packages together the core tools needed for modern collaboration across technical and business teams. While the exact composition can vary by offer and partner, it typically includes:

• Jira for planning and tracking work,
• Confluence as the collaborative workspace,
• Loom for async video communication,
• and AI capabilities / agents (Rovo) to help teams find and act on information.

From a customer perspective, Teamwork Collection is a signal that Atlassian isn’t just selling individual products anymore. It’s selling a unified system for teamwork: one place where work is planned, documented, discussed, and reported on – with AI layered across all of it.

Atlassian’s data shows that 50% of users are in finance, HR, marketing, operations, and other business roles. Teamwork Collection is explicitly designed with those teams in mind.

Is Confluence a project management tool?

Confluence is not a project tracker, but it is the workspace where projects actually come to life.

Think of the split like this:

• Jira:
  • Tracks tasks, epics, sprints, workflows
  • Answers “who’s doing what and when?”
  • Holds structured work items and status data
• Confluence:
  • Stores project briefs, plans, specs, roadmaps, decisions, and summaries
  • Answers “why are we doing this, what’s the context, and what did we decide?”
  • Holds deliverables, documentation, reports, and the team’s knowledge

On its own, Confluence isn’t a full-blown project management system. But together with Jira, it becomes the place where:

• Project goals, timelines, and risks are explained
• Jira data is turned into readable, visual reports
• Stakeholders comment, ask questions, and align around the same source of truth

With an app like Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence, teams can add Gantt-like roadmaps, status overviews, and live dashboards directly to Confluence pages. That makes Confluence feel much more like a project management workspace, especially for non-technical teams that prefer pages and tables over Kanban boards and backlogs.

Can Jira be used for non-software projects and teams?

Yes. Jira is already heavily used by non-software teams, and Atlassian’s own numbers confirm it. According to the Q2 FY26 shareholder letter, about 50% of Atlassian users work in finance, HR, marketing, and other non-technical functions.

For non-technical teams, Jira works well when you:

• Model your work as a structured framework (requests, tasks, approvals, campaigns, etc.).
• Configure workflows that match your real process (e.g., draft → in review → approved → launched)
• Use boards, backlogs, and fields to track priorities, owners, and deadlines

Practical non-software use cases include:

• Marketing: campaign backlogs, content production, launch plans
• HR: hiring pipelines, onboarding tasks, policy rollouts
• Finance & ops: month-end close tasks, procurement, vendor requests
• PMO: cross-project tracking, risk logs, portfolio views

Where non-technical teams often struggle is reporting: default Jira dashboards can feel too “inside baseball,” especially for stakeholders who don’t live in Jira every day. This is where Confluence comes in – as the place to build understandable, visual, narrative reports using Jira data.

How do Confluence and Jira work together?

Jira and Confluence are designed to be used together – Jira as the execution engine, Confluence as the connected collaboration and reporting layer.

Linking work items and pages

• Create a Confluence page for a project brief, spec, or report.
• Insert or link relevant Jira issues, epics, or filters directly into the page.
• Readers can drill into the details from Confluence without switching tools.

Reporting in Confluence using Jira data

• • Use the Jira work items macro to pull live Jira data into Confluence.
  • Build interactive tables, charts, and overviews that update automatically as Jira changes.
  • Avoid screenshots and manual exports to Excel that quickly become stale.

Context + commentary in one place

• Jira holds the structured data (status, assignee, dates).
• Confluence holds the narrative (why we’re doing this, what changed, what we decided).
• Stakeholders comment and ask questions on the page that contains both.

Dashboards for non-technical stakeholders

• Many leaders and business teams dislike living in Jira, but they still need visibility.
• A Confluence “hub page” per initiative, team, or portfolio can show:
  • status summaries,
  • key Jira metrics and charts,
  • links to deeper reports,
  • and decision logs.

Apps like Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence enable you to turn Jira-powered tables into filterable dashboards, pivot reports, and visual charts right on the page. This way, teams don’t have to export data to Excel or Google Sheets – they can analyze and present it directly in Confluence.