Confluence vs. SharePoint - Part 1: Overall structure
Note
When talking about Confluence pages, blog posts are also meant, because they are basically pages with another name. When looking at the cloud there is more than pages and blog posts but let’s keep things simple by looking at what is at the core of Confluence: pages.Confluence
When looking at a Confluence page the basic structure looks like this:

A Confluence page
The following parts make up a Confluence page:
- Page Content, including
- Versions
- Inline Comments
- Inline Tasks
- @-Mentions
- Macros
- Attachments, including
- Versions
- Comments
- Footer Comments
- like page content…
- Restrictions
- Metadata, including
- Title
- Creator, Author
- Creation Date, Modification Date
- Likes
- Labels
Each page lives in a Confluence space where each space can contain hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of pages.
Pages within a space usually form a hierarchy. This means there are parent pages, child pages, and leaves, like a tree:

A Confluence space contains many pages
Access to pages can be restricted at each level of the tree, which also affects all child pages. If a user is not allowed to access a parent page, they cannot access any of the child pages as well.
Confluence can have many spaces. A typical instance has dozens or a couple of hundred space, but there’s also instances with a couple of thousand spaces.
The following parts make up a Confluence space:
- Pages
- Metadata
- Title
- Description
- Archived or not
- Restrictions
Spaces have no hierarchy:

Confluence organizes content in spaces
SharePoint
While Confluence consists of spaces, SharePoint consists of sites, which serve a similar purpose.
The following parts make up a SharePoint site:
- Lists (note: those are like a table)
- List Items
- Item Data in List Columns
- List Item Permissions
- List Permissions
- List Items
- Document Libraries (note: those are like a drive or folder)
- Files
- File Metadata in List Columns
- File Permissions
- Document Library Permissions
- Files
- Site Permissions
- Apps

A SharePoint site
Some SharePoint document libraries are “special” in that they serve a specific purpose. With regard to pages, there’s the Site Pages library and the Site Assets library.
All SharePoint pages are stored in the Site Pages library. For SharePoint, pages are just files with some metadata. There is no page hierarchy and all pages are stored flat in the Site Pages library.
Page attachments are stored in the Site Assets library, in a folder that belongs to the page. Each page has its own folder.
When setting the permissions for a SharePoint page, SharePoint takes care of setting those permissions on the page’s folder as well.
How does it map?
Often Confluence spaces are compared to SharePoint sites.
I’d say this is a fair comparison, when focusing on wiki functionality.
Confluence spaces and SharePoint sites have some things in common. Both:
- have a title and description
- have owners
- can be access restricted to users and groups
- contain wiki pages and files
- have their content indexed by search
- have no strict technical hierarchy (bear with me on this one)
- have their permissions inherited by pages, but pages can also have their own
Confluence pages and SharePoint pages also have some things in common. Both:
- support the basic text formatting capabilities, like bold, headings, tables, images, etc.
- can be created from templates
- can have sections to structure page content
- can contain “blocks of functionality” - macros in Confluence, web parts in SharePoint
Here are the areas where Confluence and SharePoint differ:
Confluence | SharePoint Online |
---|---|
pages form a hierarchy (with parent and child pages) | pages are flat, without a hierarchy |
page breadcrumb navigation above pages | no page breadcrumb navigation |
pages have attachments | pages have associated files in a special folder (we can make it look like attachments using a web part) |
attachments (files) are bound to pages | files are stored in document libraries and linked to by pages |
pages seem a bit better suited for documenting knowledge | pages seem a bit too much focused on presenting content nicely |
macros can be nested | web parts cannot be nested |
page restrictions have a hierarchy | item level permissions for pages have no hierarchy |
rich app marketplace | marketplaces are not Microsoft’s strength |
pages support @-mentioning other users | no @-mention support on pages |
comments under pages with rich formatting, deeply nested | plain text comments under pages, 2 levels |
inline comments on pages | no inline comments |
inline tasks on pages | no inline tasks |
integration with Jira | no integration with Jira |
pages can easily be moved to other Confluence spaces (due to their self-contained nature) | pages cannot easily be moved to other SharePoint sites (at least not without breaking links or attached metadata) |
Confluence Cloud introduces some new restrictions compared to Confluence Server and Data Center, for example with regard to formatting content and nesting macros.