Confluence: The Underestimated Terrain for Atlassian Forge
When teams talk about developing on Atlassian Forge, the conversation almost always revolves around Jira. Custom fields, issue panel extensions, automation triggers – these are the use cases that dominate developer blogs, community contributions, and Marketplace listings.
There are good reasons for this: Jira is Atlassian’s flagship product, the tool is deeply rooted in development and IT, and many use cases have a technical background.
This focus has, however, led to Confluence being underestimated as a platform for Forge extensions – in community documentation, on the Marketplace, and in many development teams. Yet the tooling here is equally mature.
That’s a missed opportunity – for customers and development teams alike. It’s worth exploring what’s possible.
There’s also a migration angle that often goes unnoticed: Confluence Data Center offered User Macros – a built-in mechanism that allowed teams to create lightweight custom macros without any Marketplace app. Confluence Cloud does not have an equivalent. For teams transitioning from DC who relied on User Macros, Forge Custom Macros are the direct replacement: same intent, proper cloud architecture, and fully within the Atlassian platform.
What Forge Technically Allows in Confluence
Forge offers several extension points specifically for Confluence that are worth knowing:
Custom Macros are the most powerful option. A Forge macro behaves like any native Confluence block: it can be inserted into a page via the macro picker, configured by the page editor, and rendered inline for all readers. Thanks to the macro’s built-in config panel, developers can also create intuitive input forms that allow users to customise the macro without any coding knowledge. The real difference lies in the logic behind it: it can be arbitrarily complex – calling external APIs, reading data from Jira, processing data, or providing a fully interactive interface using Custom UI.
Content Bylines appear directly below the page title and are excellent for surfacing compact metadata: the current status of a linked Jira project, a compliance signal, or a “Last reviewed” indicator that updates automatically.
Space & Global Pages make it possible to embed custom content. While Space Pages are ideal for team dashboards or a space-wide sidebar navigation, Global Pages enable the creation of instance-wide interfaces – perfect for administrative overviews or central reporting hubs.
Context Menu Extensions allow functionality to be integrated directly into the text selection menu. When a user selects text on a page and clicks the menu entry, the Forge app opens in an inline dialog – where the selected text can then be processed by app logic, for example to create a Jira ticket or trigger an analysis.
Automation Actions are available via the Forge automation module and allow you to define custom actions that integrate into the built-in automation rules as reusable building blocks. Note that the module provides actions rather than custom triggers, and the documented tutorials currently center on Jira – worth confirming the Confluence coverage for your specific scenario.
An often-underestimated technical advantage here is cross-product handling: since Forge manages user identity, a Confluence app can seamlessly access the Jira API (and vice versa) without needing to implement complex OAuth flows – provided the app declares the relevant scopes in its manifest and both products are present on the site. Additionally, the Forge Storage API provides a secure location for app data directly within Atlassian infrastructure.
Three Concrete Use Cases
1. A Compliance Status Macro
Many regulated industries require documentation to be reviewed before a process can continue. In practice, this often means manually checking Jira tickets and updating documentation pages accordingly – a laborious, error-prone process.
With a custom Forge macro, a live compliance view can be embedded directly into a Confluence page. The macro reads the status of linked Jira tickets via the Jira REST API, checks whether all required review steps have been completed, and displays a clear status indicator inline. Anyone opening the page sees the real state of affairs, without needing to open Jira.
2. A Live Project Dashboard & Rovo Tools
Project pages in Confluence go stale quickly. Sprint status, open blockers, current velocity – all of this changes daily, but manual page updates rarely keep pace.
A Forge macro can retrieve the current sprint status from the Jira API and render it directly on a Confluence project page: open issues by assignee, days remaining until sprint end, a summary of recently completed tickets.
In the context of Atlassian Rovo, this can be extended further: Forge apps can expose actions that a Rovo agent uses as tools. This means a Rovo agent can not only read the project data from the macro, but also proactively suggest actions – such as escalating a blocker directly from Confluence.
3. A Knowledge Quality Indicator
Confluence spaces grow over time. Pages are created and often left untouched even after the reality behind them has long since changed. The result: anyone who comes across a page frequently doesn’t know whether they can trust it.
A Forge app can address this problem at the source. Concretely: a Content Byline can be populated with automatically calculated quality signals. By accessing the Confluence History API, the app can display, for example:
- Nature of the last edit: Was only a typo corrected (small diff), or was there a significant content change?
- Linked Jira tickets with a “Needs Review” label: If the team uses these to flag when a page needs reviewing, the byline can make that directly visible.
- Page type consistency: Was the page created as a template but never developed into an actual project page?
The result isn’t an elaborate audit tool, but a quiet prompt directly on the page. In combination with Rovo, this can be taken further: a Rovo agent could identify pages with a low score and notify the author, while the Forge app handles the data display. How this interplay works is described in our article on Atlassian AI strategy.
Build or Buy?
As with any Forge project, the first question is: does an existing Marketplace app already solve the requirement well enough? Confluence has a solid ecosystem of macro apps, and many common use cases are already covered.
The decision to build a custom solution makes particular sense in the following cases:
Data protection & data residency: Since Forge apps run on Atlassian’s infrastructure (AWS-based), data stays within the Atlassian trust boundary as long as the app doesn’t call external services. For organisations with strict compliance requirements that don’t want data processing on third-party servers, Forge is often the only viable solution.
Specific logic: The use case requires access to internal systems or processes that no standard macro can accommodate.
Existing know-how: The team has already developed Forge apps for Jira. The deployment model, security architecture, and monitoring can be carried over directly. The marginal cost of a Confluence extension is extremely low once the foundation is in place.
A Pragmatic Starting Point
Anyone wanting to try Forge in Confluence is well advised to begin with a Custom Macro. Thanks to AI-assisted development (e.g. via the Forge MCP Server, usable from tools like GitHub Copilot or Claude), the barrier to a first prototype has never been lower. The AI can generate the boilerplate for the extension points, allowing the team to focus immediately on business logic.
Keep the scope small: identify one piece of information the team currently has to look up manually, and build a macro that displays it directly. This makes the potential tangible before getting lost in abstract architecture discussions.
Confluence as Underestimated Forge Terrain
Forge on Confluence is not a niche topic. It is a natural extension of work that Atlassian-focused development teams are already doing – and it lands where users already spend a significant portion of their working day.
The tooling is mature. The extension points are well documented. What has been missing, until now, is attention.
Is your team planning to extend Confluence with Forge, or would you like to explore what’s possible? Our experienced Atlassian development teams support you with architecture, development, and certification. Get in touch via email or simply schedule an initial remote meeting with us.