Companies that use Confluence (as a knowledge base)

We dug into our own data to find which companies are using Confluence. We also asked a few engineers from these companies to share us any interesting use cases they're using Confluence for.

Harvard University

Higher Education · Cambridge, Massachusetts · Confluence

Harvard is probably the most famous university in the world. It's been around since 1636, has about 27,000 employees, and teaches everyone from undergrads to retirees across 12 graduate schools. Behind the classrooms and the research labs is a pretty massive technology operation that keeps the whole thing running.

Most of that technology work happens inside a group called Harvard University Information Technology, or HUIT. They're the team that builds and supports the software everyone at Harvard uses, from the systems that manage student admissions to the tools researchers use to apply for grants.

Confluence is one of the main places all of that work gets documented. When business analysts sit down with professors and administrators to figure out what a new system needs to do, those notes go into Confluence. When the team working on the Grants Management system rolls out a new feature, the training materials and end-user guides live in Confluence. When developers build a new custom application for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the technical specs and project updates get written up there too.

The usage goes beyond just the IT teams. The Division of Continuing Education, which runs the online programs serving 30,000 students around the world, uses Confluence to keep track of admissions processes, student support procedures, and how different teams across the division operate. Their admissions office uses it as a shared knowledge base so staff members across different teams can find the latest procedures without having to ask someone.

Even the instructional technology folks who support Harvard's online courses use Confluence. When they figure out a new trick for using Canvas or a better way to handle course accessibility, they write it up there so the rest of the team can find it later.

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CME Group

Financial Services · Chicago, Illinois · Confluence

CME Group is the biggest financial exchange in the world, but most people outside of finance have never heard of it. If you've ever watched the news and heard someone say oil prices jumped or wheat futures fell, the place where those prices are actually being set is probably CME. They run the markets where banks, airlines, farmers, and big investors go to lock in prices on everything from corn and crude oil to interest rates and stock indexes.

All of that trading happens on their electronic platform called Globex, which processes billions of dollars in trades every day. Running a platform like that takes a huge technology team working out of offices in Chicago, New York, Belfast, Bangalore, and a few other cities around the world.

Confluence is where a lot of that team's knowledge actually lives. When their network operations engineers in Bangalore need to troubleshoot a tricky issue, the runbooks and network diagrams they rely on are all in Confluence. When an engineer writes up a root cause analysis after something went wrong, that document ends up there too so the next person who hits a similar issue doesn't have to start from scratch.

The usage spreads across a lot of different teams. Their software engineers building features for the trading platform use Confluence to document release notes and technical designs. Their security teams use it to keep track of policies, vulnerability reports, and audit evidence. Their scrum masters and program managers use it to write up retrospectives, roadmaps, and status updates so everyone across the company knows what's happening.

One of the more interesting uses is on the regulatory side. CME is a heavily regulated company, and the change management team has to prove to auditors that every single change to their systems followed the right process. They use Confluence to keep all of that documentation accurate and audit-ready, which matters a lot when regulators come knocking.

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Appfire

Software Development · Remote-first (Burlington, Massachusetts HQ) · Confluence

Appfire is one of those companies most people outside of the tech world have never heard of, but anyone who uses Jira or Confluence at work has probably used an Appfire app without realizing it. They build software that extends and enhances the big collaboration platforms companies already use, including Atlassian, Microsoft, monday.com, and Salesforce. Their apps do things like time tracking, workflow automation, project portfolio management, and document management.

Since their whole business revolves around helping other companies get more out of their Atlassian tools, it makes sense that they use Confluence heavily themselves. Their engineering managers use it to collaborate with Product Management and Design teams, document technical decisions, and keep track of roadmaps across multiple product streams. Their solutions architects write up technical documentation, training materials, and support resources for customers there too.

That usage spreads across the rest of the company as well. Their product support engineers rely on Confluence to document troubleshooting steps and share knowledge across a globally distributed team. Their marketing data analysts use it alongside Slack, Jira, and Asana to keep dashboards, attribution models, and campaign measurement frameworks in sync across teams.

One of the more interesting internal uses is on the IT operations side. Appfire's own IT team runs a centralized service management system built on Jira Service Management and Confluence for their employees. The Confluence part is where all the procedures, policies, and internal knowledge live, and it's constantly being updated as the company grows.

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SmartBear

Software Development · Somerville, Massachusetts · Confluence

SmartBear is another company most people have never heard of, but their software touches almost every big tech product you use. They make tools that help developers and QA teams test software before it ships, and their customer list includes Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. Their products have names like TestComplete, Swagger, Cucumber, ReadyAPI, and Zephyr.

Zephyr is the one that connects most directly to Confluence. It's a test management tool that plugs into Jira and Confluence, and it's one of the top-selling apps in the Atlassian Marketplace with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. Companies use Zephyr inside Jira to plan and track their software testing, and the documentation for all of that testing work often ends up in Confluence.

That ecosystem means SmartBear's own engineering teams live in Confluence too. Their backend engineers in Wrocław, Bengaluru, and other offices document their design decisions, code review processes, and release practices there. Their QA engineers use Confluence alongside Jira and Zephyr Scale to write up test plans, track test documentation, and maintain records of what's been tested for each release.

The usage spreads well beyond engineering. Over on the product side, product owners work in Confluence with technical writers to document new features, APIs, and release notes that eventually reach external users. That same content is then picked up by the partner enablement team, who turn it into training materials, playbooks, and onboarding guides for the solution partners and resellers selling SmartBear products around the world. Customer success managers round things out by using Confluence to build migration playbooks for enterprise accounts moving between different versions of Zephyr.

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ShipHawk

Information Technology & Services · Santa Barbara, California · Confluence

ShipHawk makes software that helps warehouses run more efficiently. If you've ever ordered something online from a medium-sized retailer or wholesaler, there's a decent chance ShipHawk's technology was behind the scenes helping the warehouse pick, pack, and ship your order. They specifically work with companies that have outgrown basic shipping software but connect to bigger business systems like ERPs.

As a smaller company based out of downtown Santa Barbara, ShipHawk relies on Confluence as a central place to keep everyone on the same page. Their technical writing team uses it alongside tools like Google Docs, LucidChart, and Figma to document how the product works. Technical writers partner with product owners and UX designers to produce help articles, user guides, and blog posts that explain the software to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Confluence also plays a role outside the product side of the business. Their revenue operations team keeps its own dedicated Confluence space where they document process changes, map out how data flows between Salesforce and their business intelligence systems, and record the cleanup work they do to keep CRM data accurate. When a process gets updated or a new workflow gets introduced, it gets written up in Confluence so the rest of the team has a reference to work from.

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Barclays

Financial Services · London, United Kingdom · Confluence

Barclays is one of the oldest and largest banks in the world. Founded in London over 300 years ago, today it's a global bank with operations across investment banking, consumer banking, credit cards, and wealth management, serving millions of customers and businesses around the world.

A bank of Barclays' size runs on coordination. Engineers need to track work, document systems, and hand off projects across teams spread across multiple countries. Jira and Confluence are the tools that hold all of that together, and Barclays takes them seriously enough to have dedicated engineers whose entire job is keeping those platforms running smoothly for the rest of the company.

Those platform engineers handle the kind of deep Atlassian administration you'd expect at a company this size, including configuring Jira and Confluence to meet different team needs, writing JQL queries to pull meaningful insights out of the data, and handling everything from high-level customer questions down to hands-on incident response when something breaks. They also write Groovy scripts to extend what the platforms can do, all running on AWS infrastructure managed through tools like Chef and GitOps.

Beyond the platform team, Jira and Confluence show up all over the bank. Quality engineering teams use them to track testing and build custom reports with Python and Groovy. Business analysts use them to document requirements for payments and cash management systems. Release train engineers use them to coordinate large-scale agile releases across dozens of teams. Software engineers working on trading platforms, pricing systems, and core banking applications all rely on Jira to track their work and Confluence to document the systems they build.

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Airbus

Aviation & Aerospace · Leiden, Netherlands · Confluence

Airbus is one of the largest aerospace companies in the world. It builds the commercial jets that fly you across continents, military aircraft like the Eurofighter and A400M, satellites that orbit the Earth, and even unmanned aerial systems used by military and civilian operators. The company has nearly 90,000 employees spread across France, Germany, Spain, the UK, the US, and many other countries.

Across this huge company, Jira and Confluence show up everywhere engineers are building something complex. Commercial aircraft teams in Toulouse use them to design cockpit systems and flight warning systems for Airbus jets. Defence and space teams use them to develop satellites, mission systems, Eurofighter simulators, and encryption systems for military satellite communications. Data engineers working on Airbus's internal data platform, called Skywise, rely on Jira and Confluence to coordinate development work across teams in India, Europe, and beyond.

Because Airbus is so big, they've also invested in specialists who manage the Atlassian toolset itself. These engineers configure Jira and Confluence to work for thousands of users, pull data out using JQL queries, and build custom dashboards using tools like eazyBI and BigPicture. They write in MDX and Confluence macros to turn raw project data into reports that chief engineers and program managers can actually use to make decisions.

Jira and Confluence also tie into the rest of Airbus's engineering toolchain. Requirements live in a tool called DOORS. Code lives in Git and Bitbucket. Test cases live in an add-on called XRAY. Confluence sits in the middle as the place where all of that work gets documented, explained, and handed off between teams.

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BAE Systems

Defense & Space Manufacturing · London, United Kingdom · Confluence

BAE Systems is one of the biggest defense contractors in the world. Headquartered in London, it builds fighter jets, submarines, armored vehicles, missile systems, and cybersecurity technology for militaries across the US, UK, and allied countries. The company has over 100,000 employees worldwide.

Jira and Confluence show up on nearly every major program at BAE. Take the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Program, the massive effort to replace the aging Minuteman III missiles. It's one of the most complex weapons programs in US defense history, and coordination across thousands of engineers happens through Jira and Confluence. The same is true for electronic warfare programs like Compass Call and P-8A Poseidon Self-Protection, where the software that jams enemy radars and protects aircraft from incoming missiles gets built, reviewed, and documented inside these tools. Even the mission-critical code running on the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets passes through Jira tickets and Confluence pages on its way to production.

The tools reach well beyond engineering too. Over on the Navy submarine weapons side of the business, tech writers maintain training materials and process documents in Confluence. Elsewhere, cybersecurity work tracks through Jira, and the program managers running multi-billion-dollar acquisitions coordinate schedules and report progress to government customers through both tools.

What makes BAE's setup different from most companies is how locked down it has to be. The software is hardened according to Department of Defense security guides and scanned regularly for vulnerabilities. In some cases, Jira and Confluence even run on classified government networks that most engineers never get to see.

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thyssenkrupp

Industrial Machinery Manufacturing · Essen, Germany · Confluence

thyssenkrupp is a massive German industrial group that's been around for over 185 years. They make car parts, steel, submarines, and industrial machinery, and they also run one of the biggest metals distribution businesses in the world, supplying materials to factories and construction sites across more than 40 countries. The company has around 93,000 employees spread across its five business segments.

Inside thyssenkrupp, Jira and Confluence are run by a dedicated team of IT specialists who keep the platforms running smoothly for everyone else. Their job is to build custom workflows that match how different teams work, tune the systems for performance, and handle the technical side of keeping everything stable. They also automate routine processes using JQL and SQL queries, so teams spend less time on manual work.

The biggest user of these tools is the Marine Systems division, known as TKMS, which builds about 70 percent of NATO's submarine fleet. Engineers there use Jira to plan and manage work packages for huge shipbuilding projects, cross-checking data against SAP and Microsoft Project to keep everything consistent. Confluence sits alongside Jira as the place where technical specifications, ship design documents, requirements, and project dashboards all live.

The reach goes well beyond submarines. Over in Materials Services, the business that moves steel, aluminum, and other metals around the world, business analysts use Jira and Confluence to track requirements for the eCommerce platform that serves 250,000 customers. Meanwhile, a dedicated platform engineering team in Poland manages the underlying infrastructure, including the Atlassian tools along with related systems like Bitbucket, Artifactory, Harbor, and Jenkins, all tied together through a modern DevSecOps pipeline.

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CACI International

IT Services & Consulting · Reston, Virginia · Confluence

CACI is a US defense contractor that builds software and IT systems for government agencies across the national security space. With around 27,000 employees, they support agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps. Their work ranges from building intelligence software to running help desks for military healthcare systems.

Across almost every program CACI runs, Jira and Confluence sit at the center of how the work gets done. On one program called Makalu, software engineers build cloud-native applications that give intelligence analysts real-time situational awareness, and they use Jira and Confluence alongside Git and Amazon Web Services to track code changes and document the system. On a separate program supporting signals intelligence missions, system engineers use the Atlassian suite to plan agile sprints, break down epics into tickets for developers, and coordinate with the government customers who actually use the software.

Jira also gets extended in creative ways at CACI. One team supporting military healthcare even develops custom Jira plugins to add new functionality to the system, while another builds reporting dashboards in Jira to track user onboarding and trouble tickets for a deployment management platform used by the armed forces.

Because CACI works so heavily with classified government systems, many of these Atlassian instances run on networks that require security clearances just to log in.

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