Team Documentation Without Confluence: Pages and Wiki in Plane

You can run team documentation without Confluence if your tasks already live in Plane: it has Pages inside projects and a Wiki at the workspace level, documents link to tasks, and no separate license is needed. Confluence Standard costs $5.42 per user per month as of October 2026, and for a team of up to 100 people that money often feels wasted on a wiki maintained by three people. But Confluence is still better where there are thousands of documents and people other than developers use them.

This article is for team leads, IT department heads and product managers deciding where to keep their team’s knowledge. Below: a comparison of approaches, what exactly to store and where, who owns the documents, how to link a document to a task, when to stay on Confluence and how to migrate without losing anything useful.

Why documentation sprawls

In a typical IT team, knowledge lives in five places: some in Confluence or Notion, some in Google Docs, some in repository READMEs, some in pinned chat messages, and most of it in people’s heads. A new hire asks colleagues, colleagues answer in direct messages, and the cycle repeats.

The cause is not the choice of tool but two things. First, the document is separated from the work. To write down a decision, you have to open another system, find the right section and remember how permissions work there. Second, the document has no owner. A page that nobody is responsible for updating goes stale within a quarter.

There is a third reason people mention less often: documentation gets written “later.” First the task, then the release, then the next task, and nobody ever comes back to describe the decision. A year later, the team remembers what it did but not why, and every change starts with digging through old chats.

Documentation built into the tracker solves the first and third problems: the document and the task are in one interface, linking them takes one click, and a page is created while people still remember the details. Only rules solve the second problem.

Confluence vs. Pages and Wiki in Plane: comparison

Criterion	Confluence Standard	Pages and Wiki in Plane
Cost	$5.42 per user per month, separate from Jira (October 2026)	Included in Plane plans; see plane.so/pricing for features by plan
Where it lives	A separate Atlassian product	Inside the tracker: Pages in a project, Wiki in the workspace
Link to tasks	Integration with Jira	A document is linked to a task, and tasks are created from the text
Search	Separate from Jira	One interface for tasks and documents
Scale	Thousands of pages, complex hierarchies	Good for teams of up to 100 people
Access rights	A mature permission model for spaces and pages	Workspace and project roles, Granular Access Control on higher plans
Ecosystem	Templates, macros, Marketplace apps	Growing; the Plane Marketplace launched in 2025
Storage in Kazakhstan	No, Atlassian has no regions in Kazakhstan	Yes, with a self-hosted installation
AI	Rovo, separate pricing	Plane AI features, including in self-hosted
Who uses it	The whole company, including non-technical departments	Primarily teams that work in the tracker

If you count only money, the difference is noticeable. For a team of 25, Confluence Standard costs about $1,626 a year, and for 50 people about $3,252, at October 2026 prices with annual billing. But money is not the main argument here. The main one is how much effort it takes for a document to get written and stay current.

What to store where: a document map

We start every documentation setup with a table in which each document type has a place and an owner. Without this table, a wiki turns into a storage room.

Document type	Where it lives	Owner	When to update
Feature spec	Project Pages, linked to a module or epic	Product manager	Before development starts and when requirements change
Meeting notes	Project Pages	Whoever ran the meeting	On the day of the meeting
Retrospectives	Project Pages	Team lead	After each cycle
Architecture decisions (ADR)	Project Pages or the repository	Architect or team lead	With every significant decision
Team policies	Workspace Wiki	Head of development	Once a quarter
Onboarding	Workspace Wiki	Team lead or HR	With each new hire, based on their feedback
On-call instructions	Workspace Wiki	Person responsible for operations	After each incident
API description, README	Repository	Code author	Together with the code
Release notes	Project Pages, linked to the release	Team lead	On release day
Passwords and keys	A secrets manager, not the wiki	Person responsible for security	On rotation

The rule for borderline cases: if a document changes with the code, it belongs in the repository. If a document is read by people without access to the code, it belongs in the wiki.

Linking documents and tasks

The most valuable part of built-in documentation is the two-way link. From a task, you can see which spec it is based on. From a spec, you can see which tasks were created from it and what status they are in.

How this is used in practice:

• Meeting notes. Decisions are recorded on a page, and each decision immediately becomes a task with an owner. A week later, the notes show what has been done.
• Feature spec. The page is linked to a module. The product manager changes a requirement and leaves a comment on the linked tasks.
• Retro. Improvements from a retro become tasks for the next cycle. Six months later, the retro pages show which problems keep recurring.
• ADR. An architecture decision links to the task in which it was implemented and to the task that prompted it.

This is also possible in Confluence with Jira, but through an integration between two products. In Plane, it is one action within one interface, and the team does it more often.

Templates to start with

A blank page is documentation’s worst enemy. If the team has a template, meeting notes take five minutes to write; without a template, they do not get written at all. Four templates are enough to cover most day-to-day work.

Feature spec. The user’s problem, the goal and how we will know we have reached it. Use cases. What is in and out of scope. Mockups or links to them. Open questions and who answers them. The linked module or epic.

Meeting notes. Date and participants. Agenda. Decisions made, each on a separate line. Tasks created as a result, with links. What we expect from participants and by when.

Retrospective. What went well. What got in the way. What we are changing in the next cycle, each item as a task with an owner. Status of improvements from the previous retro.

Architecture decision (ADR). Context: what the problem is and what the constraints are. Options considered. The decision made and the reasons. Consequences: what becomes easier, what becomes harder. Status: proposed, accepted, superseded by another decision.

Templates are worth reviewing once a quarter. If a section of a template keeps staying empty, remove it instead of forcing the team to fill it in.

Rules a wiki cannot survive without

1. Every wiki section has an owner, whose name is written at the top of the page.
2. Policy pages have a last-reviewed date.
3. Templates for specs, meeting notes, retros and ADRs are created before the team starts writing.
4. Decisions made in chats are moved to a page the same day.
5. Outdated pages are not deleted but moved to an archive with a note.
6. Once a quarter, section owners review their pages.
7. During their first week, a new hire notes what was missing from onboarding, and that becomes a task.

When Confluence remains the best choice

Dropping Confluence is not always justified. We recommend staying on it if:

• The knowledge base is used by sales, support, HR and legal, who do not work in the tracker.
• There are thousands of documents, and the permission structure mirrors the company’s org chart.
• The company uses Jira Service Management and builds a customer knowledge base on Confluence.
• Important processes depend on templates, macros and Marketplace apps.
• There is no one to run the migration and clean up the structure.

A hybrid option also works. The company-wide knowledge base stays in Confluence or another company-wide wiki, while the working documentation of development teams, meaning specs, meeting notes, retros and ADRs, moves to Plane next to the tasks. The key is to explicitly write down what lives where; otherwise, the hybrid turns into two storage rooms instead of one.

If you are choosing a whole tracker, not just a wiki, see our Plane vs. Jira comparison: it covers documentation as part of the total cost of ownership.

How to migrate from Confluence without losing what is useful

Plane’s built-in importer is designed for tasks from Jira. For Confluence pages, check which migration options your version of Plane supports; either way, we do not recommend moving everything. In our experience, most pages in a mature Confluence instance have not been opened by anyone in a long time.

Migration order:

1. Export the list of pages and mark the ones opened in the last six months.
2. Assign an owner to each live section.
3. Move live documents to Pages and Wiki according to the document map, updating them along the way.
4. Save the rest as an export to a read-only archive.
5. Set a date after which no new pages are created in Confluence.
6. A month later, check which archived documents people accessed and move them over.

Think through links separately. Over the years, tasks, commits and chats have accumulated links to Confluence pages, and after the migration they lead to the archive. For the most-used pages, leave a short note in the archive with a link to the new location, and write in the team policy that new links point only to Pages and Wiki.

It is better to migrate documentation after the team has gotten comfortable with tasks in Plane. We described the order of tracker implementation in our article on implementing a task tracker in a company.

Kazakhstan context. Team documentation often contains personal data: contacts in onboarding, customer data in specs, employee information in HR policies. Kazakhstan is not on the list of Atlassian Cloud storage regions. If it matters to the company to keep such data in the country, self-hosted Plane on a Kazakhstan hosting provider’s server solves the problem and is paid in tenge under a contract, whereas Confluence is paid by card in dollars without local closing documents. For bilingual teams, decide in advance which language policies are written in and where a Kazakh version is needed.

How we do it

During the diagnostic, we map the team’s documents: what is where now, who reads it and who updates it. Then we run a pilot with one team: we set up Pages and Wiki, templates and section owners, and after two to three weeks we check whether documents are being written and whether people can find them. After the pilot, we move the live documents of the other teams and close the old wiki to edits.

Learn more about our approach on the Jira and Plane task tracker implementation service page.

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Sources. Confluence and Jira pricing: Atlassian price list. Atlassian Cloud data storage regions: Atlassian documentation on data residency. Plane pricing: plane.so/pricing. Prices are as of October 2026 with annual billing and may change.

Terms in plain words

Confluence

Atlassian's wiki system for documentation, usually paired with Jira. It is paid for separately, per user per month.

Plane

An open-source task tracker that can be installed on your own server. It has built-in pages for documents that are linked to tasks.

Pages and Wiki in Plane

Pages are pages inside a project: specs, meeting notes, retros. The Wiki is a shared section for all teams: policies, onboarding, rules.

Onboarding

Getting a new employee up to speed: instructions, access, team rules. Good onboarding in the wiki saves colleagues from answering the same questions over and over.

Retrospective (retro)

A team meeting after a work cycle: what went well, what got in the way, what to change. Improvements from a retro should be turned into tasks right away.

ADR (Architecture Decision Record)

A short record of an architecture decision: what the problem was, which options were considered and why this one was chosen. A year later, it explains why the system is built the way it is.

README

A file describing the project right in the code repository: how to build it, run it and use it. It is updated along with the code.

Self-hosted

Installing software on your own server instead of the vendor's cloud. It lets you store documents containing personal data in Kazakhstan.