35 posts tagged with "diagrams"

Somewhere in your Confluence right now there are pages that depend on a third-party app to render. A diagram here, a markdown block there, a whiteboard embed somewhere else. The pages are fine. The app is fine. Everything is fine — until it isn't: the vendor retires the app, gets acquired, or your team outgrows it. And then a question almost nobody has asked out loud suddenly matters: what is actually stored on those pages, and what survives?

We just went through this cycle for Mermaid diagram apps — one major vendor just announced the end of life of its Connect-based app in January 2027 — and the experience taught us a lot about the real cost of macro migration. Not the license cost. The content cost. This post is that breakdown; the Mermaid story is the case study at the end.

The anatomy: what a macro actually leaves behind​

Confluence macros are stored inside the page itself. The app renders them live; Confluence only stores a small block describing the macro and its content. When the rendering app disappears, the page keeps the block but nothing draws it anymore. The text, the diagram definition, the table — whatever the app put in storage — is still there.

So content usually survives the app. What dies is the render. And that is the trap: "my pages still exist" feels safe until you open one and the diagram simply is not there anymore.

Whether the surviving data is usable depends entirely on the vendor:

• Some apps keep the human-readable source (Mermaid syntax, markdown) directly in storage
• Some wrap it in JSON with revision history
• Some store only a rendered image and keep the source in a proprietary attachment format
• Some do all three, depending on the app version that last touched the macro

Every one of those is a different migration project.

Why the cost is always higher than it looks​

Cost 1: the formats. Each vendor's storage format is undocumented and versioned. Reading "what's on the page" is not a query — it is a small reverse-engineering project per app, sometimes per app version. This is the single biggest line item in any macro migration.

Cost 2: the scale is invisible until you measure it. Teams consistently underestimate how many pages depend on an app, because diagrams are scattered — one here in an architecture doc, three there in a runbook. Nobody costs a migration they have not inventoried.

Cost 3: the app ecosystem keeps generating this problem. This is not a rare event. Atlassian ended its own Server product line in 2024, forcing one of the largest app-and-content migrations in the platform's history. Vendors retire or pivot — the Connect-based Mermaid app by Stratus reaches end of life in January 2027, the very case that prompted this post. Free first-party alternatives keep appearing in the same categories. And independent of any retirement, teams switch vendors — which is the same migration with a different trigger. If your team uses Confluence deeply today, the odds that it will face at least one macro migration in the next few years are close to certain.

Cost 4: the manual fallback is real but doesn't scale. Opening every page and recreating content by hand genuinely works — for ten pages. At a hundred, triage paralysis sets in: nobody costs it, nobody schedules it, and the migration quietly becomes "we'll deal with it when it breaks."

Case study: what migrating Mermaid diagrams took​

When the retirement news landed, we built migration support into our Mermaid app — and the economics matched the framework above almost exactly.

Inventory first. A scan reads page storage and counts macros per page. Teams that ran it found diagrams in spaces nobody expected — the invisible-scale problem, confirmed every time.

Four vendors, four formats. We ended up supporting four distinct storage layouts: source in a macro parameter, source in a JSON blob in the macro body, source in a companion code block, and a renderer macro that references all of the above. Four parsers, each a small reverse-engineering project against undocumented formats.

Conversion is text processing; judgment is not. Replacing an old macro with a new rendered diagram at the same position in the page is mechanical. The hard parts were elsewhere: pages that mix several vendors' macros (convert only what you scanned for?), diagrams whose source cannot be extracted (report them honestly, per page, or they vanish without a trace), and the rollback story (in-place conversion plus page history beats any backup script).

The result: a space sweep per source app, a review table before anything is written, and every conversion landing as a normal page version. That combination turned an unbounded, scary project into a bounded checklist.

The general checklist​

Whatever the macro type — diagrams, markdown, tables, whiteboards — the same checklist applies:

1. Inventory by scanning page storage, not by asking around
2. Map the formats: where each vendor keeps the source, and whether it is human-readable
3. Migrate one vendor at a time, with per-page results before anything is written
4. Convert in place and let page history be the rollback mechanism
5. Report failures per page — silent skips are how content quietly dies anyway

The teams that skip steps 1 and 2 are the teams whose migration "unexpectedly" takes a quarter.

If the macros you're leaving behind are Mermaid diagrams, you can start today: Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence includes the migration wizard described above — it recognizes macros from Mermaid Chart, Stratus, the Atlassian Labs viewer, weweave and Tech Labs, and converts them in place. The migration guide walks through every step.

If you're switching away from a different macro type — draw.io, Excalidraw, markdown, tables — the checklist above still applies, and the same pipeline (inventory → parse → convert in place) is how we're expanding coverage: Excalidraw is next on the roadmap. Tell us which app you're switching from — the more we know about the formats teams are actually leaving, the faster that list grows.

And if you're mid-decision right now, bring it to the Community discussion — the "we'll migrate as we go" plan needs all the reality checks it can get.

Mermaid 12.2.0 shipped upstream on October 13, and it is live in all three NGPILOT diagram apps: Enhanced Markdown for Confluence, Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, and Mermaid Plus Diagrams for Jira. It's a small release with one feature you can see from across the room — mind maps that color themselves by hierarchy depth — and a set of quiet fixes that matter more on Confluence than anywhere else, because Confluence pages are where multiple diagrams share one page.

Every team that migrated to Confluence Cloud with a wiki full of PlantUML diagrams hits the same wall: the macro they used on Data Center does not exist in Cloud, and there is no native PlantUML support to fall back on. The source text is usually still there, sitting in page storage — it just has nothing to render it.

Quick answer: there are three working methods in Confluence Cloud. Convert PlantUML into an editable Excalidraw whiteboard with an AI agent (best for diagrams you still maintain), render externally and embed an image (fine for frozen history), or write new diagrams in Mermaid (best for everything you have not created yet). This post shows all three.

Confluence holds your team's diagrams in two worlds, and the two don't talk to each other.

Text-defined diagrams — Mermaid and friends — are what AI speaks natively. They're source code, so a chat agent can read them, write them, and revise them. We shipped exactly that last week: an AI agent for Mermaid in Confluence.

Whiteboards are the other world. Freeform shapes, hand-drawn lines, arrows you drag where they need to go — the format that's actually intuitive to put in front of people. Every team has one: the architecture board on the team page, the incident flow everyone references, the onboarding map. And AI couldn't touch any of it. Ask a chat agent for a change to a whiteboard and you'd get a text description of a change, and someone still had to open the canvas and do it by hand.

That gap is why whiteboards go stale. Editing shapes one drag at a time is slow enough that nobody does it, and AI — the thing that was supposed to make maintenance cheap — had no way in.

The AI agent in Excalidraw Plus Whiteboards & AI Agent for Confluence closes the gap: the whiteboard stays what it always was — visual, intuitive, for people — but now you can operate it in plain language, from Confluence chat.

Confluence chat can write your page, summarize the thread, and answer questions about the space. What it couldn't do — until now — is draw. If you asked for "a flowchart of our deployment process," you got a text description of a flowchart, and someone still had to open an editor and build it.

The AI agent in Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence closes that gap: it creates, reads, updates, and converts Mermaid diagrams directly on Confluence pages and blog posts, from chat.

Every Confluence team ends up choosing a diagram tool, and most start by asking the wrong question: does it support Mermaid? These days, two answers exist. Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence is built around Mermaid — all 30 Mermaid v12 diagram types, a code editor with live preview, one-click templates for every type, and a Rovo AI agent that works on the page. draw.io is the most-installed diagramming app on the Atlassian Marketplace, with deep shape libraries, whiteboarding, and a Mermaid importer added to its editor.

Both are good tools. This guide compares how they behave in Confluence specifically — how a diagram is created, what is stored on the page, what happens when you need to change it six months later, and what it costs.

Mermaid 12 is the biggest release the diagram language has had in years — and as of today it is live in all three NGPILOT diagram apps: Enhanced Markdown for Confluence, Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, and Mermaid Plus Diagrams for Jira. You get the headline feature immediately: UML use case diagrams, the diagram type Confluence and Jira teams have been asking for since requirements documents moved out of dedicated UML tools.

Meeting notes, project briefs, planning docs — most Confluence pages already start life as a Markdown-ish outline: a title, some headings, bullets underneath. A mind map is just that outline seen from above. This guide shows how to get from the outline you already have to an interactive mind map on the page, without drawing anything and without learning diagram syntax.

Jira is where the work happens — but the process behind the work usually lives in someone's head or in a stale Confluence page nobody opens. A flowchart on the Jira issue itself fixes that: bug triage paths, approval chains, and escalation procedures become visual, unambiguous, and impossible to miss.

Jira Cloud gives you two ways to get there, and they serve different needs. This guide walks through both, then gives you three copy-paste Mermaid flowchart examples for the scenarios Jira teams hit most: bug triage, approval workflows, and incident escalation.

Text-based diagramming — writing a few lines of code that render into a diagram — is how modern teams keep diagrams in sync with their documentation. No more drawing boxes by hand in Visio, exporting screenshots, and pasting them into Confluence where they go stale. With text-based diagrams, you edit the source and the diagram redraws instantly.

But there are three major text-based diagramming languages, and they are not interchangeable. Each has different strengths, different syntax, and different ideal use cases. This guide compares Mermaid, PlantUML, and Graphviz so you can choose the right one (or combination) for your Confluence team.

Every team that adopts Jira diagrams hits the same moment: you discover Mermaid supports 30 diagram types, you get excited, and then you realize you have no idea which ones to actually use during a sprint. Most of them never get drawn. The diagrams that earn their keep are the ones that make a standup faster, an onboarding doc clearer, or a ticket unambiguous — and those are a small, repeatable subset.

This post is the workflow guide we wish we'd had: the four diagram types a sprint team actually uses, each with a real scenario and copy-paste syntax you can drop straight into a Jira issue. The full 30-type reference follows, so the same page works as both a sprint playbook and a complete catalog.

Every architecture review ends the same way: the team sketches a system on a whiteboard, someone takes a blurry phone photo, and the diagram is never seen again. The next sprint a new engineer joins, asks how the system fits together, and the whiteboard gets redrawn from memory — different every time.

The fix is to capture the architecture sketch on the ticket it describes, editable by anyone on the team, versioned with the issue. That's what Excalidraw Diagrams plus Whiteboards for Jira does: it adds a full drawing canvas to every Jira issue, with 229 bundled shape libraries and freehand drawing. The same experience is available in Confluence via Excalidraw plus Whiteboards for Confluence. This guide walks through running an architecture session that produces a saved, shareable diagram.

Developer teams use Confluence differently than marketing or HR. You document APIs, share architecture diagrams, write runbooks, and collaborate on code reviews. The default Confluence editor works, but it wasn't built for technical documentation.

This guide covers the best Confluence apps for developers in 2026, organized by use case. We built several of these apps at NGPILOT, so we'll be transparent about where our apps fit and where competitors offer better solutions.

Need diagram tools for Confluence without paying for a large team? NGPILOT's three diagramming apps — Mermaid Plus, Excalidraw Plus, and Graphviz Charts — are all free for up to 10 users. This guide compares them so you can pick the right free diagram plugin for your Confluence.

Adding diagrams to Confluence pages helps teams communicate architecture, processes, and workflows visually. This guide covers the three main approaches to creating diagrams in Confluence and helps you choose the right tool for your needs.

No, Confluence does not support Mermaid diagrams natively. There is no built-in macro or feature that renders Mermaid syntax in Confluence pages. To add Mermaid diagrams to Confluence, you need a Marketplace app.

This guide covers how to set up Mermaid in Confluence and which diagram types you can create.

Sequence diagrams are one of the most widely used diagram types in software documentation. They show exactly how participants -- users, services, databases, external APIs -- exchange messages over time. For Confluence teams, embedding sequence diagrams directly on wiki pages means architecture docs, API specifications, and incident post-mortems stay in one place instead of scattered across external tools.

Mermaid's text-based syntax makes sequence diagrams fast to write and easy to update, but the syntax has its own set of rules that can trip you up. This FAQ answers the questions Confluence users ask most often about building sequence diagrams with Mermaid, with expanded explanations, working code examples, and copy-paste templates you can drop straight into a Mermaid Plus macro.

When teams need to add diagrams to Confluence, two tools come up again and again: Excalidraw and draw.io (also known as diagrams.net). Both are popular Confluence diagram apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, but they take fundamentally different approaches to visual communication — and picking the wrong one wastes time and licensing budget.

The short version: for live whiteboarding, brainstorming, and freeform sketching, Excalidraw wins. For formal, finalized diagrams (UML, network topology, BPMN), draw.io is the better fit. Most teams end up needing both — and the rest of this post is the honest, feature-by-feature comparison so you can make the right call for your workflow.

Graphviz has been the backbone of automated graph visualization for over three decades. Originally developed at AT&T Labs, it powers dependency graphs in build systems, call graphs in profilers, and database schemas in ORMs -- anywhere that diagrams need to be generated from structured data rather than drawn by hand. Graphviz Charts for Confluence brings that same engine directly into your Confluence pages, letting you write DOT language descriptions and get polished, auto-laid-out diagrams without leaving your wiki.

Mermaid is the most popular text-based diagramming language for technical documentation. One line of code generates a flowchart. A few more produce a sequence diagram, ER diagram, or Gantt chart. Teams using Confluence can embed Mermaid diagrams directly on their pages, keeping diagrams alongside the documentation they illustrate.

Architecture diagrams are the backbone of technical documentation. They show how services communicate, where data flows, and which infrastructure components underpin your system. When a new engineer joins your team, the first thing they look for is an architecture diagram. When something breaks in production, the incident response starts at the same diagram.

Yet many teams store their architecture diagrams in external tools -- draw.io, Lucidchart, or even desktop applications -- detached from the documentation where they matter most. Confluence is where your runbooks live, where architecture decision records are written, and where post-mortem discussions happen. Keeping your architecture diagrams inside Confluence eliminates context-switching and ensures diagrams evolve alongside the written documentation they illustrate.

This guide walks through three ways to create architecture diagrams directly in Confluence, using NGPILOT apps designed for different workflows. Every Mermaid example is copy-paste ready, so you can insert it into a Confluence page and see the result immediately.

Class diagrams are the standard way to model object-oriented systems. They show the classes in your codebase, their attributes and methods, and the relationships between them -- inheritance hierarchies, composition, aggregation, and simple associations. Whether you are documenting a domain model, onboarding new engineers onto a codebase, or collaborating on a design before writing a single line of code, a UML class diagram communicates structure faster than paragraphs of prose.

If your team uses Confluence for technical documentation, embedding class diagrams directly on your pages keeps your design docs next to your architecture decisions, runbooks, and sprint planning notes. With Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, you can write class diagrams in plain text and render them instantly, no external drawing tool required.

An ER diagram (entity-relationship diagram) visualizes a database schema — the tables, columns, primary and foreign keys, and the relationships between them. If your team documents data models, API contracts, or system architecture in Confluence, embedding ER diagrams directly on the page keeps the schema next to the prose instead of stranded in an external tool as a stale screenshot.

Confluence has no built-in ER diagram support, so you add it with a Marketplace app. The approach below uses Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, which renders ER diagrams from plain text — meaning diagrams version, diff, and search alongside the rest of your documentation.

Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams are the standard way to visualize database schemas. They show the tables in your database, the columns in each table, primary and foreign key constraints, and the relationships between tables -- one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. Whether you are designing a new database from scratch, documenting an existing schema for onboarding, or collaborating on a data model before writing migration scripts, an ER diagram communicates structure faster than any amount of prose.

Gantt charts are one of the most widely used visual tools in project management. They give teams a clear, time-based view of who is doing what, when tasks start and end, and how dependencies chain together across a project lifecycle. Whether you are planning a software release, coordinating a marketing campaign, or managing a sprint backlog, a Gantt chart turns a flat task list into a timeline your whole team can read at a glance.

Confluence is where many teams already store their project documentation, meeting notes, and decision records. Embedding Gantt charts directly on Confluence pages keeps your project visuals alongside the context your team needs, instead of burying timelines in a separate project management tool that nobody checks. With Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, you can write Gantt charts using plain text syntax and see them rendered instantly on the page.

Jira issues are where your team tracks bugs, features, and tasks every day. But describing complex processes, API interactions, or system designs in plain text often leads to confusion and misalignment. Mermaid Plus Diagrams for Jira solves this by letting you create and embed Mermaid diagrams directly on any Jira issue, so the visual context lives exactly where the work happens. No external tools, no attached images that go stale, no switching between tabs.

Mind maps are one of the most effective ways to capture ideas, organize thoughts, and brainstorm with a team. Unlike linear notes or bullet lists, mind maps radiate outward from a central topic, making it easy to see relationships between concepts at a glance. If your team already uses Confluence for documentation, meeting notes, and project planning, adding mind maps directly to your Confluence pages keeps brainstorming sessions alongside the rest of your team's knowledge.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create mind maps in Confluence using Mermaid syntax and the Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence app. Every example is copy-paste ready, so you can drop it straight into a Confluence page and start organizing your ideas immediately.

Sequence diagrams are one of the most practical tools in a software team's documentation toolkit. They show how objects, services, or actors interact over time, making them ideal for documenting API flows, authentication processes, microservice choreography, and error-handling logic. If your team uses Confluence for documentation, embedding sequence diagrams directly on your pages keeps architecture docs alongside everything else your team needs.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create sequence diagrams in Confluence using Mermaid syntax. Every example is copy-paste ready, so you can drop it straight into a Confluence page and see the result immediately. The examples use Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, which renders the full Mermaid v12 syntax natively in Confluence Cloud — free to try from the Marketplace.

State diagrams (also called state machine diagrams) model how a system transitions between discrete states in response to events. They are essential for documenting order lifecycles, user authentication flows, CI/CD pipelines, IoT device behavior, and any system where the current state determines what happens next. If your team uses Confluence for technical documentation, embedding state diagrams directly on your pages keeps your design decisions alongside runbooks, architecture decision records, and sprint planning notes.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create state diagrams in Confluence using the Mermaid stateDiagram-v2 syntax. Every example is copy-paste ready, so you can drop it straight into a Confluence page and see the rendered result immediately.

Looking for the best diagram tool for Confluence? Confluence has no built-in diagramming, so every team adds a Marketplace app — but the right choice depends entirely on what you draw and how you prefer to work. This guide compares the three strongest options — Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, Excalidraw Plus Whiteboards & AI Agent for Confluence, and Graphviz Charts for Confluence — so you can pick the diagram tool that fits your team instead of guessing.

Mermaid diagrams in Confluence let you create flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and more using simple text syntax. This guide covers Confluence Mermaid setup with Mermaid Plus — live preview, 30 diagram types, and copy-paste examples.

Engineering teams need diagrams in Confluence — flowcharts for runbooks, sequence diagrams for API docs, ER models for database schemas, architecture diagrams for design decisions. Writing diagrams as code (text-based syntax) is faster than drag-and-drop for developers. Mermaid is the most popular text-based diagram language.

Several marketplace apps bring Mermaid to Confluence, plus the major visual diagramming tools (draw.io, Gliffy, Lucidchart) also support it. We built Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence to offer 30 diagram types with live preview, one-click templates, and a built-in syntax guide. In this post we compare it against every alternative.

Excalidraw in Confluence brings hand-drawn style diagrams and whiteboards to your wiki. This guide compares Excalidraw Plus vs draw.io — features, libraries, and which fits your team's needs.