Beyond LaTeX: Why We Brought Animated Math to Confluence

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If you write technical documentation in Confluence — research notes, an internal course, a tutorial, an onboarding guide for new engineers — you've probably hit the math wall. Confluence Cloud has no native LaTeX support. The open feature request, CONFCLOUD-30543, has been sitting in "Gathering Interest" for years.

So you install a Marketplace app. There are about a dozen of them. Appfire's LaTeX Math has 3,337 installs and a 4.36/5 rating. Narva Software's version has 3,102 installs. They mostly work. They render equations as images: E=mc2E=mc2, summations, integrals, matrices.

And every one of them is static.

I'm Simon from NGPILOT. This is the story of why we built something different — an app called Manim for Confluence that renders animated math inside a Confluence page, the way Grant Sanderson's Manim library popularized on the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel.

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What static equations can't do

A static equation shows the result. An animation shows the process.

If you're documenting a Fourier transform, a static equation tells the reader "trust me, this works." An animation shows the rotating vector, the unwrapping sine wave, the series converging — and the reader sees it work. The same gap exists for derivatives, geometric proofs, matrix operations, algorithm visualisations, anything where the motion is the concept.

LaTeX rendered to an image can't do this. Neither can MathJax, AsciiMath, or MathML. They're all answer-format tools. The reader still has to reconstruct the reasoning in their head.

This is the gap Manim filled on YouTube. We wanted the same thing for Confluence.

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What users were saying

The Atlassian Community threads on math support fall into two buckets.

The first bucket is "how do I render equations at all?" Lena, on a 2023 thread, asked for "an ability for my team to write math equations in Confluence including the square root of something; sum sign; X to the power of y." The community answer is always the same: install a Marketplace app. There's no native option.

The second bucket is the bugs in those Marketplace apps. Hanan reported on another thread that the LaTeX Math Inline macro renders black text that becomes invisible in dark mode. Someone else reported that editing a LaTeX math block inside Numbered Headings wipes the rest of the page. A user in 2021 watched formulas disappear from their pages overnight — turned out to be a silently expired app license.

What you don't see in any of those threads is someone saying "I want to animate a derivative being taken" or "I wish I could show this series converging step by step." That's not because the desire isn't there — it's because nobody expects Confluence to do it. The tooling has trained people to settle for static output.

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The competitive landscape

Here's what's actually available (data from our marketplace crawler, June 2026):

App	Vendor	Framework	Rating	Reviews	Installs	What it renders
LaTeX Math	Appfire	Connect	4.4/5	39	3,337	Static LaTeX equations
LaTeX Math for Confluence	Narva Software	Connect	4.1/5	18	3,102	Static LaTeX with dark mode, export
LaTeX for Confluence	Bertly	Forge	3.2/5	7	913	Static LaTeX, minimal editor
LaTeX and MathJax	The Plugin People	Connect	3.9/5	17	438	Static LaTeX + MathML (Server/DC only)
Beautiful Math (LaTeX, AsciiMath)	Elevatic	Connect	3.4/5	7	175	Static LaTeX + AsciiMath
LaTeX EASY	Polaris Office	Connect	4.2/5	6	140	Static LaTeX with live preview
LaTeX Math (Free)	Yamuno Software	Forge	—	0	125	Static LaTeX, free tier
LaTeX Formulas & Diagrams	Clovity	Forge	5.0/5	4	73	Static LaTeX + non-animated diagrams
LaTeX Math for Confluence	Stiltsoft	Forge	4.7/5	4	41	Static LaTeX + AsciiMath + chemistry
Manim for Confluence	NGPILOT	Forge	—	0	1	Animated scenes (this is us)

Twelve apps, twelve static renderers. Our install count is honest: 1. We're new. The point of this article isn't to claim dominance — it's to explain why this category needed to exist.

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How we built it

Manim was originally a Python library — the one Grant Sanderson uses to produce the 3Blue1Brown videos. To bring it inside a Confluence page, we used manim-web, a community port that runs the same scene API in JavaScript. The animation renders entirely in the reader's browser, with no server round-trip and no external dependency.

The macro is built on Forge with a custom config panel. You write Manim scene code in the Monaco editor (the same editor VS Code uses) and watch a live preview update as you type. Six templates ship built-in — basic shape transforms, the Manim logo, a sine curve traced by a rotating vector, an angle driven by a value tracker, boolean operations on ellipses, and a point that leaves a visible trail. Click any template and the code loads into the editor with the preview already rendering.

Beyond templates, the toolbar exposes the things you actually need to tweak per page: canvas size, background colour, animation speed (0.25× to 2×), autoplay behaviour, and where the player controls sit on the canvas.

One decision worth calling out: everything runs in the reader's browser. When someone opens a published page, the animation plays immediately — no server-side render farm, no external service, no data leaving Atlassian. That's the only "technical" choice that actually matters to a reader; the rest is implementation detail.

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Where we landed

Manim for Confluence does what no other math app on the Marketplace does:

• Animated math scenes — not static equations, but actual moving visualisations
• Built on the Manim community library — the same toolkit behind 3Blue1Brown
• Monaco code editor (the same one VS Code uses) with JavaScript syntax highlighting
• Six quick-start templates — Basic, Manim Logo, Sine Curve, Moving Angle, Boolean Ops, Point Trace
• Live preview that updates on every keystroke
• Canvas control — width, height, background colour
• Playback control — autoplay, speed (0.25×–2×), player control position and theme
• Dark and light mode that follows Confluence
• Forge-native — runs entirely on Atlassian infrastructure, nothing leaves your instance

We're brand new — 1 install, 0 reviews as I write this. If you write technical content that involves math, geometry, algorithms, or anything where motion is part of the explanation, give it a try and tell us what's missing.

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Pair it with static math when you need both

Manim is for the moments where motion teaches. Plenty of pages also need plain static equations — inline references, full derivations, the kinds of formulas that just sit there and are fine sitting there.

For that, our Enhanced Markdown for Confluence renders KaTeX math inside Markdown content. You write $E = mc^2$ inline or $$P(A|B) = \frac{P(B|A) \cdot P(A)}{P(B)}$$ as a block, and Cherry Markdown renders it natively. It also handles Mermaid diagrams, code blocks, and a WYSIWYG mode — same editor, multiple uses.

The two apps pair naturally: Enhanced Markdown for the static equations and prose, Manim for the moments where the reader needs to see the concept move.

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Try them

• Manim for Confluence
• Enhanced Markdown for Confluence