Managing approval workflows in Confluence: native options and the concept of working copies

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Confluence is amazing for collaboration — it’s where drafts turn into specs, ideas become documentation, and policies are shared with the whole company. But one question keeps coming up again and again:

“How do we add approval workflows in Confluence?”

If you’ve run into drafts being published too early or policies going live without a second pair of eyes, you’ll know how tricky this can be.

The problem

Confluence itself doesn’t offer a built-in approval process. That means there’s no straightforward way to ensure content is reviewed before it’s published.

Even more challenging, Confluence doesn’t let you separate the three critical steps of content management: editing, approvals, and publishing. Once a page is edited, those changes are immediately part of the live document — whether they’ve been reviewed or not.

This lack of separation is what forces teams to come up with workarounds to create some sense of approval flow.

The native workarounds

Most teams try to make workarounds with:

• Tagging colleagues with @mentions.

• Using page restrictions to limit publishing.

• Adding page statuses like “Draft” or “In Approval.”

These can help in small setups, but they often don’t scale. Notifications can get lost when not managed properly, page restrictions create bottlenecks and cause significant management overhead, while statuses are merely labels without real workflow logic.

👉 If you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, we’ve shared more details on our blog: How to build approval workflows in Confluence.

Why approvals matter

Without a clear approval process, Confluence spaces can lose credibility as a reliable source of truth. Outdated or unreviewed pages sneak in, people start second-guessing what’s accurate, and in some industries, it can even create compliance issues.

That’s why many teams look for third-party apps from the Atlassian Marketplace to create structured workflows and bring more confidence to their publishing process.

A different approach with Breeze

A lot of approval apps, however, still require publishing before a review can even begin — meaning unfinished drafts are already visible in your wiki. Breeze takes a different approach with something called working copies.

Working copies are private clones of a page. Authors can edit these without affecting the live version, and only once the draft is reviewed and approved does Breeze publish the changes back to the original page.

This separation of editing, reviewing, and publishing means only approved content goes live. Breeze also adds extras like approval presets, due dates with notifications, and audit logs for accountability.

More details about working copies and the approval workflow options can be found here: Breeze approval workflows. 

Wrapping Up

Approvals aren’t just about process — they’re about trust. When readers open a Confluence page, they need to know it’s accurate and up to date. Native tools can’t always provide that assurance, but working copies and structured workflows can.

👉 Curious to see it in action? Explore Breeze on the Atlassian Marketplace and give it a free trial.