The 5 Biggest Knowledge Management Challenges in Confluence and How to Solve Them

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Hi there!

I'm Elena from Communardo Products. During my experience as a Product Marketing Manager for knowledge management tools, I often see the same challenges appear as teams scale their Confluence spaces. Here’s a quick overview of the 5 most common issues and how the 5 Pillars of Knowledge Management can help solve them.

TL;DR - Key Takeaways

Confluence is powerful, but knowledge can get lost, outdated, or inconsistent as it grows. The 5 Pillars of Knowledge Management solve these challenges. The result is a clear, trusted, and scalable knowledge ecosystem your teams actually use.

Confluence has become one of the most widely adopted tools for team collaboration and documentation. But as organizations grow, so does their content. The result? A familiar pattern emerges:

• navigation becomes chaotic

• content becomes outdated

• knowledge hides in silos

• users lose trust

The truth is simple: Confluence scales beautifully, if knowledge management scales with it.

At Communardo Products, we help thousands of organizations build sustainable, enterprise-ready knowledge ecosystems. Through our work, five universal challenges appear again and again.

And the answer to each challenge aligns perfectly with our 5 Pillars of Knowledge Management: Structure, Manage, Create, Share, Monitor.

Let’s explore each challenge and how the pillars (supported by the right apps) solve them.

Challenge 1: “We can’t find anything.”

As teams create more pages, navigation becomes inconsistent. Search results feel overwhelming. The risk of duplicate pages on the same topic increases. Documentation feels scattered.

This is the root cause of most Confluence frustrations: poor structure leads to poor findability.

How to Fix It: Build a Clear Structure

Solution Pillar: STRUCTURE

Your Structure pillar provides the foundation for intuitive navigation, consistent organization, and predictable browsing.

Recommended tools:

SubSpace Navigation for Confluence organizes spaces into navigable hubs. It’s ideal for large intranets, departments, and multi-space documentation sets.

Navitabs – Navigation Macros for Confluence allows you to create clean tab-based navigation inside pages for guided journeys and improved readability.

Metadata for Confluence applies consistent categorization, reporting, and taxonomy across Confluence pages, improving content structure dramatically.

Challenge 2: “Our content is outdated, duplicated, or unreliable.”

Knowledge is valuable only when trusted. Many Confluence instances show old project pages in search or outdated instructions. Users often create multiple versions of the same process due to unclear ownership and lack of regular reviews.

This leads to one major risk: people stop trusting the knowledge base.

How to Fix It: Establish Content Management Practice

Solution Pillar: MANAGE

The Manage pillar focuses on lifecycle, ownership, consistency, and keeping content fresh.

Recommended tools:

User Profiles for Confluence allows you to add improved User Profiles macros that show details such as position, department, location, and other contact information. This helps teams understand project ownership at a glance. All attributes are synced from Entra ID, so the information stays current and colleagues can be contacted quickly.

Viewtracker – Analytics for Confluence shows which pages are viewed, which can be archived, and helps you identify knowledge gaps and outdated content.

Translations for Confluence lets international teams view content in their language, while editors work on a single page without creating multiple pages for each language.

Challenge 3: “Content is inconsistent.”

Without guidance, users create content in completely different ways. The result? Messy pages, different terminology, long walls of text, duplicated structures, unclear workflows and missing mandatory information.

How to Fix It: Guide Teams Toward High-Quality, Structured Content

Solution Pillar: CREATE

The Create pillar empowers teams to produce clear, standardized, reusable, and meaningful content. By giving teams simple, guided ways to create content, you significantly improve overall consistency.

Recommended tools:

Metadata for Confluence allows admins to create tailored metadata fields and set mandatory requirements for key information, and to stay audit-ready.

Navitabs – Navigation Macros for Confluence lets you create clean tab-based navigation inside pages for improved readability, customizable with your brand colors.

Scroll Sites is ideal for creating websites with regulated documentation and still managing all content in Confluence.

Challenge 4: “Knowledge is siloed across systems and tools.”

Employees constantly switch between Confluence, SharePoint, Teams etc. Context switching costs time and leads to outdated information circulating in private chats or hidden folders.

Knowledge sharing works when users never lose context and do not waste time hunting for files.

How to Fix It: Make Knowledge Easy to Share and Access

Solution Pillar: SHARE

The Share pillar focuses on removing barriers to information access and enabling team collaboration.

Recommended tools:

SharePoint Connector for Confluence bridges Microsoft 365 and Confluence so documents stay in SharePoint but become fully accessible in Confluence.

SubSpace Navigation for Confluence is the best for customizing multiple menus across Confluence spaces. It suits large intranets, departments, and multi-space documentation.

Challenge 5: “We don’t know what’s used, what’s missing, or what to improve.”

A knowledge base without insights is guesswork. Organizations struggle when they don't know which content is used, what no one reads, which topics trend, or which teams lack documentation and have knowledge gaps.

How to Fix It: Use Analytics to Drive Continuous Improvement

Solution Pillar: MONITOR

Monitoring is essential for a healthy knowledge ecosystem. The most successful Confluence teams operate based on data, not assumptions.

Recommended tools:

Viewtracker – Analytics for Confluence tracks reads, engagement, search terms, and user journeys. It helps you uncover hot topics, dead pages, and improvement opportunities.

Looking for the right app stack? We’ll help you design a solution that fits your use case and budget.

Conclusion: The 5 Pillars Turn Confluence into a Scalable Knowledge Ecosystem

The challenges organizations face in Confluence are predictable, but entirely solvable when addressed systematically.

Structure gives clarity.
Manage builds trust.
Create ensures quality.
Share breaks down silos.
Monitor fuels data-driven decisions.

Together, they transform Confluence from a simple wiki into a mature, resilient, and scalable knowledge platform.

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Need migration, cleanup, or restructuring your knowledge base? We can turn your Confluence into a world-class knowledge hub.