When Should Teams Consider Content Formatting Apps in Confluence (and How to Choose the Right One)

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Here’s the scenario: You’re working on a Confluence page and you want to make it more beautiful and engaging. What would you do?

If you’re new to Confluence, you’ll likely explore native formatting options and try to make them work. If you’re more experienced, you already know the limits. You start looking for ways to push beyond them often through content formatting apps.

And if you’re deeply technical, you might even consider building your own workaround or custom solution.

But regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, the same questions eventually come up:

When are native Confluence macros no longer enough?
And how do you choose the right content formatting app when you need one?

When to Consider Content Formatting Apps in Confluence?

Reason 1: Confluence doesn’t have the macro you’re looking for

This is usually the first signal. You want to structure your content a certain way but Confluence doesn’t have the macro you need. Like for example, explaining terms with tooltips, adding footnotes, or structuring content with tabs. This might seem like an oversight and surely those features will be introduced as is the case with cards and carousels. Some might others don't, but it’s purely a product decision.

Confluence is designed to stay broadly usable across very different teams and use cases. And that’s its strength. The more opinionated and advanced its formatting layer becomes, the more complexity it introduces into the editor. Every additional macro might affect performance, and needs to behave consistently across Cloud while also taking into consideration migration from Data Center.

So Atlassian deliberately keeps the core set of macros relatively generic:

• flexible enough to cover many scenarios
• simple enough to stay approachable
• stable enough to work reliably at scale

The trade-off is that they stop short of more advanced design patterns. This pushes users to improvise and look for workarounds.

Reason 2: Workarounds become the norm (& the hidden cost)

Workarounds often start as improvisation. You’re missing a macro, you look for one that’s available and does the job. Nothing wrong with this initially. But getting used to this approach often results in many issues further down the line.

• Lost time: At first, you notice the time cost. Not just in implementing the workaround, but in figuring out how to build it, navigating Atlassian community for answers and choosing the best fit. Every time someone wants to achieve the same outcome, they have to rediscover the same combination of macros and the same structure (in the absence of proper documentation). There’s no native way, no standard approach, just tribal knowledge if you think about it.

• Workarounds don’t scale well: In the short term, workarounds work. However, in the long run, they fail because they are built on features that were never designed for that purpose. Think using inline comments to highlight content. They provide context for highlighted content, and might feel like a tooltip: They’re not. Inline comments are designed for collaboration. They can be resolved, hidden, or ignored. They’re not persistent, not part of the actual content, and not meant to guide the reader.

Reason 3: You’ve hit the ceiling of what’s possible with Confluence

Confluence is simple and powerful enough to properly format your Confluence pages, but at times we simply want more. More control over structure, flexibility in layout, and depth in how content is presented. 

You might want to further customize panels with icons, include a predefined layout for your expands, or provide context with custom statutes. Native Confluence macros lead you halfway, but not quite there. And that’s the ceiling. Here, some start to combine macros and look for creative ways to fill the gap or simply settle for what they already have.

How to Choose the Right Content Formatting App

Once you’ve decided you need more than native Confluence macros, the next challenge is choosing the right app. And this is where some mistakes might happen.

Understand your teams’ needs & develop your most recurrent use cases

This one is obvious. The first step is not comparing tools, but understanding how your team is already working and where things start to break. 

Look at your existing content and patterns.

You’ll usually notice signals: teams using inline comments as tooltips, combining multiple macros to create a custom layout, or recreating the same structures across pages with slight variations. Sometimes, it even shows up more directly with teams asking for specific macros or “better ways” to present certain types of content.

At that point, the goal is not to list features, but to identify patterns. What are teams trying to achieve consistently, but struggling to do cleanly? What are the structures that keep reappearing, but never in a standardized way? That’s what should drive your choice.

Focus on adoption, not only capability

An app can be incredibly rich and powerful yet completely useless if your team doesn’t adopt it.

If creating or editing content becomes more complicated or confusing, most users will fall back to native macros. And then you’re back to inconsistency.

The right formatting app should feel like a natural extension of Confluence, not a separate system you have to learn from scratch. So when evaluating an app, look beyond what it enables technically, and to whether your team can easily adopt it. Look for an app that: 

• doesn’t require extensive onboarding 
• provides users with detailed use cases and templates to get started
• reduces formatting decisions instead of adding more of them
• completely eliminates workarounds

This is exactly where the trial period is crucial not to only test features but to validate adoption in real conditions. You can involve a small group of champions and regular contributors during the trial. Champions will explore the limits of the app, while everyday users will quickly reveal whether it feels intuitive or adds unnecessary complexity. 

Don’t (always) look for the app with most macros 

More macros doesn’t always mean more value. You can get a content formatting app with a wide variety of macros, only for your teams to end up using a couple. From a financial point of view, this doesn't make sense. 

But the issue goes beyond paying for unused features. Sometimes, teams start using macros simply because they exist, not because they solve a real content problem. The result is pages with more components, but not necessarily better structure or readability.

A smaller, more focused set of macros that teams use consistently is often far more valuable than dozens of features that rarely become part of actual workflows.

Choose with the future in mind: Roadmaps matter 

Once you adopt a content formatting app, switching isn’t that straightforward. It’s not a simple change, it’s an entire content migration. And that’s why the roadmap matters. Your team might grow, more use cases might appear, and you want an app that matches that. 

A good roadmap usually shows steady improvement in usability, and performance (not just the addition of new macros). On the other hand, an app that hasn’t meaningfully evolved in years isn’t automatically a bad choice, but it can be a risk indicator. Especially if your team’s usage is expected to grow or become more standardized over time.

And there you have it. Confluence is great on its own, but at times an added layer of advanced macros is what you need to unlock its full potential. 

If you landed on this post looking for your next content formatting app, you can take a look at ours here. But more importantly, make sure you’ve done the groundwork first: Define your use cases, test adoption with real users, and validate that it actually fits how your team works.