🤔 Why are Confluence Automation rules cut off at ~100 pages?

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The other day, we shared nCino’s story about how Automation for Confluence struggled to keep up with their enterprise-scale content lifecycle needs.

One number, in particular, raised eyebrows: the 100-page branch rule limit Gary Spross mentioned.

1,000 pages are sometimes still just ~100

What? Didn't Atlassian increase the branch rule limits to a 1,000 pages?

When we first heard it from Gary, nCino’s Confluence admin, we thought Gary had misspoken. It's true that the documentation hasn't been updated with this, but we followed up with Gary to clarify and get the full picture. This is how he responded:

"I meant 100 pages. A few times, the branch within the automation would show as having gone through 1,000 pages, but that happened only a handful of times. Most of the runs were around 138 pages. I tried to understand why there was inconsistency with Atlassian and got nowhere. This is when I realized the automation with Confluence wasn't going to allow us to do what we needed to do. Even if it functioned, it wasn't scalable."

This puts the branch rule limits into a new perspective for the largest Confluence users.

What are the Confluence Automation limits?

The short answer is yes, officially the branch rule limit is 1,000 pages. But based on customer experiences, it does not work consistently.

When the Automation for Confluence team announced this update, a handful of congratulatory comments rolled in, praising the team on this milestone.

Given that Confluence Cloud adoption among enterprise customers has been slow, it’s fair to assume that many of these commenters were nowhere near hitting this limit—they were simply cheering from the sidelines. Cold comfort for enterprise teams.

Atlassian enforces various thresholds depending on the type of automation rule, the number of operations triggered, and the subscription tier. You can learn more on the general Atlassian Automation service limits here.

It still says "if a rule branch contains a CQL query that returns more than 150 items, the rule will only perform actions on the first 150 items."

This still seems to be the reality.

Confluence Automation example: even if it functions, it's not scalable

In nCino’s case, the automation rules struggled, cutting off around 138 pages and only occasionally processing up to 1,000 pages. When they reached out to Atlassian support, they reportedly "got nowhere." 🤷‍♂️ There was never a proper explanation in their specific case.

And this is just the challenge of making automation work for fewer than 1,000 pages. For teams managing more, it’s simply a non-starter.

Why this matters for enterprise Confluence customers

If you’re running a small Confluence site, you might never hit these limits. But if you’re managing thousands—or tens of thousands—of pages, these restrictions aren’t just a footnote; they define what’s possible.

Enterprise teams need Confluence content lifecycle management automation that truly scales with their content—not just a feature that sounds impressive in a product announcement but falls short in real-world use.

That’s why nCino, like many others, looked for a dedicated content lifecycle management solution in the form of Better Content Archiving and Analytics for Confluence, instead of trying to force-fit Automation for Confluence into a role it wasn’t built for.

Better Content Archiving and Analytics implements its own automation mechanism to apply statuses (20 instead of the built-in 5), send notifications (customizable content and recipients), and archive/delete content as well as a robust Confluence page owner concept.

What’s your experience?

We appreciate the discussions around automating Confluence content lifecycle management, and we’re always happy to dive deeper into strategies.

Are you successfully using Confluence Automation with a Confluence instance containing thousands of pages? Let us know!

If you’ve run into similar challenges—or found other unexpected limits—let’s talk about that too in the comments!