Why teams still use Horizontal Menus in Confluence—Even With the New Navigation

[#1]

Atlassian’s recent rollout of a refreshed navigation experience in Confluence Cloud—introducing a sleek, vertical sidebar—marks a significant evolution in how users browse spaces and content. The intention is clear—the new navigation is built for usability at scale with:

• Sidebar-First Design
  A new left-hand sidebar replaces the old top layout, giving quicker access to “For You,” “Recent,” “Starred,” “Projects,” and more.
• Customizable Layout
  Users can reorder, hide, or show navigation items for a personalized experience.
• Utility Improvements
  Notifications, settings, and account tools are now more intuitive.
• Unified Product Experience
  Consistent navigation across all Atlassian cloud products improves usability.

But even with this progress, many teams continue to rely on horizontal menus—custom top-level navigation that lives within Confluence pages themselves. Why? Because one size doesn’t fit all. Here’s why horizontal menus still matter.

1. Branding and Portal-Style Layouts

For many companies, Confluence isn’t just a wiki—it’s a branded internal portal, documentation hub, or employee resource center. And those use cases demand more than functionality—they require visual consistency and user experience that matches the company’s identity.

• Brand colors, icons, and layout all contribute to engagement.

• Horizontal menus integrate cleanly with banners, cover images, and headings.

But here’s another benefit often overlooked:
🌍 For distributed, global teams, tools like Navigation Menus for Confluence Cloud make it possible to structure menus by Geographic Locations. Whether your offices are in Munich, São Paulo, or Tokyo, you can build menus that reflect local terminology, and language—all within the same Confluence site.

This level of localization and customization just isn’t feasible with the default vertical sidebar, especially when branding, structure, and accessibility need to coexist.

2. Navigation Needs Differ Across Teams

Different teams work and think differently. A single vertical sidebar can't serve everyone equally.

• Design, marketing, and HR teams often need structured, linear flows that feel like websites. Their menus might include items like “Brand Guidelines,” “Campaign Templates,” “Employee Benefits,” or “Event Playbooks.”

• Product and engineering teams prefer project-centric overviews that span across multiple pages. Typical menu items might be “Product Specs,” “Sprint Backlogs,” “Architecture Docs,” or “Release Notes".

• Onboarding and training teams benefit from guided, step-by-step navigation. Their menus could include “Start Here,” “Tools & Access,” “Team Intros,” “First Week Tasks,” and “Compliance Training. 

While the new sidebar improves content discoverability at a system level, horizontal menus allow teams to curate how users move through specific content—within a space or across spaces.

3. CQL-Powered Menus Are Smarter Than Static Links

Horizontal menus aren’t just prettier—they can be smarter. Navigation Menus for Confluence Cloud supports Confluence Query Language (CQL), allowing menus to dynamically populate based on metadata like:

• Page labels

• Update dates

• Author or contributor

• Mentions

• and more...

This means you can build menus that auto-update—showing, for example, the most recently updated onboarding pages created by team HR without having to manually change anything. This level of automation goes beyond what’s possible with the built-in sidebar.

---

Final Thoughts: The Sidebar and Menus Work Better Together

The new sidebar is a significant improvement. But that doesn’t mean horizontal menus are outdated—they’re just solving a different problem.

• The sidebar is great for system-wide navigation across spaces and tools.

• Horizontal menus shine when storytelling, branding, structure, and custom logic are required within content.

It’s not an either/or decision. The most effective Confluence setups combine both: letting the platform handle the infrastructure while teams customize the experience to match how they actually work. Want to see how they play nice in action? Find us on the Atlassian Marketplace, here.

[Kamal Deep Pareek]

Despite Confluence’s new vertical sidebar improving system-wide navigation, many teams still use horizontal menus for customization, branding, and tailored user flows. Horizontal menus enable portal-style layouts, localized content for global teams, and structured guidance for onboarding or department-specific needs. Powered by Confluence Query Language (CQL), they also offer dynamic, auto-updating navigation based on metadata. While the sidebar supports broad usability, horizontal menus enhance storytelling, structure, and interactivity within spaces. The best Confluence experiences blend both—leveraging the sidebar for scale and horizontal menus for team-specific clarity, consistency, and branding. It’s not redundancy—it’s adaptability to diverse ways of working.

[Angela Thomas_Seibert Group]

@Kamal Deep Pareek Thanks for summarising my article.