Approvals in Confluence, now on Open Beta

[#1]

Hello Confluence Community 👋

I’m excited to share that Approvals in Confluence are moving into Open Beta, gradually rolling out over the next week.

Approvals are built for teams that need more structure around important content.

Whether you’re publishing policies, reviewing launch plans, coordinating legal sign-off, or managing operational procedures, approvals make it easier to request a formal review, capture decisions, and keep work moving with a visible record of what happened.

We’ve heard a consistent theme from customers: teams want Confluence to stay flexible for everyday collaboration, while also supporting the moments that need more control, accountability, and traceability. That’s exactly what approvals are designed to do.

Open beta availability: Approvals are available for Confluence Premium and Enterprise customers in open beta, and are supported on pages. You can find it in your admin settings, under status and approval.

Why We Built Approvals:

Confluence works best when teams can move quickly, but speed alone is not always enough. Some content needs an explicit sign-off step before it can be trusted, shared broadly, or used as a source of truth.

Until now, many customers have handled this with manual workarounds: comments, @mentions, page statuses, separate messaging threads, or external tools. Those approaches can work, but they often leave teams asking the same questions:

• Who still needs to review this?

• Was this actually approved, or just discussed?

• What changed between versions?

• Where is the record of the decision?

Approvals bring that process into Confluence itself, so the review workflow stays connected to the content being reviewed.

What This Looks Like in Practice: 

Approvals are especially useful for content where clarity and accountability matter, such as:

• Policies and procedures that need a clear sign-off trail

• Legal and compliance content that requires explicit approval before teams rely on it

• Launch plans and campaign documents that need stakeholder review before execution

• Finance, operations, and HR documentation where teams need a record of decisions

• Cross-functional project pages where multiple reviewers need to weigh in before work moves forward

Approvals help teams add structure to high-stakes content without forcing them to leave the place where the work already lives.

Core Features Of Approvals:

Structured sign-off on pages

Teams can request approval directly on a page, making the decision explicit instead of relying on scattered comments or offline confirmation.

Clear review status

New states such as In review, Changes Requested, and Approved help readers quickly understand where a page stands in the company’s content lifecycle.

Notifications for key moments

Initiators and approvers are notified at the right points in the flow, reducing manual follow-up and helping reviews move forward.

Automation-ready

Approvals show up in automation as triggers and actions, to power an unlimited number of downstream or upstream steps.

Publish controls

Opt to block publishing within a space until the required approvals are complete.

Activity log

Show approval history directly in the approvals panel so anyone can quickly get up to speed on history of decisions.

Enforced approvers

Optionally choose to require all approvals in a space to go through a standard set of reviewers, such as engineering leads or legal team members.

Lifecycle support

Optionally set up expiration windows for approvals that remind content owners to get updated approvals, helping ensure content stays fresh.

How To Get Started

1. If you’re on Confluence Premium or Enterprise, go to your space settings → status and approvals → enable approvals

2. Once enabled, go to a page in that space and select the status drop-down

3. Select “start an approval,” and select your approvers.

4. You will be notified of their responses.

Share feedback on what’s working, what feels unclear, and what would make approvals more valuable for your use case

We’d Love Your Feedback

This is a big step toward helping teams manage structured review and sign-off natively in Confluence, and we’re excited to see how you use it.

Drop a comment below with your thoughts, questions, or early feedback—we’re listening.

Cheers,

The Confluence team ✨

[Josh]

Hi @Alli Shea .

This is a very interesting feature.

Have you considered providing a way to capture structured data as part of the approval process? For example:

• When publishing policies and procedures one may want to capture metadata on the locations and business units that are impacted by the documentation. Page properties and labels can be used for this sort of thing, but maintaining data quality is hard at scale with this approach. Additionally, Jira fields may already have the authoritative list of options (e.g. asset-linked fields).
• When publishing technical documentation, one may want to reference the systems, networks, or hardware related to the documentation and link it with Assets data to tightly couple knowledge resources into change management processes.

[Rhys Gottwald]

I cannot see this option in my environment.  What should I do?

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

solid addition, especially for teams relying on comments. the automation support is awesome, it will allow some cool workflows 

[Rob Hean]

@Rhys Gottwald - this is a rolling deployment, so not everyone will get it at the same time... it's possible your instance just hasn't had it added yet.  Also looks like space admins have to enable this in space settings before it's available (the "How to get started" section).

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Oh wow 😮 I didn't know this was in the works.

Really glad this will be added, as pretty much every customer asks for something like this 👀

[James O_Connor]

Really glad to see this feature - I've been wanting something like this for a while. It hasn't appeared on my instance yet but I look forward to building it into our ways of working when it pops up.

[__ Jimi Wikman]

This looks exactly like Comala Document Manager and other approval plugins, but am I correct that this native functionality can actually interrupt the publishing and require approval before the new version is published?

If this is the case, will that be something that other, existing app partners can access? Currently, this is not available as I understand it, so you need to have a workflow approval and publication step, and you can not have multiple versions on hold from publishing?

Speaking of that, what is the flow if an approval has been requested and then a second edit is made? Will the approval be cancelled or be added as a version regardless? How many approvals can a page have at the same time if it is tied to versions?

Will this be ISO-9001 and ISO-27001 compliant I assume?

This is for Pages today; are there plans to add this to other types later? Whiteboards, for example, as it is being used for process documentation and integration maps?


...and I love this :)

[Rhys Gottwald]

Thank you for the feedback, @Rob Hean I thought that might be the case, but I was hoping it wasn't. I am really happy this feature is coming, and I really want to take it for a spin.   This was a nice little under-the-radar surprise. I'm glad that it is finally coming. Next thing, they'll allow us to choose our own colours when creating table headers. 😉

[Hanna Torany]

@Alli Shea We cannot see it in our enviroment.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Looking forward exploring the possibilities!

This might just be something that will replace a couple of marketplace apps.

@Alli Shea for Open Beta this is available for Premium and Enteprise, will Standard be included once this goes GA?

[Andreas Schmidt _yasoon_]

I see it as a "New feature" toggle, but when I try to activate I get "Something went wrong"
Dev tools reveal the more accurate error: message: "Feature not available"
Could you please fix this so we can try it out?

[Martina Guth]

@Alli Shea Really looking forward to the opportunity to check it. Currently unfortunately we don´t have the functionality. How long will the rollout take?

Kind regards,
Martina

[Jamie Knight]

This is very exciting to read. Especially since I just spent quite a bit of time testing a few of the Marketplace Apps which none fit our needs.

I do not currently have the option to turn this on, but when I do, is it possible to only enable it in the Sandbox? 

Thanks,
Jamie 

[Brita Moorus]

This is a really useful addition, can’t wait to tey it out! 🙌

Approvals have been a common reason teams rely on third-party apps or manual workarounds. The approval history, enforced approvers, and automation support look especially valuable.

A little disappointing that it’s limited to Premium and Enterprise, though - I think many Standard customers would also benefit from a basic approval flow 💙

[Koloman Pfeffer]

Excited to try this new feature, sadly not rolled out yet (and in the release notes, it's still marked as "coming soon").

Currently we're using a combination of Confluence and Jira for Confluence page approvals, linking a page with an approval ticket. Before that we used the Comala extension, but switched over because of the lack of features and the additional cost.

Our current system works very well so far and is also flexible to accommodate complex requirements (two-stage approvals, flexible permissions for user editing, etc.). But it also requires a lot of know how to maintain it, as well as users reviewing content in one system, but then switching to another system for the approvals.

So a native integration would be great, if it can provide some key features that I didn't see in this post: 

• Multi Stage approvals (e.g. content review by someone with operative know how and after the first approval a general review by a process owner).
• User editable approvers that aren't hard coded per space (e.g. user activates approval and can choose, who should give the first stage and who should give the second stage approval).
• Restrict publish controls by page properties (e.g. if a page was created using a certain template or if a page has a certain label) and not only per space.
• Resetting approvals for a page, if it's edited.

Brownie points, if in the automation actions the approvers can be set dynamically by using smart values.

[Linda Wu]

Hi everyone, thanks for all the excitement and thoughtful questions here.

@Josh Assets data linking and capturing structured metadata on an approval is great feedback! We'll note this for the team to further explore.

A few of you (@Rhys Gottwald @James O_Connor @Hanna Torany @Martina Guth @Andreas Schmidt _yasoon_@Jamie Knight) reported not seeing Approvals yet. That's expected for now since it hasn't reached every site yet; we are rolling out gradually to eligible Premium and Enterprise Cloud sites over the next week or so. Once it has been rolled out to your site, a product admin can enable it under Configuration - New features. If you'd like it enabled sooner, please open a support ticket and we can get you set up. This also applies to sandbox sites which can be enabled separately.

@Dirk Ronsmans @Brita Moorus during the beta it's available on Premium and Enterprise. We hear you on Standard and I've passed that to the team to look into.

@Koloman Pfeffer good news on one of your asks: attempting to edit a page after an approval is requested in draft mode will prompt you to cancel the pending review, so you can re-request once your changes are in. Thanks for your suggestions on user-selectable/multi-stage approvals and property/label-based publish rules. This is more great feedback we'll pass on to the team to look into.

@__ Jimi Wikman great questions! Publish gating: yes, Approvals can act as a real gate, not just a status label alongside the page. A space setting can be optionally enabled to require approval before a new page is first published, so publishing can be blocked until the review cycle is complete. Access for existing app partners isn't available today, but I'll pass that request along to the team. You are also correct in that you cannot have multiple versions on hold from publishing as of today. More generally, you can send either the published view mode or the draft edit mode version for approval:

• Pending review in view mode (published version): you can edit the page's draft but publishing it cancels the view mode's pending review.
• Pending review in edit mode (draft version): the draft is locked until you cancel the review; if there's a currently approved published version it stays published.

With regard to other content types: whiteboard support is a great call out! Other content types are not yet supported, but we've noted the feedback. For specific questions about ISO compliance, our Trust Center is the source of truth. You can raise a ticket and/or download ISO certificates and compliance docs directly there.

Thanks,
Linda & the Confluence Approvals team

[Dirk Ronsmans]

 @Alli Shea ,

Follow up question, I might be missing it or just reading over it but just wondering.

There are some marketplace apps that allow you to have a published version of a page and then work on a draft version which will supersede the published page once approved. Basically having a "live" version and a "working version" of the same document without it having to be 2 different pages.

Is that what you mean with your answser towards @__ Jimi Wikman ? 

Especially in document lifecycle that would be awesome if that is how it works. In short it would keep the published page alive untill the reviewed/edited version has been fully approved in the next cycle.

[Jamie Knight]

Does Atlassian have documentation for this new approvals workflow?

[Gary Spross]

I don't have access to the feature in my instance yet, so I may be getting ahead of myself asking this question, but reading through the description for this feature, it sounds like the content author is selecting who the approvers should be? Am I reading that correctly?

Is there (or will there be) configurations where the approvers are determined and set based on the author setting the content for approval?

Beyond that, could a Rovo agent be created and utilized to determine stakeholders based on the content of the document and set the appropriate approvers?