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As a regular user, how do I get access to CQL?

Abhay Patil
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October 8, 2025

I am a regular licensed user of Confluence. I do not see any option to access Confluence Query Language (CQL). Does one need to buy "Scriptrunner for Confluence" license to gain access to CQL? What is the best and right way for user to gain access to CQL - to use it as conveniently as one uses JQL for JIRA?

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3 votes
Aron Gombas _Midori_
Community Champion
October 10, 2025

@Abhay Patil As you noted, CQL is not made that prominent in Confluence as JQL is in Jira. I asked it several times why not, but haven't heard any acceptable answer. I would find CQL a super-useful tool to run structured queries against Confluence content.

Anyway, apps can help with it until Atlassian offers an out-of-the-box solution. See this page that mentions two apps that offer macros powered by CQL, ad-hoc CQL searches or  even ready-made status reports.

 

 

Vijay Hiregoudar
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October 16, 2025

Confluence used to have an 'Advanced Search' option, is that not available anymore?

 

1 vote
Tomislav Tobijas
Community Champion
October 8, 2025

Hey @Abhay Patil ,

Confluence doesn't have 'CQL search bar/option' (something similar to Jira JQL search). CQLs are mostly used in automation rules (see examples) or within some third-party apps (like ScriptRunner).

I'd say that main question is what's the requirement here 👀 Like, why do you need to use CQL instead of standard, user-faced filters.

Here's some additional documentation about this: Advanced searching using CQL

There's also a feature request about improvements in that area: AI-584: Improve Advanced Search in Confluence UI with CQL 

Cheers,
Tobi

Abhay Patil
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October 9, 2025

Thanks @Tomislav Tobijas
We just want to inspect our Confluence repository with queries, e,g. how many documents are in status "ready for review", which documents got changed since some date, which are the documents owned by a certain user and so on. So looking for a way to execute such query from UI.

Like Tomislav Tobijas likes this
Vijay Hiregoudar
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October 16, 2025

@Tomislav Tobijas - I am unable to find the 'Advanced Search' anywhere in Confluence, any thoughts what if any could be the cause?

0 votes
Hope Man
Contributor
April 21, 2026

I know I'm late to the party but I discovered that you can do this.

Just paste this in your browser url and adjust the CQL according to your needs and press enter.  Your browser should automatically URL encode it:

https://<your-confluence-instance>.atlassian.net/wiki/search?cql= space = HKB AND type = page
Kh_Safal
Moderator
April 21, 2026

Hi @Hope Man, this topic has been locked because the thread has become a bit dated. If you’d like to keep the conversation going or have additional questions, we encourage you to start a new topic. You can read more about necro posting (“raising threads from the dead”) in our Community Guidelines.
Thanks!

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