Cost-effective read-only access for internal users (same domain) in Confluence Cloud?

[Susheela_Kushwaha]

Hi everyone,

We are currently evaluating our Confluence Cloud access model and have a requirement to provide read-only access to approximately 1,000 internal users who only need to view space content, with zero permissions to create or edit pages.

For our use case, two capabilities are absolute must-haves:

1. Page-Visit Analytics: We need visibility into who is viewing the content and how often.

2. Comment Participation: Users must be able to view and participate in page comment threads.

We’ve reviewed several options so far, but hit a few roadblocks:

• Guest Access: We explored this feature, but we understand it is restricted to external users outside of our organization's domain. Because these 1,000 users have email addresses that end with our organization's domain, this option is unavailable to us. (Please correct us if our assumption here is incorrect!)

• Third-Party Exporters: We looked at alternatives like Scroll PDF Exporter, but exporting content strips out page-visit analytics and introduces a massive, ongoing maintenance and distribution overhead for our teams.

• Jira Service Management (JSM) Knowledge Base: While linking a Confluence space to a JSM project allows unlicensed users to view content via the portal, it falls short because users cannot view comment threads or participate in discussions through that view.

Given these constraints and our requirement for analytics and commenting, how are other large organizations handling this? Are there any creative workarounds, third-party apps, or upcoming roadmap items (such as internal stakeholder/viewer tiers or site-wide options) that would allow us to provide cost-effective read-only access for internal users under our domain?

Appreciate any guidance or advice the community can share!

Thanks,

Susheela

[Martin Runge]

Hi @Susheela_Kushwaha

The honest architectural answer is that no unlicensed tier in Confluence Cloud today provides both per-user view analytics and authenticated commenting simultaneously. Guests break analytics; JSM breaks comments; anonymous access breaks both (no per-user tracking, no signed-in comments). A full licensed seat is currently the only path that unlocks both, as I am not aware of any generally available internal viewer tier that yet delivers analytics and comments together.

Cheers, Martin

[Susheela_Kushwaha]

Thanks, Martin! Your answer is really helpful.

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

Hello @Susheela_Kushwaha 

There might be a solution but since your use case, by definition, combines features that are mutually exclusive, and that would apply to pretty much any documentation platform, there will be some compromises.

But I think that the solution I'm outlining here covers about 80% of your use case.

Since you mentioned our Scroll PDF Exporter... we also have Scroll Sites for Confluence.

Yes, it builds a website from your Confluence content. But unlike most 'theme' apps for Confluence, it can provide authenticated access to that website independently of Confluence licensed/guest seats.

Disclaimer: I work for K15t now, after using and deploying K15t apps as user.

In the past, I used this method to create an Internal documentation website and Intranet for a company called Emplifi.

Back to your requirements.

• You build a Scroll Sites website from you Confluence content (no coding needed).
• You connect your own domain.
• You decided which form of authentication you want to use - token (password) or SAML SSO. For my Emplifi projects, I used SAML SSO so our employees could access the content. In other words, as long as a user is within your Identity Provider's setup, they can access the site even if they do not have a seat on Confluence.
• You connect your analytics. 
• You enable Comments functionality.

The compromises:

• Since the site is independent of Confluence, you cannot trace individual users with Confluence seats. But you can see trafic for individual pages. At Emplifi, we had the same concern at the beginning but we realized that we did not need to exercise that level of oversight over individual users reading individual pages.
• Comments functionality requires a third party product. 

Feel free to reach out if you have more questions or want to learn more details.

Some reading material Publish Confluence Content without Anonymous Access

[Susheela_Kushwaha]

Hi Kris,

Thank you for taking the time to provide such a detailed response and for sharing your experience with Scroll Sites. I appreciate the suggestions and spent some time reading through the solution, including the Hyvor Talk integration, which I thought was a great addition for enabling engagement and feedback.

Unfortunately, one of our key requirements is the ability to capture user-level page analytics, not just overall page traffic. Our leadership is specifically interested in understanding which individual users and departments are accessing specific content, so we can measure adoption, identify areas of interest, and better tailor our documentation strategy.

Based on my understanding, the Scroll Sites approach would provide page-level traffic insights, but not the level of individual user attribution we're looking for. Because of that limitation, I don't believe it will fully meet our current requirements.

That said, I really appreciate your recommendations and think this could be an excellent solution for organizations that need to publish Confluence content broadly without requiring licenses while still providing authentication, analytics, and commenting capabilities. I'm sure your response will be very helpful to others evaluating similar options.

Thanks again for the thoughtful guidance.