Marketplace apps on Cloud are almost all priced per user on your site, not per user who uses the app. That pricing makes sense for a lot of things. It makes less sense for a macro whose entire job is to turn a block of text into a picture.
The arithmetic is the part people miss until renewal. If a diagram app is priced per user and you have 800 people on your Confluence site, you are paying for 800 seats even if the diagrams are written by nine engineers on two teams. There is no "only these users" tier on Cloud. The unit is the site.
What to check before you buy any diagram app
Worth running through regardless of which one you pick, including ours.
- Does it need a render server? PlantUML in particular is often rendered by calling out to a server. Ask where that server is, who runs it, and what happens to your diagram source when it gets there. If it is down, your pages show a broken box.
- Does it survive a PDF export? Exports do not run the app's JavaScript. A macro that only draws in the browser loses the diagram at exactly the moment you need it, which is usually the review or the audit handover.
- Is it vector? A fixed-size PNG looks soft on any modern display and cannot be zoomed. SVG stays sharp at any width.
- How far behind is the engine? Mermaid ships fast. A macro pinned to a two-year-old version will reject syntax your AI assistant just wrote.
- What is the price per user, times every user on the site? Not times the number of people who draw diagrams.
Our answer to point five
Disclosure: I work at Katabarwa Labs and we build Crisp Diagrams. I wrote about the rendering side of this a few days ago. This post is about the price, because the earlier article mentioned it only in passing.
Crisp Diagrams is free. To be precise about what that means, because "free" is used loosely on the Marketplace:
No paid tier. There is not a free edition with the useful half removed.
No diagram limit, no page limit, no user limit.
No account to create with us, and no sign-up.
No trial that expires and then stops rendering your existing diagrams.
No external servers. Mermaid, PlantUML, D2, DBML and Excalidraw all render in your browser, so there is nothing of ours for your diagrams to travel to, and nothing of ours that can go down and take your pages with it.
It is free because it costs us almost nothing to run. The app ships as Forge code that executes inside your own tenant. We operate no servers for it and store none of your content, so there is no per-customer cost for us to pass on. That is the whole reason, and it is also why we are comfortable saying it will stay free rather than describing it as free "for now".
The honest caveats
It is a rendering and editing macro. It is not a drawing canvas like draw.io, and if what you want is dragging boxes with a mouse, Excalidraw is in there but the other four languages are text.
Being free means there is no support contract to buy. You get a person answering email, which is me, and that is a different thing from an SLA.
Crisp Diagrams on the Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/3911881842/crisp-diagrams-mermaid-plantuml-excalidraw-for-confluence
If you are evaluating diagram apps, run the five checks above against all of them. If another one fits your team better, use that one.
