Confluence for user documentation

[Wynand Meijer]

Good morning everyone,

I've got a question that I'm not sure has been answered yet.  Partly, yes, but not completely.

So I want to use Confluence for our end-user documentation.  I know I can give users access to this documentation by giving them guess access, or by making the documentation public and giving them the link.  This would make the end users "anonymous users" as they're called.

However, there are issues with both.  First, the anonymous users route would mean the documentation would be publicly accessible, and we don't want that.  We want the documentation to be behind a login or at least in some way controlled.

Second, the route going with the guest users seems to limit us to 5 guests to one paid users.  This is a problem because I'll probably be the only user using Confluence.  This would limit us to 5 guest accounts, but we have hundreds, potentially thousands of users who'll need to get access to this documentation, so this option won't work either.

That brings me to my question.  Can we pay a per-user fee, obviously down from a regular user's fee, to give the users guest access to the documentation, or am I out of luck?  I would like to use Confluence as I've used it before, but it's just not going to work in the two ways I see above, unless I'm missing something?

[Barbara Szczesniak · Accepted solution]

@Wynand Meijer Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

There is another option if your customers only need to view your documentation—use one of the 3rd-party apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace to generate a website from your Confluence space(s) and make the website available to your customers with authentication.

This route eliminates the need for guest licenses, public access, permissions on pages you do/don't want people to see, etc. 

Note that most of these apps have a cost per licensed Confluence user in your instance.

[Wynand Meijer]

Thanks @Barbara Szczesniak for that reply.  That's what I was afraid of - having to do it all in Confluence and then export it to a webpage.  Apart from cost, I don't see the benefit of using Confluence then.  There are much better tools out there for documentation, so I think I'll have to think hard on these options for now.