How to have a space public without the confluence horizontal top ribbon

[Dario Margeli]

Hello, we have the user guide for the product our company creates on Confluence.  We want to have it the user guide for the product public.

The only way we saw doing this was giving "Anonymous access" to the space.

However, we don't like the fact that the reading public (anonymous users) sees the Confluence logo and the horizontal top Confluence ribbon with the link to Spaces, the + Create button, etc..

We don't like them to see the above part.

Is there a way to make a space public without the public seeing "Confluence", "Spaces", "Apps", "Create", "Space settings"?

[Patricia Modispacher _appanvil_]

Hi, @Dario Margeli, I actually do have a fave third party app: Spacecraft. You can easily try and enjoy it.

[Dario Margeli]

Thank you. My boss was concerned about security given that it is a free APP. He said what is the catch?

[Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_]

Hi @Dario Margeli 

Spacecraft was launched in 2023 as an experiment, and given its success, Seibert has decided to invest it in further and it will become a paid app in the coming weeks. You can read more here.

Concerning security, the team is actively working on becoming Cloud Fortified. The app is also built with the Forge framework, which means your app data is hosted within your instance, and not on servers belonging to Seibert. If you have any other questions, feel free to book a quick call with the Product Owner.

[Dario Margeli]

@Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_  I saw the pricing plan. Again, the same problem. We are only 2 writers, and documentation is something the company doesn't spend much on. However if we purchase something from the marketplace, it takes as the number of users 200 because that is the number of workers in the company, which makes the price become too much for us.  Companies making these plugins should have a pricing plan per writer, not per amount of people that work in the company. We are thinking about using Wordpress for the documentation section of the website. 

[Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_]

@Dario Margeli I understand your situation. Unfortunately the billing structure for apps is imposed by Atlassian, so Marketplace partners can't customize the number of users billed.

A workaround would be to have your documentation on a separate Confluence site, with just 2 users, and then you would only have the flat fee to pay.

[Dario Margeli]

@Laura Campbell _Seibert Group_   I think our Atlassian manager looked into this option of having a separate Confluence. From what I understood, he created a new instance for free with two users, but then when he went to add the plugin ..there was some problem and it wouldn't accept the second site.  I will ask him again.  Basically we would need a standard edition Confluence and the pricing for that is minimum 600 dollars a year because the minimum count is 10.

[Kristian Klima]

Hello @Dario Margeli and welcome to the community

You can create a website from a private space using Scroll Viewport by K15t 

Because Viewport decouples your Confluence Content from the Website, you can save/publish Confluence pages without worrying that content will be seen by the public.

Only once everything is ready, you click a button to generate a Viewport site.

Our public documentation portal is created from a private Confluence Space (it doesn't have anonymous access enable) using Viewport.

We also have an internal portal built with the same app - access to that portal is protected by SSO.

[Dario Margeli]

This solution is too expensive for us. The pricing model is not right. We have 200 employees on Confluence, but documentation is a small thing for the company, so it makes no sense to spend 350 dollars a month on documentation publishing for us.

[Dario Margeli]

We are also thinking maybe a better solution for our situation is a: SaaS Service based Web Content Management System not associated with Atlassian marketplace.  Any idea on those?

[Kristian Klima]

Plenty. It's just that chances are that, at the end of the day, the 'total cost of ownership' will be higher...

Disclaimer. I did 3 proper docs CMS evaluations in the last two years, Confluence + apps won in all three (albeit it was a tie with Archbee for a open-source router project).

Any proper documentation CMS that uses 'per seat' pricing is more expensive TCO. A couple of months ago I was quoted $30K annual for a Paligo solution for 5 (FIVE) writers. I needed SSO, etc. And yet... there was no integration with Jira and I'd still have to develop/host my own website. All other features were on par with my current Confluence + apps based solution.

You can try ClickHelp, MadCap, Doc360, Archbee (which I liked), Helpjuice... compare the pricing, compare integration options, etc. You may find out that a Confluence based solution is not that bad ALL things considered. I did. 

Or you can go with a 'doc as code' solution. Which is basically a developers' way to tell tech writers to shut up and use tools developed for coding ... to write the docs. You end up trying to DYI everything, formatting, integrations, hosting.. even things so elemental as implementation of basic search that works. And that's before we get to resolving conflicts, merges, pushes/pulls, rebasing etc.

My CMS requirement analysis spreadsheet is in circulation on the Write the Docs Slack so feel free to ping me there. I can't share an xlsx file here :)  

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

There are several Market Place Addons that can present the page so it doesn't look like a Confluence page.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?category=Themes%20%26%20styles&hosting=cloud&product=confluence

I don't have a favorite, I would suggest trying them and seeing what works best for you.

[Dario Margeli]

Thanks. Unfortunately these end up being expensive for us because we have 200 people  that work in the company and have access to Confluence. But they are not documentation people and we want a solution for the few times we want to publish end product documentation. I am the sole writer!!   These marketplace apps charge you for the whole 200 people that are at the company and have nothing to do with documentation: developers, product owners, ...