Read-only Access to Confluence

[Jo Newman-Bosak]

We would like to give some users Read-Only Access to our pages in Confluence. Do we need a license for each one of these users? Our current licensing is tied to Jira and we are not willing to give up any open Jira "spots" for use in Confluence.

[Andy Gladstone · Accepted solution]

@Jo Newman-Bosak if your intention is for internal users only to have read-only access to your pages, you need to have a license for each user. The alternative is to store the pages you want your users to access in a Public Space - but that would grant access to people outside your organization as well. 

I will be moving your question from the Questions for Confluence collection to the Questions about Confluence collection for more visibility. (QfC is an Atlassian supported app available in the Marketplace.)

[Jo Newman-Bosak]

Thank you. That was what I was afraid of. These pages cannot be shared outside of our organization therefore we will need to move away from using Confluence as a document repository. 

[Bill Bailey]

Well this is another reason for not using Cloud. If you were running the server version, you could just place your instance behind a firewall and then grant anon view rights.

[Taylor]

@Bill Bailey  How do we do this? I was going into every single space and changing permissions and it's still allowing comments. We have server version Confluence and for maintenance need to make the entire instance read-only to all users.. can you help please?

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hey @Jo Newman-Bosak ,

Unless you want all users to share one Atlassian ID, they will need individual product access to Confluence for their Atlassian ID. You can also consider making parts of your Confluence Instance publicly available if that's an option. But then you should make sure that really only the content you want to make available is publicly available. 

Regarding the use of licenses, it should be no problem. I recommend looking at how you set up product access to both tools for users in the site settings. Here's some information from the docs that will also be helpful:

• How does product access work? 
• Update product access settings 

You can grant the users access to Confluence only. Both products are billed individually. And you will not "give up" spots, but your license tier will increase by the number of new users. You will notice it at the latest during the next billing cycle. 😅

Best, Max