[6][7] Atlassian released Confluence 1.0 on 25 March 2004, saying its purpose was to build "an application that was built to the requirements of an enterprise knowledge management system, without losing the essential, powerful simplicity of the wiki in the process.

"[8] In recent versions, Confluence has evolved into part of an integrated collaboration platform[9] and has been adapted to work in conjunction with Jira and other Atlassian software products, including Bamboo, Clover, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye.

[10] In 2014, Atlassian released Confluence Data Center to add high availability with load balancing across nodes in a clustered setup.

[12] eWeek cited in 2011 such new features in version 4 as auto-formatting and auto-complete, unified wiki and WYSIWYG, social network notifications and drag and drop integration of multimedia files.

[22] In June 2022, Atlassian disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in Confluence Server allowing remote code execution, which had been present for over a decade.