Confluence vs IT Glue (2026): The CTO's Technical Comparison

Confluence is a general-purpose wiki built for software teams and cross-functional collaboration. IT Glue is a structured, relational asset documentation platform built for MSPs and IT departments. They solve fundamentally different problems, and choosing the wrong one costs months of rework.

If you manage client networks, track passwords, SSL certificates, and hardware configurations across dozens of organizations, IT Glue is purpose-built for that workflow. If you need a flexible knowledge base for engineering docs, product specs, runbooks, and internal wikis — and you're already in the Atlassian ecosystem — Confluence is the stronger fit.

This guide breaks down the architecture, API constraints, pricing, data portability, and lock-in risks so you can make a final decision. No feature marketing — just the technical realities that matter at decision time.

If you're already shopping the category, our deeper breakdowns of IT Glue alternatives and Confluence alternatives are the logical next reads.

Core Philosophy & Architecture: Pages vs. Flexible Assets

The most critical difference between these platforms is not a feature gap — it's an architectural divide. This determines what each tool does well and what it cannot do without fighting its own data model.

Confluence: Flexible Page Trees

Confluence stores content as pages organized into spaces. Each page uses Atlassian's proprietary XHTML-based storage format — a mix of standard HTML and custom XML elements for macros, layouts, and embedded content. Pages nest into hierarchical trees, and spaces act as top-level containers.

The data model is flat by design. A page is a page. It can contain text, tables, images, embedded Jira issues, and hundreds of macro types from the Atlassian Marketplace. There is no native concept of "asset types," "relational fields," or "tagged configurations." If you want structured, queryable data in Confluence, you build it with Confluence Databases (released in 2024), page properties macros, or third-party apps. The flexibility is high, but the structure is entirely self-imposed.

Extensibility comes from macros — custom XML elements that render dynamic content (like Jira ticket lists, charts, or embedded code snippets) inside a page. For a deeper look at how this compares to modern block-based editors, see our guide on Notion vs. Confluence (2026): Architecture, Limits, and Migration Guide.

Confluence Cloud runs on AWS and offers both cloud and Data Center (self-hosted) deployment. New Data Center subscriptions end in March 2026, expansion rights end in 2028, and read-only mode begins in 2029. The practical result: every new Confluence deployment in 2026 is cloud.

IT Glue: Relational Asset Database

IT Glue's data model is architecturally different. The platform is built on three foundational concepts: Core Assets, Flexible Assets, and Documents.

Core Assets are pre-defined record types: Organizations, Configurations (hardware/software), Contacts, Locations, Domains, and SSL Certificates. Core Assets are the building blocks you document first, and they can be linked to create relevant, logical relationships that keep information retrieval down to one or two clicks.

Flexible Assets are the differentiator. Flexible Assets document information about the applications and services you manage for your clients and can be completely customized to fit your team's information needs. Think of them as custom database tables with typed fields (text, date, select, tags) where Tag fields create explicit relational links between assets, configurations, contacts, and organizations.

You don't write a "document" about a server in IT Glue. You create a Server asset. You then link that Server asset to a Location asset, a Vendor asset, and a Password asset. If the IP address changes, you update the IP field on the Server asset, and that change is reflected everywhere the server is linked. This architecture forces standardization — your team cannot "freestyle" their documentation. They must fill out the required fields for the specific asset type.

Core and Flexible Assets make up about 70% of what is needed to make your tech team efficient. The remaining approximately 30% will be in the Documents area of IT Glue. Documents in IT Glue are long-form SOPs and procedures — closer to what Confluence pages do, but scoped to individual organizations.

IT Glue is available strictly as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. No self-hosted option exists.

If you're mapping data between the two systems, the conceptual translation looks like this:

source:
  system: IT Glue
  object: flexible asset
  type: Firewall
 
target:
  confluence_database: Infrastructure Assets
  confluence_page: Acme / Network / Firewall / fw-01
  sensitive_fields:
    - keep outside Confluence or replace with a secure reference

That architectural choice changes daily behavior. In Confluence, you model process and context in pages, templates, databases, labels, and app extensions. In IT Glue, the model is already opinionated: technician-friendly lists, linked assets, passwords, SOPs, and relationship mapping. Confluence gives you more freedom. IT Glue gives you less room to improvise — and less room to drift.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Core Functionality

Confluence excels at long-form documentation, meeting notes, product requirements, decision logs, and technical specs. The editor is block-based, supports inline comments, real-time co-editing (up to 29 concurrent editors on a page), and has deep Jira integration for linking issues to docs.

IT Glue excels at structured IT documentation: password management with an encrypted vault, domain/SSL tracking, configuration records, and runbooks. IT Glue offers features such as relationship mapping between assets, search capabilities, and granular access controls.

Winner: IT Glue for IT asset documentation. Confluence for general knowledge management.

Customization & Extensibility

Confluence has a massive Marketplace ecosystem — thousands of apps for diagramming, reporting, workflows, and compliance. This is both a strength and a cost trap (more on that in the pricing section).

IT Glue's extensibility is narrower but deeper within its domain. The Enterprise plan supports unlimited integrations and adds functionality like IT Glue API Access, Runbooks, Cooper Copilot AI, and custom SSL branding. Custom Flexible Asset types give you schema-level customization, but the broader ecosystem is restricted to Kaseya products and MSP tools (RMMs and PSAs).

Winner: Confluence for breadth. IT Glue for depth within IT operations.

Integrations & Ecosystem

Confluence provides integration with other Atlassian tools like Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Bitbucket, and Trello. The Marketplace adds integrations with Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, Figma, and hundreds more.

IT Glue integrates with RMM, PSA, and other IT management tools to simplify workflows. Native integrations include Autotask, ConnectWise, Datto RMM, and Kaseya VSA. The Basic plan supports 1 data source, along with 1-way PSA/CRM and RMM sync. The Select plan adds a second data source and 2-way PSA/CRM sync.

Winner: Confluence for general business integrations. IT Glue for the MSP/RMM/PSA stack.

Search, Organization & Scalability

Confluence's search covers all spaces and pages with full-text indexing and explicit search syntax including boolean operators, exact-phrase matching, and wildcards. Atlassian's Standard tier supports up to 250,000 users per site. At scale (10,000+ pages), search quality degrades unless your team enforces consistent labeling and space organization.

Searching in IT Glue can be frustrating due to inconsistent results, poor folder support, and unintuitive navigation. Users report difficulty finding documents, slow or inaccurate searches. The search engine is dependent on how well documentation is tagged and structured. That said, IT Glue's relational model means finding a specific asset — the admin password for a particular firewall at a particular client — is typically one or two clicks if the asset model is well-structured.

Winner: Confluence for ad-hoc full-text discovery and enterprise scale. IT Glue for navigating structured asset data. Both degrade without discipline.

Collaboration & Editing

Confluence has real-time co-authoring, inline comments, page comments, @mentions, likes, and notifications. Live docs support editing without publishing. IT Glue supports documentation sharing, granular access control, audit trails, and version control, but it is not a collaborative editor in the same class.

Winner: Confluence, by a wide margin.

Mobile & Cross-Platform

Confluence has native iOS and Android apps with offline reading, push notifications, and basic editing.

The mobile version of IT Glue lacks the functionality and responsiveness of the desktop platform. Key features are missing, and performance is subpar. IT Glue's mobile app does support viewing and editing passwords and viewing configurations with biometric login — useful for field technicians who need quick credential access.

Winner: Confluence for general use. IT Glue has niche value for field techs.

Comparison Table

API Limits & Extensibility: What Developers Need to Know

If you plan to build integrations, sync data, or eventually migrate off either platform, API constraints dictate what's possible and what will break.

IT Glue API

Currently, IT Glue has throttling limits in place: a maximum of 3,000 requests within a 5-minute window. A 429 Too Many Requests error code will be returned for rate-limited requests.

There is an API payload size limit of 10MB, set by Amazon API Gateway.

API access is not included on the Basic plan. The Select plan adds IT Glue API access. This means a 5-person team on the Basic plan at $29/user cannot programmatically access their own data.

Page size is capped at 1,000. For an MSP with 500 clients and hundreds of Flexible Assets per client, extracting a full dataset requires thousands of paginated requests — and you'll hit the rate limit repeatedly. Inactive API keys are also revoked after 90 days, so long-running automation needs key management built in.

Confluence Cloud API

Confluence Cloud uses a points-based model to measure API usage. Instead of simply counting requests, each API call consumes points based on the work it performs — such as the amount of data returned or the complexity of the operation.

Enforcement of the new points-based API rate limits and tiered quota rate limits for Jira and Confluence Cloud apps began on March 2, 2026. The default pool is 65,000 points per hour globally. API token-based traffic is not affected by this change and will continue to be governed by existing burst rate limits.

Quotas are measured per hour and reset at the top of each UTC hour. There is no partial throttling — once the quota is reached, all requests are blocked until reset.

For migration scripts using API tokens (not Marketplace apps), Confluence's burst limits are generally more forgiving than IT Glue's hard 3,000-per-5-minutes cap. But Confluence's points model penalizes heavy read operations — fetching large pages with embedded content costs more points than fetching metadata.

Pricing & Total Cost of Ownership

The pricing models reveal exactly who each tool is built for.

IT Glue Pricing

The Basic plan costs $29 per user per month with a minimum of 5 users. It includes core documentation features, allowing IT teams to manage unlimited organizations, documentation, and client accounts.

The Select plan is priced at $36 per user per month and requires a 5-user minimum.

The Enterprise plan, at $42 per user per month, requires a 5-user minimum but offers an option for 1-4 users at $50-$99 per user.

All listed prices are for minimum 5 users on a 36-month term. The one-time activation fee cannot be waived.

Add-ons drive costs higher. Network Glue and MyGlue carry their own monthly fees. There is a one-time $545 fee for Standard Onboarding, $1,419 for Premier Onboarding, or IT Glue 360 at $1,485.

For a small internal IT team of two or three people, you're forced to pay for unused seats and lock into a three-year commitment. This pricing structure is designed for scaling MSPs, not agile startups.

Confluence Cloud Pricing

Confluence Cloud offers four tiers: Free ($0, up to 10 users), Standard ($5.42/user/month), Premium ($10.44/user/month), and Enterprise (custom pricing).

Confluence's hidden costs come from Marketplace apps. Features like advanced diagramming, reporting, workflow tools, and compliance tools are sold separately. These often carry their own monthly subscriptions and can add $2–$15 or more per user per month.

Atlassian Guard (identity management, SSO enforcement, audit logs) is a separate product required for enterprise security controls. For a breakdown of these layered costs, see Confluence Alternatives (2026): Platforms, Limits & Migration.

TCO Comparison

IT Glue prices based on Basic plan at $29/user/month. Confluence prices based on Standard plan with annual billing. Both exclude add-ons.

At small scale, Confluence's free tier is unbeatable. At 10–50 users, base pricing is comparable — but real-world costs diverge based on add-ons, Marketplace apps, and tier requirements. IT Glue's 36-month lock-in and mandatory onboarding fees add friction for teams that want to evaluate before committing.

Security, Compliance & Data Sovereignty

Confluence (Atlassian Cloud)

Atlassian has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification for the Trust Services Criteria of security, availability, and confidentiality of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, as well as ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 certifications for Jira and Confluence.

All data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2+ with perfect forward secrecy. Servers holding user data use full disk, industry-standard AES 256 encryption.

Data residency gives you control over where your in-scope app data for Jira, Confluence, and other Atlassian products is hosted. You can choose whether the data is hosted in a defined geographic location, such as Europe or the US. Available realms include EU (Frankfurt/Dublin), US (East/West), AU (Sydney), DE (Frankfurt), SG (Singapore), CA (Canada), IN (Mumbai), KR (Seoul), and CH (Zurich).

IT Glue

IT Glue is SOC 2 compliant. SOC 2 compliance means that third-party auditors have verified that IT Glue follows best practices with respect to security in terms of both infrastructure and process.

IT Glue does not publicly claim ISO 27001 or ISO 27018 certification. Data residency options cover US, EU, and Australia hosting regions — far narrower than Atlassian's nine-realm model.

Security is a core pillar, with strict user permissions and audit logs to track data usage and changes. The built-in password vault with IP access controls and SSO/SAML support is a genuine strength for teams managing client credentials. Confluence has no native password vaulting and should never be used to store plaintext credentials or API keys.

Winner: Confluence for breadth of certifications, data residency options, and regulated-industry support. IT Glue for credential-specific security controls.

Data Portability & Lock-in: Getting Your Data Out

This is where both platforms show their teeth. Getting data in is easy. Getting it out intact is a different story.

Exporting from IT Glue

IT Glue offers two export paths: the API and a full tenant export (ZIP file with Core and Flexible Assets as CSV, Documents as HTML, plus Passwords, Attachments, and Activity Logs).

The API is rate-limited to 3,000 requests per 5 minutes with a 10MB payload cap. For large MSPs, a full export can take hours of carefully throttled requests. Worse, the current migration tooling supports password folders flattened to a single level. Nested password folder hierarchies are lost. Permissions and access control lists are not preserved in API exports.

IT Glue does not provide clean API access to Documents in a format scripts can directly push into another platform. Documents are limited by how IT Glue renders them to HTML in the tenant export. Formatting — especially tables, inline images, and custom styling — often degrades.

Image links in Flexible Assets or Documents will likely break because they rely on signed AWS S3 URLs or internal relative paths.

For a deeper look at what breaks during an IT Glue export, see IT Glue to Hudu Migration: API Limits, Asset Mapping & What Breaks.

Exporting from Confluence

Confluence Cloud supports native XML and HTML space exports, PDF exports, and full-site backups. The REST API allows programmatic extraction of pages, attachments, comments, and labels.

The pain points: macros don't export cleanly (they render as XML elements that only make sense inside Confluence), inline images reference Confluence-hosted URLs, and page-tree hierarchies require reconstruction from parent-child relationships in the API response. Space-level PDF layout customizations do not apply to single-page exports, and concurrent exports are limited by server resources.

For full export details, see How to Export All Data from Confluence: Methods, Limits & Tools.

Lock-in Comparison

IT Glue's lock-in is higher. The 36-month contract, API gating behind higher tiers, and destructive export (flattened hierarchies, broken images, dropped permissions) create significant switching costs. Confluence's lock-in is primarily ecosystem-driven — Marketplace app dependencies and Jira integration depth make leaving expensive, but the data itself is more portable.

Use-Case-Based Recommendations

Don't try to force one tool to do the job of the other.

MSPs Managing Multiple Client Environments

Choose IT Glue. The multi-organization data model, built-in password vault, PSA/RMM integrations, and Flexible Asset templates are purpose-built for this workflow. Confluence can be forced to work, but you'll spend months building the structure that IT Glue provides out of the box.

Software Development Teams

Choose Confluence. The Jira integration alone is worth the decision. Real-time co-editing, page trees for product specs, and the Marketplace ecosystem for diagramming and code documentation are unmatched.

Internal IT Departments (Non-MSP)

This is the gray area. If your primary need is tracking hardware assets, passwords, SSL certs, and vendor configurations for a single organization, IT Glue works but is priced for MSPs — the 5-user minimum and 36-month term may not fit a small IT team. Consider IT Glue alternatives like Hudu (which offers self-hosted options) or Confluence with structured databases for lighter asset tracking.

Enterprise with Compliance Requirements

Choose Confluence. Atlassian's certification portfolio (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27018), nine-region data residency, and Atlassian Guard for identity management are significantly stronger than IT Glue's compliance posture.

Budget-Conscious Small Teams (< 10 Users)

Choose Confluence. The free tier supports up to 10 users with unlimited pages. IT Glue does not offer a free plan or free trial. The lowest entry point is approximately $1,740/year.

Teams Already in the Kaseya Ecosystem

Choose IT Glue. If you're running Autotask, Datto RMM, or Kaseya VSA, IT Glue's native bidirectional sync eliminates the integration tax you'd pay bolting Confluence into that stack.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Confluence

Strengths:

• Free tier for up to 10 users — no other enterprise wiki matches this
• Deep Atlassian ecosystem integration (Jira, Bitbucket, Trello, JSM)
• Massive Marketplace with 5,000+ apps for every workflow
• Data residency across 9+ global regions
• Real-time co-editing with inline comments and @mentions
• Low barrier to entry with flexible per-user pricing

Weaknesses:

• No native IT asset management — tracking configurations, passwords, or SSL certs requires third-party apps
• Per-user pricing compounds at scale — Marketplace apps often double the effective per-user cost
• Macro lock-in — heavily customized spaces using Marketplace macros become nearly impossible to migrate
• Data Center end-of-life forces cloud migration for self-hosted customers
• Prone to "wiki rot" and disorganized data sprawl without strict governance

IT Glue

Strengths:

• Purpose-built for IT documentation with relational asset tracking
• Built-in password vault with OTP, audit trails, and per-password access controls
• Multi-organization scoping is a first-class concept, not a workaround
• PSA/RMM integrations are native and bidirectional (on higher tiers)
• Forces strict documentation standards — less room to drift

Weaknesses:

• 36-month contract with a 5-user minimum and mandatory onboarding fee — significant commitment before you've validated the platform
• API access gated behind the Select tier ($36/user/month) — Basic plan users cannot programmatically access their own data
• Performance and speed issues: users report that IT Glue can be slow, especially when loading large client datasets or searching across multiple records
• Export degrades data — password folder hierarchies flatten, images break, permissions are dropped
• No self-hosted option — all data is in Kaseya's cloud
• Poor experience for writing long-form, unstructured documents

The Verdict

These tools serve different markets. The decision is not about which is "better" — it's about which problem you're solving.

Choose IT Glue if you are an MSP or managed IT provider managing multiple client environments, need a built-in password vault with per-client scoping, and run Autotask, ConnectWise, or Datto RMM as your PSA/RMM stack.

Choose Confluence if you are a software team, internal engineering org, or cross-functional business that needs a flexible knowledge base with deep Jira integration, real-time collaboration, and the ability to start free.

Do not choose IT Glue as a general-purpose wiki. Its structured data model is a strength for IT asset tracking but a constraint for freeform documentation. The editor is adequate, not great. If your content is primarily long-form process docs, product specs, or team knowledge, Confluence is more capable.

Do not choose Confluence as an IT asset management tool. You can build asset tracking using databases and page properties, but you'll spend weeks recreating what IT Glue provides out of the box — and you still won't have a password vault.

For the CTO skimming this page: If you're at a software company and IT Glue is still on your shortlist, you're probably solving the wrong problem. If you're running an MSP and Confluence is still on your shortlist, you probably need structure more than flexibility. The architectural gap between these tools is wide enough that a direct comparison is only relevant if you're an internal IT team deciding how to centralize documentation — and even then, the answer depends on whether your primary records are relational (assets, passwords, configs) or narrative (processes, specs, decisions).

The short version: Confluence is the better platform. IT Glue is the better tool. Buy the platform when many teams author knowledge. Buy the tool when technicians need operational truth.

If you're evaluating adjacent options — Notion for flexible docs, Hudu as a self-hosted IT Glue alternative, or SharePoint because it's bundled with Microsoft 365 — see our Confluence alternatives guide and IT Glue alternatives guide.

Migrating Between Confluence and IT Glue

If you're moving data between these platforms — or migrating off either one — the complexity isn't in the export. It's in the model mismatch.

Password vaults, Flexible Asset relationships, and PSA sync configurations have no direct equivalents across the two platforms. Standard export tools on both sides drop formatting, flatten hierarchies, or strip permissions. IT Glue's relational Flexible Assets have no native equivalent in Confluence — each asset type needs to be mapped to a Confluence page template or database, and Tag-based relationships between assets require manual or scripted reconstruction. Password data cannot be migrated into Confluence at all (no vault). Going the other direction, Confluence pages with macros render as raw XML in IT Glue's document editor.

At ClonePartner, we build custom migration pipelines that map IT Glue Flexible Assets into structured Confluence page properties or databases (or vice versa), handle API throttling on both sides to avoid hitting rate limits, and run parallel environments so your team never loses access during cutover. If you're planning a migration in either direction, we can scope the work in a 30-minute call.