An honest comparison of Confluence and SharePoint as a knowledge base for Microsoft 365 teams, including where Confluence genuinely fits better and how to get a Confluence-style article experience without leaving SharePoint.
If your team runs on Microsoft 365 but keeps hearing that Confluence is the "real" knowledge base, you are right to question the move before you make it. Confluence is a genuinely good product, and for some teams it is the better choice. For many Microsoft 365 organisations, though, switching means paying for and securing a second platform to solve a problem you can fix where your content already lives. This is an honest comparison: what each does well, where Confluence really does fit better, and how to decide.
What Confluence does well
Confluence has earned its reputation. It was built from the ground up as an article system, so the authoring experience is smooth, the page tree and linking model are designed for knowledge rather than documents, and the editing feels purpose-made. It has a deep ecosystem of integrations, and it is tightly woven into the Atlassian suite, so teams already living in Jira get a connected experience that is hard to match from outside. If your engineering organisation runs on Jira and Bitbucket, Confluence sitting next to them is a real, tangible advantage. None of that is marketing; it is why Confluence is popular.
Where Confluence genuinely fits better
Being fair about this matters, so here is the honest version. Confluence is often the better choice when your organisation is already deep in the Atlassian ecosystem and wants knowledge tightly coupled to Jira workflows. It can fit better when your primary authors live outside Microsoft 365 day to day, or when you specifically want Confluence's particular authoring model and the third-party apps built around it. And if your team already knows and likes Confluence and has no strong reason to consolidate, the switching cost of moving them off it can outweigh the benefit. If those describe you, Confluence may well be the right answer, and you should not let anyone talk you out of a tool that fits.
Where staying on SharePoint wins
For a Microsoft 365 organisation, the calculus often runs the other way, and the reasons are practical rather than tribal.
Your knowledge already lives in Microsoft 365, with identity, permissions, retention, and search already governed there. Adopting Confluence means standing up a second platform: new identity to manage, new access controls to get right, new licences to pay for, and a fresh place for content to be secured and audited. It also creates a second source of truth. The moment some knowledge lives in Confluence and some in SharePoint, the two start to drift, and "which system has the current answer?" becomes a daily friction. Consolidation has real value, and a migration spends it. There is also the simple cost and change-management reality: you are already paying for SharePoint, and moving a whole organisation's knowledge and habits to a new tool is a project, not a weekend.
The usual reason teams look at Confluence is not that SharePoint cannot host knowledge, it is that SharePoint lacks a polished article experience out of the box. That is a real gap, but it is a narrower one than "switch everything," and it can be closed in place.
The third option: a Confluence-style experience inside SharePoint
The choice is often framed as binary, stay on a clumsy SharePoint setup or migrate to Confluence, but there is a third option. You can add the article experience SharePoint lacks without leaving Microsoft 365. That is what Athena's Knowledge Base webpart is built for: a self-provisioning rich-text article catalogue with search, attachments, and deep-linking, the Confluence-style article experience, running inside your existing SharePoint. You get the smooth article model people want Confluence for, while keeping one platform, one identity, one source of truth, and the licences you already pay for.
The point is not that this beats Confluence for everyone, because it does not. The point is that "SharePoint's article experience is weak" and "we must migrate to Confluence" are two different statements, and the gap between them is exactly the option most comparisons leave out.
How to decide
Be honest about which world you live in. If you are an Atlassian-centric organisation, or your authors and workflows already orbit Jira, look hard at Confluence. If you are a Microsoft 365 organisation whose main objection to SharePoint is the article experience rather than the platform, the cheaper and less disruptive fix is to add that experience natively and keep your knowledge consolidated. Decide on the basis of where your work actually happens, not on a vendor's claim that one tool is universally right.
Where to go next
The best knowledge base is usually the one that keeps your content in one place your team already trusts. To weigh it up, read SharePoint as a knowledge base: what works and what breaks, see how to build it natively, and explore the wider SharePoint knowledge base approach. When you want to try a Confluence-style article experience on your own Microsoft 365 tenant, you can try it free for 21 days.
Athena adds policy management, a knowledge base, org chart, noticeboard and more to the SharePoint your team already uses. Per-tenant pricing, no separate SaaS.