How to build approval workflows in Confluence

Confluence is a powerful platform for creating, sharing, and managing content across teams. It’s where product teams draft specifications, HR teams publish policies, and marketing teams collaborate on campaign pages.

But there’s one common pain point: content quality control.

Without proper approval workflows in Confluence, spaces can quickly fill with:

• Pages published before they’re ready,
• Typos or outdated information that hurt trust,
• Inconsistent formatting and tone across teams,
• No clear record of who approved what or when.

That’s why many teams ask: “How do we add approval workflows in Confluence?”

Why Confluence needs approval workflows

Confluence is built for collaboration, but when everyone can publish freely, things can get messy.

Common content quality challenges in Confluence

Confluence makes it incredibly easy for anyone in the team to create and publish content. While that openness is one of its strengths, it can also create problems if there’s no structure around the review process. Drafts sometimes go live without proper checks, leading to small but damaging mistakes such as typos or formatting inconsistencies. Over time, different authors may also write in different styles, which makes the overall knowledge base feel inconsistent and harder to read. And when information is updated without oversight, it’s easy for outdated or conflicting content to remain online, leaving readers unsure which version is correct. These kinds of issues may seem minor on the surface, but they undermine the credibility of your documentation and reduce trust in Confluence as a reliable single source of truth.

In practice, teams often run into problems like:

• Drafts being published without any review.
• Inconsistent formatting and tone across different spaces.
• Conflicting or outdated pages staying online and confusing readers.

Risks of publishing without approvals

The risks of skipping approvals go beyond just a messy wiki. In regulated industries, publishing unreviewed content can lead to compliance breaches and real business consequences. Even in less regulated settings, inaccurate documentation causes confusion, slows down work, and forces teams to waste time double-checking facts. When multiple versions of the truth coexist, decision-making suffers and trust in the knowledge base erodes. Ultimately, without a structured approval process, Confluence shifts from being a central hub for reliable information into a cluttered repository where readers never know if what they’re seeing is accurate and up to date.

Summarized, the key risks include:

• Compliance violations when policies and documentation go unchecked.
• Confusion and inefficiency caused by inaccurate or contradictory content.
• Loss of trust in Confluence as a reliable single source of truth.

Approval workflows help solve these challenges by introducing structure, accountability, and consistency to the Confluence review process.

What Confluence offers natively

Confluence doesn’t include a built-in approval workflow, but many teams try to work around this by combining existing features. The most common methods are @mentions in comments, page restrictions, and page statuses.

1. Using @mentions and comments for reviews

A very common way to request a review in Confluence is by tagging colleagues in the comments using @username. The author writes the page, drops a comment like “@Anna can you approve this?”, and waits for feedback.

This approach is quick and simple, but it falls apart as soon as your team grows. Notifications get missed, there’s no reliable record of who approved or rejected a change, and nothing actually enforces that a review must happen before publishing. In practice, it’s more of a courtesy than a real approval workflow.

2. Using permissions and restrictions to control publishing

Another workaround is restricting who can publish pages by modifying the view and editing permissions. In Confluence, you can go to the share menu (Share > General access > Restricted) and set editing or viewing rights for a smaller group of “approvers.” Authors prepare drafts in a restricted state, and once approved manually, an admin could ‘publish’ the changes by removing the restrictions.

While this does prevent just anyone from updating content live, it also undermines the collaborative spirit of Confluence. Instead of enabling open contributions, it funnels publishing power into the hands of a few people — which often creates bottlenecks due to the enormous permission management overhead. Worse, there’s no workflow logic or audit log, so even if something was approved, there’s no record of when and by whom.

3. Using page statuses to signal review progress

Confluence Cloud also offers page statuses, where you can label a page as “Draft,” “In approval,” or Verified.” On the surface, this looks like a review system: readers see a banner at the top of the page showing its status.

But in reality, page statuses are little more than decorative labels. Each space is limited to just five statuses, and every space must be configured separately — which quickly turns into an admin headache. Even more importantly, statuses don’t actually do anything. A page marked as “In approval” behaves exactly the same as one marked ”Verified.” There’s no workflow logic, no enforcement, and no dedicated views tailored to the meaning of a status. They’re useful for signaling intent, but not for managing structured approvals.

👉 These native methods are fine for lightweight collaboration, but they simply don’t scale. They lack the structure, accountability, and automation that teams need when accuracy and compliance really matter. That’s why many organizations end up looking for an Atlassian Marketplace app to add true approval workflows to Confluence.

Breeze’s unique approach: working copies

Most third-party apps in the Atlassian Marketplace that add approvals to Confluence share the same limitation as Confluence itself: a page must be published before its updated content can be reviewed. This means that unapproved drafts are already visible in your knowledge base, blurring the line between draft and final content.

Breeze takes a completely different approach. At the heart of Breeze is the concept of working copies. Instead of editing the live page, Breeze creates a private clone of the published page whenever you want to make changes. This working copy becomes your safe editing environment.

In a working copy, authors can collaborate freely without worrying about unfinished drafts leaking into the original document. Once the content is ready, the working copy is submitted into an approval workflow. Only after it has been approved does Breeze automatically publish the changes back to the original page.

This separation of editing, approvals, and publishing eliminates the biggest downside of both Confluence’s native tools and other approval apps. Drafted content never goes live until it is reviewed and approved. For teams where accuracy, consistency, and compliance are critical, that difference is huge.

Beyond working copies: flexible approval workflows

Working copies are the foundation, but Breeze also builds a complete approval system around them. Approvals can be set up as simple single sign-offs, as group approvals where multiple reviewers must give a thumbs up, or as multi-step approval workflows — for example, a peer review followed by a manager approval. This flexibility allows teams to adapt workflows to their exact needs.

To save time, admins can also create approval presets that standardize processes for all pages within a space. Instead of allowing users to choose approvers, admins can apply a workflow preset and know the right approver groups are determined for all documents.

Breeze also addresses a common frustration in native Confluence: approvals getting lost or delayed. With due dates and notifications, reviewers receive clear reminders, keeping the process moving. Content owners don’t need to chase down colleagues — Breeze does the nudging for them.

While every approval advancement or rejection is recorded in page comments, changes of the document status are recorded in the audit log, providing the transparency that compliance teams demand. Instead of relying on informal “@mention” trails or hoping someone remembers who last reviewed a page, teams have a reliable record of who approved what and when.

Finally, Breeze provides clear views of documents under approval. Authors and reviewers can instantly see what’s pending, what’s been approved, and what’s live. This kind of visibility is something page statuses alone can’t deliver.

In practice, this means that:

• A compliance team can require multiple managers to approve a policy update before it replaces the published version.
• A marketing team can assign due dates so campaign content is reviewed before launch day.
• A knowledge base team can roll out the same approval workflow across dozens of spaces without extra admin effort.

Breeze doesn’t just add approvals into Confluence — it reshapes the whole process into something scalable, accountable, and safe.

Conclusion: making Confluence approvals easy

Confluence is excellent for collaboration, but its native approval options are limited and difficult to scale. For teams that need reliable Confluence approval workflows, Breeze provides the structure missing in the standard toolset.

With its working copies approach, Breeze separates editing, reviewing, and publishing — ensuring only approved content makes it live.

👉 Explore Breeze on the Atlassian Marketplace to see how it can improve your team’s Confluence document management.