The limitations of Confluence page statuses (and what to do instead)

Confluence is a powerful tool for creating and sharing knowledge across teams. One of its most popular features for adding structure is page statuses. With just a few clicks, you can label a page as Draft, In Review, or Final, giving readers a sense of where the content stands.

It sounds like a simple solution for approvals and content quality. But here’s the catch: page statuses are not real workflows.

We covered the broader challenges of approvals in Confluence in this article, but here we’ll focus on page statuses specifically — what they offer, where they fall short, and how Breeze takes content approvals in Confluence to the next level.

What Confluence page statuses offer

Page statuses are designed to provide quick context for readers. At the top of a Confluence page, you can add a banner that says Draft, In Progress, In Review, or any other label you create.

Imagine you’re drafting a new onboarding guide for your team. You don’t want colleagues to mistake it for a final version, so you mark the page with a Draft status. Later, you switch it to In approval when you ask a teammate to check it, and finally change it to Final once you’re confident it’s ready to use.

Here’s how that looks in Confluence:

This can be useful when you want to:

• Signal that a page isn’t finished yet.
• Highlight that a document is under review.
• Mark something as ready to share widely.

The simplicity is what makes statuses appealing: no complex setup, no technical knowledge required. For small teams with light documentation needs, this may feel like “good enough.” A banner communicates intent, and everyone moves on.

But the trouble starts when statuses are expected to act as workflows.

The limitations of page statuses

Confluence page statuses look like workflows, but they’re really just visual indicators. And when teams start relying on them as if they were actual processes, problems show up quickly.

The first issue is the hard limit of five statuses per space. While this sounds flexible because you can name them anything you want, it quickly becomes a problem. There’s no built-in guidance, so every team defines statuses differently. One space might use Draft → In Review → Final, while another space chooses Open → Ongoing → Completed. The result is inconsistency across the organization, and no clear workflow logic behind what the statuses mean.

Another headache is that statuses must be configured separately for each space. That means admins spend time recreating the same statuses over and over, and consistency across the organization becomes nearly impossible.

On top of that, statuses don’t actually do anything. A page marked In Review behaves exactly the same as one marked Final. There’s no workflow logic, no enforcement, and nothing stopping someone from skipping straight from draft to published.

And then there’s the issue of status maintenance. If an admin edits or removes a status, pages that used the old one don’t update automatically. They continue to display the outdated status banner, even though it no longer exists in the configuration. The result: inconsistent signals, and even more confusion about which pages are current.

Finally, there’s no global visibility. You can’t pull up a list of all “In Review” pages across your Confluence instance. Managers and compliance teams are left guessing what content is waiting for approval, or worse — they don’t realize content went live unreviewed at all.

Imagine, for example, a new security policy page. Someone updates it, tags the status as Final, and publishes it without review. Employees follow the outdated instructions for weeks until someone notices the mistake. The banner at the top gave everyone confidence, but in reality it was only a visual indicator — nothing more.

In short: statuses show intent, but they don’t enforce process.

We explored other common workarounds like @mentions and page restrictions in our earlier post. Page statuses may look simpler, but as you’ve seen, they come with their own limitations.

Why this matters for teams

At first glance, the limitations of page statuses might seem like minor inconveniences. But when teams depend on Confluence as their primary knowledge base, these gaps start to cause real problems.

Outdated or unreviewed content can sneak into spaces and stay there unnoticed. A page marked Final might still contain mistakes or incomplete information, misleading readers who trust the banner at the top. Over time, people lose confidence in the content — and once that trust is gone, it’s hard to win back.

For compliance-driven industries, the risks are even greater. Without enforced review steps or an audit trail, it’s impossible to prove that critical documents went through the right approvals before being published. This can lead to costly compliance failures or internal audits that reveal gaps in process.

Even for teams outside regulated environments, the lack of accountability adds friction. Managers and admins can’t easily see what’s ready to publish and what’s still in review. Instead of focusing on creating and maintaining high-quality content, they spend their time chasing updates or second-guessing what’s reliable.

In short, relying on statuses as if they were workflows doesn’t just create inefficiency — it undermines the very purpose of Confluence as a trusted source of truth.

How Breeze turns Confluence page statuses into real approval and review workflows

Where Confluence page statuses are just visual indicators, Breeze offers a structured approach to content approvals — one that’s both simple and powerful.

At the core of Breeze are working copies. This solves one of Confluence’s biggest limitations: in Confluence, a page must be published before teammates can see and collaborate on it. That means unreviewed changes often go live just so others can give feedback.

Breeze flips this model. Instead of editing the live page, authors create a working copy. This copy can be updated collaboratively, reviewed, and even passed through multi-step review and approval — all while the original page remains untouched. Only once the working copy is approved are the changes published back to the original page.

👉 You can read more about working copies in the Breeze documentation.

On top of this, Breeze uses six predefined statuses tailored specifically for two workflows:

• Approving content updates
• Reviewing outdated content

Because the statuses are predefined and consistent across all spaces, Breeze can offer dedicated views that show exactly which pages are in draft, under review, approved, or outdated. No admin overhead, no per-space configuration — just a workflow that works out of the box.

This out-of-the-box approach gets teams started immediately, while still being flexible enough to support compliance-driven industries. With additional features like approval presets, due dates, notifications, and audit logs, Breeze provides the accountability Confluence lacks, while remaining simple enough for everyday use and robust enough for regulated industries.

In short: Confluence merges editing with publishing and reduces statuses to visual indicators. In contrast, Breeze separates the entire content lifecycle with working copies and structured workflows — turning statuses into process. That’s what makes approvals in Confluence finally possible.

Conclusion

Confluence page statuses are helpful as visual indicators, but they were never designed to manage approvals. They can’t enforce review steps, don’t provide visibility across spaces, and blur the line between editing and publishing. For teams that depend on Confluence as their knowledge base, that creates unnecessary risk.

Breeze fixes this. With working copies, six predefined statuses, and structured approval workflows, it adds the missing approval layer to Confluence. Out-of-the-box views, notifications, and audit logs ensure that only approved, reliable content goes live — without adding complexity.

👉 If your team has ever struggled with unreviewed content slipping into Confluence, it’s time to try Breeze. Explore Breeze on the Atlassian Marketplace and see how simple approval workflows can be.