14 posts tagged with "excalidraw"

Confluence holds your team's diagrams in two worlds, and the two don't talk to each other.

Text-defined diagrams — Mermaid and friends — are what AI speaks natively. They're source code, so a chat agent can read them, write them, and revise them. We shipped exactly that last week: an AI agent for Mermaid in Confluence.

Whiteboards are the other world. Freeform shapes, hand-drawn lines, arrows you drag where they need to go — the format that's actually intuitive to put in front of people. Every team has one: the architecture board on the team page, the incident flow everyone references, the onboarding map. And AI couldn't touch any of it. Ask a chat agent for a change to a whiteboard and you'd get a text description of a change, and someone still had to open the canvas and do it by hand.

That gap is why whiteboards go stale. Editing shapes one drag at a time is slow enough that nobody does it, and AI — the thing that was supposed to make maintenance cheap — had no way in.

The AI agent in Excalidraw Plus Whiteboards & AI Agent for Confluence closes the gap: the whiteboard stays what it always was — visual, intuitive, for people — but now you can operate it in plain language, from Confluence chat.

Every architecture review ends the same way: the team sketches a system on a whiteboard, someone takes a blurry phone photo, and the diagram is never seen again. The next sprint a new engineer joins, asks how the system fits together, and the whiteboard gets redrawn from memory — different every time.

The fix is to capture the architecture sketch on the ticket it describes, editable by anyone on the team, versioned with the issue. That's what Excalidraw Diagrams plus Whiteboards for Jira does: it adds a full drawing canvas to every Jira issue, with 229 bundled shape libraries and freehand drawing. The same experience is available in Confluence via Excalidraw plus Whiteboards for Confluence. This guide walks through running an architecture session that produces a saved, shareable diagram.

Need diagram tools for Confluence without paying for a large team? NGPILOT's three diagramming apps — Mermaid Plus, Excalidraw Plus, and Graphviz Charts — are all free for up to 10 users. This guide compares them so you can pick the right free diagram plugin for your Confluence.

Adding diagrams to Confluence pages helps teams communicate architecture, processes, and workflows visually. This guide covers the three main approaches to creating diagrams in Confluence and helps you choose the right tool for your needs.

When teams need to add diagrams to Confluence, two tools come up again and again: Excalidraw and draw.io (also known as diagrams.net). Both are popular Confluence diagram apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, but they take fundamentally different approaches to visual communication — and picking the wrong one wastes time and licensing budget.

The short version: for live whiteboarding, brainstorming, and freeform sketching, Excalidraw wins. For formal, finalized diagrams (UML, network topology, BPMN), draw.io is the better fit. Most teams end up needing both — and the rest of this post is the honest, feature-by-feature comparison so you can make the right call for your workflow.

Architecture diagrams are the backbone of technical documentation. They show how services communicate, where data flows, and which infrastructure components underpin your system. When a new engineer joins your team, the first thing they look for is an architecture diagram. When something breaks in production, the incident response starts at the same diagram.

Yet many teams store their architecture diagrams in external tools -- draw.io, Lucidchart, or even desktop applications -- detached from the documentation where they matter most. Confluence is where your runbooks live, where architecture decision records are written, and where post-mortem discussions happen. Keeping your architecture diagrams inside Confluence eliminates context-switching and ensures diagrams evolve alongside the written documentation they illustrate.

This guide walks through three ways to create architecture diagrams directly in Confluence, using NGPILOT apps designed for different workflows. Every Mermaid example is copy-paste ready, so you can insert it into a Confluence page and see the result immediately.

Wireframes are the backbone of every user interface design process. They let product managers, designers, and engineers align on layout, content hierarchy, and interaction flow before writing a single line of code. With Excalidraw Plus for Confluence, you can create wireframes and UI mockups directly inside your Confluence pages, keeping design artifacts next to requirements, user stories, and technical specs.

Looking for the best diagram tool for Confluence? Confluence has no built-in diagramming, so every team adds a Marketplace app — but the right choice depends entirely on what you draw and how you prefer to work. This guide compares the three strongest options — Mermaid Plus Diagrams & AI Agent for Confluence, Excalidraw Plus Whiteboards & AI Agent for Confluence, and Graphviz Charts for Confluence — so you can pick the diagram tool that fits your team instead of guessing.

Flowcharts are one of the most common diagrams teams add to Confluence pages — for process documentation, onboarding, decision trees, and troubleshooting guides. This article shows three ways to create them using NGPILOT apps.

Excalidraw-powered whiteboards let teams sketch ideas directly inside Jira issues. This quick guide covers creating boards, saving snapshots, and sharing with team members.

Every engineering team needs diagrams in Jira — architecture decisions on epics, bug reproduction flows on tickets, wireframes on stories. But Jira has no built-in diagramming. You either paste screenshots from external tools or install a marketplace app.

We built two diagram apps for Jira: Mermaid+ Diagrams for Jira for text-based diagrams using Mermaid syntax (flowcharts, sequence diagrams, ER models, C4 architecture), and Excalidraw Diagrams + Whiteboards for Jira for freeform drawing with 229 built-in shape libraries. In this post we compare both against every alternative on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Excalidraw in Confluence brings hand-drawn style diagrams and whiteboards to your wiki. This guide compares Excalidraw Plus vs draw.io — features, libraries, and which fits your team's needs.