diagramHub vs Confluence: Where should your team's draw.io diagrams live?

September 16, 2026 • 6 min read • diagramHub Team

Many teams draw their architecture, process and infrastructure diagrams with draw.io inside Confluence. It is a natural choice: Confluence is already the wiki, and the draw.io app puts a diagram editor right on the page.

It works well for a few diagrams. Once a company has hundreds of them, spread across dozens of spaces, the same questions keep coming up: Where is the current version of the network diagram? Who is allowed to change it? Why are there three copies?

This article compares Confluence (with the draw.io app) and diagramHub for exactly this job: managing draw.io diagrams across an organization. For a quick overview of all three options, see our draw.io vs Confluence vs diagramHub feature comparison.

The short answer

• Choose Confluence if diagrams are a small part of your documentation, every diagram belongs to exactly one page, and everyone who needs them already has a Confluence license.
• Choose diagramHub if diagrams are a knowledge asset of their own: you want one place to find, govern and version them, share them with people outside Confluence, and embed the same diagram in Confluence, Azure DevOps, GitHub and elsewhere.

You don't have to pick one. Many teams keep Confluence as the wiki and use diagramHub as the source of truth for diagrams, embedded as live images on Confluence pages.

Where the diagrams are stored

Confluence: A draw.io diagram is stored as an attachment of the page it was created on. The page is the container. If the page is moved, archived or deleted, the diagram goes with it. Reusing a diagram on another page means either embedding it by reference or, often in practice, copying it, and copies start to drift apart.

diagramHub: Diagrams are first-class objects, organized in collections and folders by team, system or project. A diagram doesn't depend on any page. It can be referenced from as many places as you like, and there is always exactly one current version.

Finding diagrams

Confluence: Search is page-centric. You find the page and then hope the right diagram is on it. Labels and macros help, but there is no overview of "all diagrams in the company".

diagramHub: Search runs across all diagrams and their documentation. Every diagram can carry its own Markdown documentation (context, decisions, owners), so the knowledge around a diagram is stored next to it and is searchable too.

Access control

Confluence: Permissions follow spaces and pages. That is fine for documents, but diagrams often need different rules: an architecture diagram may be readable by everyone and editable only by the architecture team, regardless of which page shows it.

diagramHub: Access is managed per collection with role-based permissions, and sign-in works with Microsoft Entra ID SSO (as well as personal Microsoft accounts and email). Organization admins manage users and Editor licenses centrally.

Version history and audit

Confluence: Each save creates a new attachment version. You can restore older versions, but browsing visual history of a diagram is cumbersome, and changes are mixed with the page history.

diagramHub: Every diagram has its own version history, so you can open, compare and restore earlier states. Changes are recorded in an audit log, which helps during reviews and audits.

Collaboration and sharing

Confluence: Real-time co-editing is available for Confluence pages. Sharing with people outside your organization usually means giving them Confluence access or exporting an image.

diagramHub:

• Real-time collaboration with live cursors in the draw.io editor
• Public view links for read-only access
• Temporary guest editor links, so external partners can edit a diagram without an account
• Live embeds: copy the image link or Markdown snippet from the "Embed" tab and paste it into Confluence, an Azure DevOps wiki, a GitHub README or any other tool. When the diagram changes, every embed shows the new version automatically.

AI assistants

diagramHub has a built-in MCP server. Claude, GitHub Copilot in VS Code, Claude Code and other MCP clients can search, read and update your diagrams, always with your permissions. A version is saved before every AI edit, so every change can be undone.

Licensing and cost

Confluence: Marketplace apps such as draw.io are licensed for the whole Confluence user tier, so you pay for the app for every Confluence user, whether they draw diagrams or not. On top of that, anyone who should see a diagram needs Confluence access.

diagramHub: You pay 10 EUR per Editor per month, only for people who create and edit diagrams. Viewer licenses in your organization are unlimited. Personal accounts can use up to 3 diagrams for free, and every organization can start with a 14-day free trial without a credit card.

Hosting and data protection

Confluence: Atlassian Cloud, or Data Center if you run it yourself.

diagramHub: The SaaS is hosted in Germany and GDPR compliant. For regulated or air-gapped environments, diagramHub can be self-hosted with Docker on your own infrastructure, and it is also available on the Azure Marketplace.

Side by side

Using both together

The most common setup we see is not "either or":

1. Keep Confluence for written documentation.
2. Move diagrams to diagramHub. Existing .drawio files can be imported.
3. Embed the diagrams on Confluence pages using the live image link from the "Embed" tab.

Your pages look the same as before, but every diagram now has an owner, a history and a single source of truth.

Conclusion

Confluence is a great wiki, and the draw.io app makes it easy to put a diagram on a page. Once diagrams become an asset of their own, with many owners, many readers and many places where they appear, a dedicated hub pays off. diagramHub gives them a home with structure, search, permissions and version history, while still showing up wherever your team works.

Try the live demo or start a free trial to see how your diagrams look in diagramHub.