How to Link Confluence With Jira 2026 Easily

Open Confluence and look at the "For you" landing page. If Jira Software or Business projects on the same Atlassian domain already show up there as recent projects with open work-item counts, the two products are on one Cloud site.

According to Atlassian's own documentation, products deployed to the same Cloud site are connected through app links automatically — there is nothing to configure. If that's your situation, skip ahead to inserting a Jira link or macro in a Confluence page; the next few steps don't apply to you.

A manual link is only needed when Jira and Confluence sit on different Cloud sites, or when one of them is a self-managed Data Center instance. Atlassian's current admin interface puts this under Settings (the gear icon) > Jira apps > App Links.

Older instances, and this recording, show it filed under Integrations as "Application links," next to Compass and DVCS accounts — Atlassian has since reorganized this screen, so look in both places if one comes up empty. Either way, this page lists every external application currently linked to Jira.

Start a new link and choose a direct app link, not a tunnelled one — a tunnel only applies to a Data Center instance sitting behind your own network. Paste the target site's URL (a Confluence Cloud site follows the pattern yoursite.atlassian.net/wiki) into the Application URL field and continue. Jira needs that address to be publicly reachable over HTTPS; it validates it and pulls basic details about the target automatically.

Give the link an Application Name your team will recognize later; Application Type defaults to Generic Application, which is correct here. Jira now picks the strongest authentication method the two apps both support on its own, typically OAuth or OAuth with impersonation if the sites share a user base, so the consumer key and shared secret fields below are leftovers from an older manual OAuth flow and can stay blank for a standard connection. Confirm, and the link is active immediately.

With a same-site connection (automatic) or an app link (manual) in place, paste a Jira work-item URL directly into a Confluence page and it converts on its own into a Jira work items macro showing live status. You can also open the macro browser or type /jira for a filtered list of items instead of a single one. It runs the other way too: open a Jira work item, use Link, and search by Confluence page title to attach that page to it — the reference shows up in the item's Links section from then on and stays live instead of going stale like a plain hyperlink.

A link only creates the possibility of a connection; someone still has to attach the right page to the right work item. A simple team convention works best: every epic gets linked to its planning or requirements page the moment it's created, and a major spec change gets a note back on the epic. Keep this up for a sprint or two and new team members find both the ticket and its context in either tool without asking around.

Linked pages and work items don't correct themselves when a project reorganizes, a page gets archived, or an epic gets split. Build a short check into sprint retro or backlog grooming: does the linked doc on each active epic still match what the team is building. It takes a few minutes and heads off the slow drift where the Confluence link on a two-year-old epic points at a spec nobody has opened since the project's first week.