ShellYard vs Confluence

Runbooks where the work happens —
not in a browser tab.

Confluence is a great company-wide wiki. It's a bad runbook tool: the docs are open in one app, the SSH session in another, the AI in a third. ShellYard keeps the runbook, the connection, and the AI in the same window — and the AI drafts runbooks from your real session output.

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Free forever · Documents on Team+ · Per-Space audit + crypto

Today

Browser · Confluence

Terminal · SSH

$ ssh prod-db-02

postgres=#

Browser · ChatGPT

With ShellYard

ShellYard · ops-east

● db-failover.md pg-replica-02 · SSH ✨ Magellan

# Postgres failover

$ pg_ctl promote

server promoting

Drafted by Magellan

One window · three tabs · one Space

Quick decision

Pick the right tool for the doc you're writing.

Stay on Confluence if

You need a company-wide wiki for HR, legal, finance, onboarding, and product specs.
Atlassian Suite (Jira, Bitbucket, Trello) is non-negotiable in your stack.
You don't have a separate "infrastructure runbook" use-case worth carving out.
Real-time collaborative editing and threaded page comments are core to how the team works.

Switch (or supplement) with ShellYard if

Your runbooks rot — pages from 2023 still describe a system that was migrated last fall.
You want docs scoped to the systems (one Space per client / env / project, not one global graph).
You want the AI to draft the runbook from the actual session output, not from a blank page.
You want per-Space customer-managed KMS for sensitive technical docs — not a single org-wide key.

Feature by feature

Two different tools, honestly mapped.

ShellYard advantage Confluence advantage Parity

Feature	Confluence	ShellYard
Doc scope	Generic company-wide wiki — HR, marketing, product, ops all share one graph	Per-Space runbooks bound to the SSH hosts, DBs, and APIs they describe
SSH / RDP / HTTP / DB in the same window	— web wiki only	✓ desktop workspace, one window, one search
AI drafts a runbook from your real session output	Atlassian Intelligence can summarize an existing page	✓ Magellan ingests SSH / HTTP / DB output and writes the doc
Per-Space customer-managed KMS (CMK)	Org-wide encryption-at-rest	✓ on Team+ — every Shared Space gets its own CMK
Per-Space audit log (actor / action / target)	Org audit on Premium+	✓ every tier (CSV export on Team+)
Side-by-side diff viewer on every version	Linear version history	✓ 90 days on Team, unlimited on Enterprise
IPAM (subnets + hosts) inside the doc store	— third-party Marketplace app	✓ first-class, with Subnet Calculator + Nmap writeback
Search built for technical content	Full-text across every space	✓ per-Space, scoped to the systems the team owns
Markdown / WYSIWYG editor	✓ rich editor	✓ Tiptap that round-trips Markdown
Public share links	✓ (Premium+)	✓ password gate, expiry, view count
PDF export	✓	✓
Page / folder hierarchy	✓ spaces and child pages	✓ folder tree per Space
Native desktop app	— web only (mobile apps for read/comment)	✓ macOS / Windows / Linux, code-signed
Inline page comments + threaded discussion	✓ deep collaboration model	— per-Space audit captures who changed what; no real-time threads
Macros, smart links, page-template marketplace	✓ Atlassian Marketplace	— kind-aware starter templates only
Jira / Bitbucket / Trello integration	✓ Atlassian suite	—
Mobile apps	✓ iOS / Android	— desktop only
Hosted-for-you, browser-accessible from any device	✓ Atlassian Cloud	— desktop install required
Pricing	Free 10-user · Standard $5.16 · Premium $9.73 · Enterprise (annual, contact)	Free · Pro $24 · Team $49 · Enterprise $99 — documents on Team+

Reflects publicly documented Confluence Cloud capability at time of comparison.

Where Confluence still wins

Don't switch for these reasons.

ShellYard is scoped to operations docs that live next to the systems they describe. For everything else a wiki does, Confluence is the better tool — and we'd rather you keep it.

Company-wide collaboration. HR policies, marketing decks, product specs, onboarding pages — the broad-scope wiki use-case.
Atlassian integration. Jira tickets, Bitbucket repos, Trello boards, smart links across the suite.
Mobile apps. iOS and Android. ShellYard is desktop-only.
Inline comments and threaded discussion. The collaborative-editing flow Confluence is built around.
Macro and template ecosystem. Hundreds of Marketplace apps; deep page-template library.
Hosted-for-you, browser-accessible. No install, reachable from any device with a login.

Run both

Keep the wiki. Add the runbook workspace.

The two tools have different scopes, so the cleanest migration is no migration at all — keep Confluence for everything broad and let ShellYard own the ops docs that need to live next to the systems.

1 Keep Confluence for company-wide docs. HR pages, product specs, onboarding, marketing — anything that isn't bound to a specific host, database, or API stays where it is.
2 Use ShellYard Spaces for ops + runbook docs scoped to systems. One Space per client, environment, or project. The runbook for prod-east-failover sits in the same Space as the SSH host, the Postgres connection, and the HTTP smoke-test that the runbook describes.
3 Link from Confluence pages to the ShellYard runbook URL. Public share links (password-gated, expiring) give the wiki a stable URL to point at — and ShellYard exports the runbook as Markdown if you ever want to flatten it back into Confluence.

Before you switch

The questions you'd ask first.

Can I import my existing Confluence pages?

Yes — Confluence Cloud exports any page or space as Markdown (or HTML, which converts cleanly). Paste the Markdown into a ShellYard document and the Tiptap editor renders it; tables, code blocks, and headings round-trip. We do not need an OAuth integration in either direction — your data stays on your machine the entire way through.

Should I replace Confluence entirely?

For operations runbooks: yes — that's the whole pitch. For company-wide wiki content (HR policies, product specs, marketing playbooks, onboarding pages), no. The two tools have different scopes. Most teams that move ops docs into ShellYard keep Confluence for everything that isn't bound to a specific system.

What does per-Space CMK actually mean for documents?

Documents shared into a Space land in DynamoDB under AWS-managed encryption-at-rest. Secrets in the same Space (vault credentials, environment variables, OAuth tokens) wrap under that Space's customer-managed KMS key on Team and Enterprise. Off-boarding a client means cryptographic erasure of the Space CMK, not a row-by-row delete. See /security/ for the full crypto map.

How long is version history kept?

90 days on Team, unlimited on Enterprise (subject to the per-Space byte cap). Every version is browsable side-by-side with a structural diff — the green/red shape an engineer expects from git, not a "show me the previous revision" link.

Can multiple people edit the same runbook at once?

Not in real time — ShellYard isn't a collaborative editor. Each member edits in their own session, and the per-Space audit log captures who changed what at the field level. For ops runbooks this is usually what you want: one engineer owns the doc during an incident, and the audit row is the contemporaneous record of what they changed.

How does search compare?

Per-Space search is built in — title, body, kind (note / runbook / IPAM), tags. It's deliberately scoped to the Space, which matches how ops teams actually think ("the failover runbook for prod-east") and not how a global wiki works ("everything in the company"). Confluence's cross-space full-text search is broader. If you need that breadth, keep Confluence for company-wide docs and use ShellYard for the ops Space.

Try a Space for your team's runbooks.

Install. Open one SSH host you already use. Click "Draft runbook" — Magellan writes the doc from the session output, and it lands in the same Space as the connection. Keep Confluence for the rest. If the runbook doesn't end up better than the one rotting in your wiki, uninstall.