Smart Tables and Smart Images for Confluence are now available for both Atlassian Government Cloud (AGC) and Atlassian Isolated Cloud (IC). They help teams work with structured information and visual documentation within Confluence.

This guide explains the differences between these environments, what to check when evaluating apps, and where Smart Tables and Smart Images can fit into your workflows.

What is Atlassian Government Cloud?

Atlassian Government Cloud is a separate cloud environment for eligible U.S. government agencies and organizations working with the U.S. government on government-related work. Atlassian describes AGC as FedRAMP Moderate authorized.

For Confluence users, it provides an environment for organizing documentation, sharing knowledge, and supporting collaboration around government work. App selection also needs to account for AGC availability and feature support.

Read Atlassian’s Government Cloud overview for eligibility and platform information.

What is Atlassian Isolated Cloud?

Atlassian Isolated Cloud provides a dedicated cloud environment managed by Atlassian for organizations with strict security, compliance, or data isolation requirements.

It includes dedicated compute, storage, and networking. Atlassian also documents data egress blocked by default and customer-managed encryption keys.

For teams evaluating Confluence extensions, this makes deployment compatibility an essential part of the selection process.

Read Atlassian’s Isolated Cloud guide for details.

How do AGC and Isolated Cloud differ?

Both support organizations with demanding requirements, but they address different deployment needs.

Atlassian’s cloud environment comparison explains the deployment and app compatibility distinctions.

Can you use Confluence marketplace apps in these environments?

Yes, when the app supports the relevant environment. Availability on commercial Confluence Cloud does not establish availability on AGC or Isolated Cloud.

Before selecting an app, check its deployment support, permissions, data handling, and environment-specific feature documentation. Build your shortlist around the workflow you need: filtering a program tracker, calculating table values, or annotating screenshots for a procedure.

Smart Tables: Work with Confluence tables and reports

Smart Tables is a relevant option for teams looking for table filtering, calculations, and reporting in Confluence. Its capabilities include advanced filters, Excel-like functions, pivot tables, and charts.

Consider a program manager maintaining a table of work-streams, owners, statuses, and budgets. A useful workflow could involve filtering the table to a particular team, calculating totals, and summarizing the data for a review meeting.

Other examples include:

• A project lead reviewing outstanding actions by owner or status.
• A finance team calculating totals in a budget tracking table.
• An operations team summarizing a register for its monthly review.

These are illustrative workflows, rather than reported customer results. Match each workflow to the features supported in your deployment.

Check the AGC feature differences

Creativas’ current Smart Tables AGC documentation lists exceptions to commercial Cloud functionality: live editing in the Smart Tables macro, collaborative editing in the Live Spreadsheet macro, Smart Links, attached-file previews, and chart export.

That distinction helps teams evaluate their actual requirements. If simultaneous spreadsheet editing is central to your workflow, include it explicitly in your deployment review.

Explore Smart Tables for Confluence and review its environment-specific documentation before choosing your configuration.

Smart Images: Make visual documentation easier to follow

Smart Images is a relevant option for teams that need image editing and annotations, image maps, sliders, and galleries in Confluence.

For example, a technical writer preparing a procedure can use arrows, shapes, and text to highlight the relevant parts of a screenshot. A process owner can use an image map to connect areas of a visual overview to the corresponding Confluence pages.

Potential uses include:

• Annotated screenshots for internal instructions.
• Visual guides explaining a multistep procedure.
• Clickable diagrams that help readers navigate related documentation.
• Galleries presenting a sequence of reference images.

The goal is practical: help readers understand what they need to do and where they need to go next. Confirm the supported configuration for AGC or Isolated Cloud when planning your rollout.

Explore Smart Images for Confluence to discuss your visual documentation requirements.

How to choose the right app for your team

Start with a representative Confluence page and a specific task. For Smart Tables, this could be a project tracker that needs filtering and calculations. For Smart Images, it could be a procedure that needs annotated screenshots.

Then assess:

1. Deployment support: Is the app available for your exact environment?
2. Workflow fit: Are the features you need supported there?
3. Data handling and permissions: Does the documented configuration meet your organization’s review requirements?
4. Installation: What is the installation process for your environment?

Atlassian documents different installation routes: support-assisted installation for AGC and the in-product Marketplace for production Isolated Cloud sites. Confirm the current steps with your administrator.

That means all four Creativas apps are now developed on Atlassian’s cloud app platform:

• Smart Courses for Confluence: LMS, employee training, onboarding, quizzes and compliance
• Smart Terms: glossary and terminology management for Confluence and Jira
• Smart Tables for Confluence: table filtering, reporting, charts, formulas, calculations and SQL views
• Smart Images for Confluence: image editing, image maps, sliders and galleries

Getting here took years of work.

Moving established apps with real customers, data, workflows and years of functionality wasn’t simply about changing the technology underneath them. We had to rebuild some parts, redesign others, and work around limitations as Forge itself continued to evolve.

Now all four apps share the same Forge foundation.

And for us, that’s where the interesting part starts.

Why did we move our Atlassian apps to Forge?

Forge is now Atlassian’s preferred platform for building Cloud apps. Since September 17, 2025, only Forge apps can be submitted as new apps to the Atlassian Marketplace, and Atlassian says it’s delivering new extensibility features on Forge. Read Atlassian’s Forge documentation for Confluence.

Atlassian Connect is also approaching end of support on January 31, 2027.

So we couldn’t ignore moving to Forge.

But we didn’t want to treat it as a deadline or a box to check.

Forge is also where Atlassian is investing in capabilities that can shape the next generation of Cloud apps: AI, Rovo extensions, Forge LLMs, Teamwork Graph and deeper connections across the Atlassian platform.

We wanted our apps to be ready for that future.

What is Atlassian Forge?

Atlassian Forge is the development platform for building apps that extend Jira, Confluence and other Atlassian Cloud products.

With Forge, Atlassian manages core areas of the platform such as infrastructure, compute and hosted storage, while app developers build the functionality customers interact with. Forge is Atlassian’s preferred cloud app development platform.

For Creativas, that gives us a common foundation across our products while keeping our apps closer to the Atlassian ecosystem they are designed for.

What does moving to Forge mean for our customers?

The biggest change isn’t something customers need to learn.

It’s what Forge allows us to build behind the scenes.

• Closer alignment with Atlassian Cloud: Our apps can evolve alongside the platform they extend instead of depending on a legacy framework.
• Access to new Atlassian capabilities. Forge gives us more opportunities to work with capabilities such as Rovo Agents, Forge LLMs and Teamwork Graph.
• A stronger foundation for AI. Forge LLMs allow Forge apps to call Atlassian-hosted large language models, giving developers a platform-native way to build AI functionality.
• Atlassian-managed infrastructure. Forge provides Atlassian-managed infrastructure and hosted storage, including data residency support for persistent Forge-hosted storage. Learn about Forge data residency.
• One foundation across our portfolio. Smart Courses, Smart Terms, Smart Tables and Smart Images can now evolve on the same Atlassian development platform rather than following separate technical paths.

And some of those benefits are already visible in the products.

Smart Courses: Building a Confluence LMS on Forge

Smart Courses for Confluence was the final piece of our Forge journey.

Smart Courses turns Confluence into a learning management system where teams can create and deliver employee training, onboarding programs, compliance courses, quizzes, exams, certifications and SCORM-based learning experiences.

Rebuilding an app with that much functionality on Forge required far more than moving a few components.

Courses, assignments, learner data, Insights and the workflows customers already rely on had to remain part of the experience while the app moved to its new foundation.

That work is now complete.

Smart Courses is on Forge, and that also gives us a better foundation for the next capabilities we want to bring into learning in Confluence, including more AI-assisted experiences and deeper connections with the Atlassian platform.

For teams looking for a Confluence LMS, employee training in Confluence, Confluence onboarding, or compliance training with SCORM, the technology underneath Smart Courses is now ready for where Atlassian Cloud is going next.

Smart Terms: A Forge-powered glossary for Confluence and Jira

With Smart Terms, teams can build and manage an enterprise glossary, define terminology, connect related vocabulary and automatically highlight terms across Confluence and Jira content.

Forge has already started changing what we can add to that experience.

We launched Lexi, our AI Glossary Assistant, to help teams analyze their Confluence knowledge, identify relevant terminology and create glossary content faster.

We’re also using Atlassian Forge LLMs for AI-assisted term translations, bringing AI into the terminology workflow using Atlassian-hosted models.

For organizations managing acronyms, technical terminology, product language or company-specific vocabulary, Smart Terms provides a Confluence glossary and terminology layer directly inside the Atlassian workspace.

And this is a good example of why our Forge migration matters: the benefit isn’t the migration itself. It’s what we can build because of it.

Smart Tables: Table filtering, reporting and AI queries in Confluence

Confluence tables often start simple. Then the data grows.

Teams need advanced filters, calculations, charts, pivot tables, grouping, reporting and different ways to understand the same data.

That’s where Smart Tables for Confluence comes in.

Smart Tables extends native Confluence tables with table filtering, charts, pivots, Excel-like calculations and additional reporting capabilities. Its SQL Views also let teams query their table data and create more specific views without duplicating the source table.

Forge is also opening new ways to simplify those workflows.

With AI Query, users can describe the result they need and generate the SQL query instead of having to write it manually.

For someone searching for a Confluence table filter, Confluence reporting app, pivot tables for Confluence, or SQL queries in Confluence, Smart Tables now combines those established capabilities with a Forge foundation we can continue building on.

Smart Images: Image editing and visual content inside Confluence

Not every Forge benefit needs to involve AI.

Smart Images for Confluence is our visual toolkit for teams that want to do more with images without constantly moving between Confluence and external editing tools.

Teams can edit and annotate images, create interactive image maps, and display visual content through sliders and galleries directly in Confluence.

Smart Images is also fully Forge-developed, giving it the same foundation as the rest of our Cloud portfolio.

For teams searching for a Confluence image editor, image map for Confluence, Confluence image gallery, or image slider, those workflows can stay where the documentation itself lives.

Forge, security and trust

Security was also an important part of why moving toward Forge made sense for us.

Forge provides Atlassian-managed infrastructure alongside built-in platform security controls. Atlassian documents security for Forge through a shared responsibility model, where Atlassian manages parts of the underlying platform while Marketplace Partners remain responsible for the security decisions and functionality within their apps. Read Atlassian’s Forge security guidance and shared responsibility model.

That doesn’t mean Forge removes our responsibility as a Marketplace Partner.

It means we’re building on an infrastructure designed specifically for Atlassian Cloud apps while continuing to take responsibility for how our apps are built, maintained and secured.

Forge also provides data residency support for persistent Forge-hosted storage.

For qualifying Forge apps, Atlassian also offers Runs on Atlassian, a trust designation with requirements around Atlassian-hosted compute and storage, data residency and external data egress controls.

Today, Smart Terms, Smart Tables and Smart Images carry the Runs on Atlassian badge on the Atlassian Marketplace.

All four apps are Forge-developed; Runs on Atlassian is a separate eligibility and trust designation.

Forge isn’t the finish line

Over the last few years, we did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get our portfolio here.

There were limitations to work around, functionality to rebuild, architecture to rethink, and a platform that was evolving while we were building on it.

But the objective was never simply to say: “Our apps are on Forge.”

The objective was to make sure Smart Courses, Smart Terms, Smart Tables and Smart Images are ready for what comes next.

We’re already seeing that with Lexi, Forge LLM-powered translations and AI-generated SQL queries.

Next, we’ll continue looking at where capabilities such as AI, Rovo, Teamwork Graph and other Forge improvements can solve real problems across our apps.

Not because every feature needs AI, not because every new Atlassian capability needs to become a feature. But because when something can genuinely make training easier, terminology clearer, data easier to understand or Confluence content better to work with, our apps are now in the right place to build it.

Why does great documentation often fall short?

Even the most well-written Confluence pages can leave readers confused or disengaged. Common challenges include:

• Inconsistent terminology: Different authors may use different terms for the same thing, making content more challenging to follow.
• Language barriers: Teams spread across countries often need documentation in more than one language.
• Lack of visuals: Complex processes are hard to understand without visuals.

Creating well-structured documentation in Confluence

To document effectively in Confluence, start by organizing your content in a dedicated space. For example, create a Knowledge Base space to get a workspace with built-in article templates and a homepage that uses search and label macros. Within the space, maintain a clear hierarchy and tagging: label each page with descriptive topics so the homepage and macros can automatically group related content. Also, define page templates so every documentation page follows a consistent layout (sections, headings, formatting).

Use Confluence’s formatting and macros.

Write your pages using Confluence’s native formatting tools. For clarity, break content into headings, bullet or numbered lists, and sections. Then add built-in macros to aid navigation.
For example, insert a Table of Contents macro at the top of any long page, and it will automatically list links to all the headings on that page.
Use Info, Tip, or Warning panels to highlight key notes or cautions within your text. You can also use the Anchor macro to create named bookmarks (e.g. a “Back to top” link) that you can link to from anywhere in the document. These built-in features make your documentation more user-friendly and easy to scan.

Collaborate on drafts

Use Confluence’s draft-and-review workflow to polish content before publishing. When you create a new page, immediately restrict its permissions (e.g., visible only to your team) to keep it private while drafting. Then write your documentation and share the page with colleagues for feedback: reviewers can leave inline comments (by highlighting text) or suggest edits directly on the page. This keeps feedback tied to the correct context. After revisions, remove restrictions and delete any placeholder comments so the final version is visible to all intended readers.

Track versions and updates

Confluence automatically versions every saved change. Encourage team members to watch key pages or the entire documentation space. Confluence will then notify them whenever those pages are edited. To see exactly what changed, use the Page History feature. The history view lists all past versions with dates and authors; you can compare any two versions or restore an older version if needed. This ensures you can track edits or recover content if something was changed incorrectly.

• Watch pages/spaces for change notifications.
• Use Page History to compare or revert versions.

Smart Terms vs Atlassian AI definitions

When it comes to defining unfamiliar terms, Confluence offers two approaches. Atlassian Intelligence’s “Define” feature lets you highlight a word on any page and click Define to get an AI-generated explanation right there. This provides instant, context-based definitions without any setup.

By contrast, Smart Terms is a glossary app: admins create and manage a permanent list of term definitions (with synonyms, images, translations, etc.), and the app automatically highlights those terms across your Confluence pages. Smart Terms also allows control over where and when to highlight terms, and provides a centralized glossary your team can search and explore.

How Smart Terms and Smart Images work together in Confluence?

Define and standardize your terminology with Smart Terms

Smart Terms allows you to build and maintain a glossary inside Confluence. Once a term is added, it can automatically appear highlighted across your pages, with definitions and translations available in a highlight popup.

Key features that make it essential for documentation:

• Auto-highlighting: Your terms are automatically detected and highlighted across Confluence pages. You can also enrich them with related vocabulary. For example, if you add Artificial Intelligence (AI) to your glossary, both “AI” and “Artificial Intelligence” will be highlighted and linked back to the exact definition, ensuring no one gets lost in acronyms.

• Highlight popup: Hover over (click on) a term to instantly see its definition without leaving the page. Unlike Atlassian’s built-in Smart Definitions, Smart Terms tooltips can include rich details: a short description, synonyms, and translations, giving your readers real context instead of just a simple dictionary-like definition.

• Multilingual support: Provide translations so every team member can read in their preferred language.

• Centralized glossary: Update once, and changes appear everywhere. Even better, Smart Terms gives you complete control over where and when terms are highlighted. You can choose to highlight terms globally across your workspace, or limit them to specific spaces, pages, or even sections, making the highlight engine both powerful and flexible.

Make visuals better with Smart Images.

Smart Images lets you add interactive elements to images, diagrams, and mockups inside Confluence. You can guide readers through complex visuals without needing long paragraphs of explanation.

Key features that improve documentation:

• Image maps: Clickable points on images that display text, links, or media.
• Image annotations: Label different areas for clarity.
• Multiple image layouts: Showcase your visuals in different ways, such as image sliders for step-by-step walkthroughs or galleries to group related diagrams and screenshots. You can also create clickable image maps, where product mockups or diagrams become interactive and guide readers through each component.

Steps to use both apps

Here’s how to combine the two apps effectively in your documentation workflow:

1. Identify key concepts & visuals
   • List essential terms, acronyms, and process names.
   • Select diagrams, UI screenshots, or workflow charts that support your content.
2. Build your glossary in Smart Terms
   • Add definitions, synonyms, and translations.
   • Enable auto-highlighting for instant in-page tooltips.
3. Upload and annotate images in Smart Images
   • Place hotspots to explain each part of your diagram.
   • Link hotspots to glossary terms, related pages, or additional resources.
4. Embed both in your Confluence page
   • Glossary terms appear naturally in your text.
   • Annotated visuals break up content and make it interactive.

Use Case: Sofia’s global team

Sofia is a team lead at a multinational tech company. Her Confluence workspace is full of documentation for product development, onboarding, and support. But her team faces three challenges:

1. Diverse languages: Some members prefer English, others work in French, Spanish, or Japanese.
2. Different learning styles: Developers want detailed technical definitions, while designers prefer diagrams and visuals.
3. Inconsistent terms: New hires keep asking what internal acronyms mean.

Here’s how Sofia solved it with Smart Terms and Smart Images:

• She created a central glossary in Smart Terms with translations for each key product term. Now, when anyone hovers over a term, they instantly see its definition in their preferred language and even some visuals.
• She replaced static diagrams with Smart Images. For example, her product architecture diagram now has clickable hotspots showing component details and linking to relevant Confluence pages.
• When onboarding new hires, they can explore documentation without needing to ask. Sofia tooltips and annotated visuals explain everything in context.

The result?

Faster onboarding, fewer repeated questions, and higher documentation adoption across her global team.

We know this occurred. That’s why we thought of showcasing the below use case to you, thinking it might help you find your way in your documentation.

This use case is a fusion between Smart Images for Confluence and Smart Terms for Confluence.

Documentation of your apps is a crucial section, and it may suffer some ambiguity if you’re not putting it the right way.

As a lot of you use Confluence to share their documentation, these recommendations are for you.

Smart Images for Confluence integration

Documentation certainly needs screenshots to display the different app sections and layouts. You can enhance your documentation experience with Smart Images for Confluence.

You don’t have to struggle to put all images and screenshots in one place. Smart Images saves you time and, most importantly, space on your Confluence page.

Find out how to create sliders and galleries in your documentation.

Smart Images for Confluence is a user-friendly editing toolkit and is certainly not only about sliders and galleries. It’s so much more, as we call it, the all-in-one image toolkit.

Discover more about Smart Images use cases, and if you’re more of a visual person, you can check these infographics.

Smart Terms for Confluence integration

In the middle of introducing your apps, you surely encounter terms that you think should be defined for your customers as they may sound a bit unclear. Smart terms for Confluence allows you to highlight these terms and deliver transparent information and definitions.

For better customer communication, you can reinforce the highlighted terms with related vocabulary or media.

The above Confluence page explains it all. 

Linking that to organizations who use Confluence pages, they surely need more images in their Confluence pages.

As Confluence editor doesn’t support image editing, we developed Smart Images to provide Confluence users with a full editing toolkit.

Thinking of what you can do with Smart Images on your Confluence page, we thought of two use cases and we tried to demonstrate them for you.

1. Onboarding new hires:

If you are expecting newbies, they need to know the team and learn about them. You can present your team virtually like the below illustration. Prepare your frame before and then insert it into Smart Images and annotate your frame as you want.

Here is an example of how we introduce Creativas’ squad for the newbies.

We mentioned before in our blog post “The remote onboarding in the era of COVID-19: for Confluence users only” two ways for presenting your team. Either through short videos or virtual get-togethers.

Well, in addition to those, here’s another trick. A cool feature in Smart Images for Confluence is used in this and it’s called image maps. You can add links or you can insert other Confluence pages. In our case, we thought of introducing the team via their LinkedIn profiles.

Check this sample Confluence page that we are using during onboarding.

2. Product Presentation

Introducing and explaining the company’s products to newbies take time and effort. In the same blog post we mentioned earlier, we talked about our case in introducing tools we use in our company within Smart Courses, one of our apps for Confluence.

In fact, we granted you a different way with Smart Images for Confluence. To avoid confusing the newbies with the accumulated information, links, and tools, you can put everything all in one place. For example, insert the different screenshots of your products in a slider and link each one to its documentation or other resources. The newbies will refer to these images every time they need to see a piece of information, at least during the first phase of onboarding.

This is what the slider will look like to the newbie.

Smart Images for Confluence editor allows you to add many types of images to your Confluence page: png, jpg, jpeg, gif, BMP, webP. You can insert these in 4 different ways.

1. Upload images

This is the quickest and easiest way to insert an image into your Confluence page. It gives you two methods to do so. The first one is to choose upload images and then click on select files. Pick whatever image you desire, and you’re good to go.

The second one is to simply drag and drop images directly from your browser. 

2. Browse space

Confluence is built out of spaces and with Smart images for Confluence, you can add images from these spaces. Choose the option browse space and select which Confluence space you’d like to take your images from. 

3. Import from page

To save time, Smart Images for Confluence allows you to import images from page to page with a simple click. Just type the page’s name you’d like to search, and the different images will pop up. You can pick the concerned ones.

4. External link

You can simply copy-paste the URL link of the image, and it will show up. However, a small error may sometimes occur if the host is securing or blocking its content from being displayed. Do not hesitate in that case, to manually download the image and insert it using the built-in uploader (the first option of the list above).

But what about having a full image-editing tool inside Confluence? 

It will definitely save time to users and provide a seamless image experience within Confluence. 

Creativas’ team thought about a solution that fills that gap and took the challenge to even go beyond a basic image editing tool to provide an all-in-one image toolkit.

Creativas just released a new Confluence app: “Smart Images” which makes it possible to edit images, undo changes, add image maps, create sliders and galleries, and much more. You can now take your Confluence pages to the next level and spice them up with the numerous features of Smart Images for Confluence.

Smart Images for Confluence: All in one image toolkit for Confluence

What are the key features?

We are thrilled to announce the main features of Smart Images for Confluence:

1. Powerful image uploader

Don’t be lost between tabs, folders, Confluence pages & spaces, or web images!
Smart Images makes it smooth to pull images within Confluence page; simply drag and drop images or browse your system to upload images or you can just select them from a chosen Confluence page or space.

2. Comprehensive image editor

Smart Images provides a Graphic Designer image editing experience: 

• Annotate: Drawing tool, Lines, Arrows, Rectangle, Ellipse, and dynamic text editor
• Crop, rotate, flip, and zoom
• Finetune Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Exposure, Temperature, Gamma, Clarity, and Vignette
• Add artistic filters

You can easily update any change made to the images without worrying about versioning. Smart Images editor preserves your changes, so your edits are stored separately.

3. Image maps editor

Whether you need a Rectangle, Circle, or Polygon, you can add image maps via these different shapes in your image. Image maps serve to draw clickable areas directly on the image. For example, select a Confluence page or set an URL as a target for the shape.

4. Fully customizable Sliders and Galleries

To customize your Confluence image-set and display multiple images through elegant and responsive sliders or galleries, this is the appropriate feature for you where you can:

• Add Sliders and Galleries skins: Light, White or Dark
• Control navigation arrows, randomize images, add bullets or thumbnails
• Configure slider size and set image scaling
• Customize transition type, delay, and autoplay
• Easily switch to Full-screen mode

Try Smart Images for Confluence

Learn about Smart Images for Confluence