Build, Brand, and Publish a Confluence Knowledge Base: Comparing External Share and Scroll Viewport
When you need to share Confluence content beyond your internal team, the right app can transform how you work. A particular case is when your Confluence content needs to double as a public knowledge base - the right add-on determines how polished, secure, and easy to maintain the final site can be. In this article, we want to introduce two of the most popular solutions: Warsaw Dynamics’ External Share for Confluence and K15t’s Scroll Viewport for Confluence . Both apps cover overlapping ground but are built with different priorities in mind.
Before comparing them feature by feature, let’s look at what each app is designed to achieve.
External Share for Confluence
External Share makes it simple (and undoubtedly secure) to collaborate with anyone outside your organization. Instead of creating external Confluence accounts or exporting pages, you generate a private link to a single page, a page tree (with folders), a single attachment, or a blog page. The app, on shared pages, tries to replicate the look and behavior of Confluence pages, which users are already familiar with and know how to use right away. No additional onboarding is needed beyond the basic knowledge of how Confluence pages work.
Guests can view, comment, or even edit content in real time if you allow it, and every shared page can be fully branded with your own domain, header, footer, favicon, general theme, and, thanks to Karma app integration , a styled main page. Thanks to another great integration - with the Lango app , you can translate the Confluence content to other languages with ease!
Because External Share never stores or caches your Confluence data, every request is fetched directly from your instance when a visitor opens the link. Security is layered: password protection, domain or email restrictions, IP whitelisting, SSO/SAML, and automatic expiration dates are all built in.
While many teams use External Share for client approvals or partner collaboration, it’s also excellent for a public-facing knowledge base (as we do ourselves 😉). And if you intentionally make a shared link public - for example, by embedding it on your product website - search engines can discover and index that content, giving you the SEO benefits of a traditional documentation site without losing control of your Confluence data.
Scroll Viewport for Confluence
Scroll Viewport is purpose-built for teams that want to transform their Confluence content into a polished, public-facing documentation site or help center. It converts one or more Confluence spaces (or structured Scroll Documents) into a responsive website with a clean help-center theme, customizable header and footer, and support for custom domains and SEO-friendly URLs. Because the generated site is fully responsive, readers get an optimal experience on desktop, tablet, or mobile.
Beyond simple publishing, Scroll Viewport adds tools for content management. Paired with the Scroll Documents add-on, you can create versioned documentation sets, offer multilingual variants, and even display different content to different audiences using display variants. Built-in AI-powered search helps visitors find answers quickly, and you can further refine the experience with custom CSS or JavaScript for a deeper level of branding.
Customer-support integration is another strength: you can embed ticket widgets from platforms like Zendesk, Jira Service Management, Freshdesk, or Intercom so that visitors can move seamlessly from reading an article to submitting a support request. Together, these capabilities make Scroll Viewport a strong fit for organizations that need a professional, scalable, and easily navigable public knowledge base.
Side-by-Side Feature Comparison
| Feature / Area | External Share for Confluence | Scroll Viewport for Confluence |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Use Cases | Secure, branded knowledge bases; real-time collaboration with external clients, partners, approvers, or even internal users who don’t have access to the Confluence instance – this helps manage/reduce the number of seats on the instance; content review and editing without onboarding external users. | Public-facing documentation or help-center sites with SEO, analytics, and support-desk integrations. |
| Content That Can Be Shared | Individual pages, pages with child pages and folders, attachments, and blog posts (with or without access to the whole version history). Exclude pages based on labels or page fragments by marking them with the Exclude macro . |
Entire Confluence spaces or Scroll Documents with optional versioning (decide which version viewers are allowed to see). Possible based on page labels, but the excluded content can still be accessed via an already. |
| Who Can Manage Shares | Anyone with permissions (similar to the Jira permission scheme). Global admins can narrow the sharing options for space admins, and space admins can further narrow them for users. | After installing Scroll Viewport for Confluence, only users who are part of the default group administrators can use the Scroll Viewport functions. You can extend these default permissions by adding a new group: scroll-viewport-admins. |
| Display Variants | Not available. | Adding a Scroll Document as a content source allows you to configure and show different variants of your content on your site. This is ideal if you want to show different content depending on the audience that visits your help center. |
| Language Versions Display | No native solution, but possible with Lango integration . | Set the default language for your site and specify additional languages to indicate which language(s) your content is in. Officially supported languages are English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish. To use this feature, you need to choose Scroll Documents for Confluence Cloud as a source. If you want to unlock the full potential of the language functionality in Scroll Documents, you’ll also need to install the extension app Translations for Scroll Documents. |
| Publishing & Permissions | Any user can create shares (restricted by permissions); admins can restrict further actions allowed by users. | Only admins by default, extendable to a custom “scroll-viewport-admins” group. |
| Collaboration | Guests can comment inline and, if allowed, edit content in real time - bidirectional access for true cooperation. | View-only; commenting requires an extra add-on (e.g., Hyvor Talk). |
| Security | There are several layers of security available:
Exclude content macro allows excluding chosen fragments on shared pages from being revealed. Read more |
Public by default; can require tokens/SAML. When you install the app, a new technical Confluence user called “Scroll Viewport for Confluence Cloud” is added as a user to your Confluence instance. The app user is used by Scroll Viewport to pull the content from the content sources to your Viewport site. What content the user can pull is limited by the permissions you give to this user on your Confluence instance and spaces. Read more |
| Branding & Customization | Full branding of shared pages: headers, footers, dark theme, and more. Option to add a custom domain. Can create a polished, knowledge-base-like experience without exposing Confluence directly. Can customize further thanks to Karma app integration. | Help Center theme with customizable header, footer, and pinned articles for a complete standalone site. Option to add a custom domain. Customize the branding further with CSS/JS code. |
| Updates | Live sync - changes in Confluence, once the page is updated, appear instantly on the shared link (it’s enough to refresh the shared page). | Requires manual republish to update the public site. |
| Search & SEO | Private shares remain hidden, but if you create a public External Share link and publish it online, search engines can find and index it. | SEO-ready and publicly discoverable unless access is restricted. |
| Analytics | Google Analytics. | Google Analytics and Matomo. |
| Supported Macros | Supports displaying multiple third-party vendor macros within the page content, and continuously adding new integrations to ensure macro content is displayed exactly as it is in Confluence. Find the whole list of supported macros here . | List of supported Macros and Features link |
| Mobile Experience | Responsive link access; behaves like a standard web page. | Fully responsive help-center site, optimized for all devices. |
| Additional Features |
|
|
Choosing the Right Tool
When it comes to publishing a knowledge base, both apps can deliver a polished, branded experience - readers won’t care which one you used. Scroll Viewport brings extras like AI-powered search and built-in integrations with tools such as Zendesk or Jira Service Management, making it attractive if you need a public help center with those specific features.
External Share, however, goes beyond knowledge bases. It’s equally strong for any external-sharing scenario - inviting clients to review documents, collaborating with partners, or collecting feedback - while letting you decide exactly who can see what and when (or even to share pages with internal employees from other departments who don’t have access to a given Confluence instance, helping reduce the number of licensed seats and thus lowering licensing costs). Its fine-grained permission controls, link expiration, password protection, and the fact that content is never stored outside your own Confluence instance give it a clear security edge. And if you do want public visibility, you can enable indexing so search engines can find and rank your content.
In short:
-
External Share is the choice when you want one solution for both secure collaboration and optional public publishing.
-
Scroll Viewport is ideal when your primary goal is a permanent documentation site with built-in service-desk integrations.