Clickable Diagrams for Confluence → Connect end of life

Connect end of life, in plain words

Which of your Confluence apps will stop working, and how to tell.

The short version

Atlassian Cloud apps are built on one of two platforms. Connect is the old one: the app runs on the vendor's own servers and talks to your site over the network. Forge is the new one: the app runs inside Atlassian's own infrastructure.

Atlassian is retiring Connect. Since March 2026 Connect apps can no longer ship updates, and support ends on 31 January 2027 (moved from December 2026); Atlassian warns that breakages will grow after that date. Every Connect app either migrates to Forge or dies.

The part that catches people out. Nothing switches off on an announced date. Connect apps degrade: a macro renders on some pages and not others, settings stop saving, then the macro shows an error box. Nobody is notified — you find out when someone needs the page.

How big is this

As of October 2026 the Marketplace lists 6723 cloud apps. 999 of them are still on Connect, and 952 of those have not had a release since March 2026. In August the Connect count was about 1475, so roughly a third have migrated in two months; the rest are the ones to check on your own site.

Most of those will migrate. A significant minority will not: their authors moved on years ago, and the app still collects subscriptions without anyone maintaining it.

How to check your own site

1. List what you have

In Confluence: Settings → Manage apps. This gives you every installed app and its vendor.

2. Check each one on the Marketplace

Open the app's Marketplace page. Two things tell you where it stands:

What to look at	Good sign	Bad sign
Last release date	2026	2024 or earlier
"Runs on Atlassian" badge	Present — it is on Forge, safe	Absent and no recent releases

The single most useful signal: a release in 2026. It means somebody is still there. An app last touched in 2023 with no Forge version is not going to be rescued in the time left.

3. Ask the vendor, once

A one-line email — "do you have a Forge migration planned, and when" — sorts the list quickly. No answer within a couple of weeks is itself an answer.

What to do about the ones that are not migrating

Find out how much you actually use it. Confluence advanced search supports macro = "name" — that gives you every page depending on it. Sometimes the answer is four pages and the problem evaporates.
Check what happens to your data. Most apps store content as ordinary page attachments or in the page body — that stays yours regardless. Apps with their own database are the painful case; export before anything breaks.
Replace early, not late. Both apps can be installed at once. Migrating a wiki calmly over a month is a different job from doing it in an afternoon because a diagram everyone needs went blank.

Is Forge actually better, or is this just churn

Honestly, both. But two things genuinely change for you as an admin:

Your data stops travelling. A Connect app sends page content to the vendor's servers to do its job. A Forge app carrying the "Runs on Atlassian" badge cannot — Atlassian enforces it at the platform level, not on the vendor's word. For anything under a compliance regime this is the whole argument.
Vendor outages stop being your outages. No vendor server in the path means one fewer thing that can be down on a Monday morning.

Specific apps

Pages on individual apps, what they did and what to move to:

CQL Search: query results on a page, last updated July 2024
Table Exporter for Confluence: tables to Excel and CSV, last updated January 2024
SVG out — clickable SVG diagrams, last updated February 2023
Mermaid apps for Confluence — several abandoned during 2024
PlantUML apps for Confluence — the main ones untouched since 2022