Clickable Diagrams for Confluence → PlantUML apps

Your PlantUML app for Confluence is no longer maintained

What the options are — including the free ones.

What happened

Apps rendering PlantUML in Confluence have been abandoned for years. Flowchart & PlantUML Diagrams for Confluence (around 560 installations) was last updated in January 2022. PowerPlantUML (around 450) in June 2022. Both sit on Connect, the platform Atlassian is retiring through 2026 and 2027.

Four years without an update is not a pause. Nobody is coming back to migrate these. See what Connect end of life means for how this plays out.

Your diagrams are safe. PlantUML is plain text. Whether it sits in a page or in an attached .puml file, nothing holds it hostage.

Check the free options first

We sell a diagram app and will still say it plainly: there are free, maintained apps rendering PlantUML in Confluence. Search the Marketplace and sort by recent updates.

If you need "turn this text into a picture" and nothing else, take one of those. Paying for a solved problem is a bad trade.

Where free renderers stop

The diagram is a menu, not a picture

A service map exists so somebody can look at the box marked "Payments" and get to its documentation. PlantUML supports links natively:

@startuml
component "Payments service" as PAY
database "Ledger" as DB
PAY --> DB : writes
url of PAY is [[https://your-wiki/display/OPS/Payments]]
@enduml

A renderer that produces a flat image throws that away. The question is whether your app honours the url line — and whether the link still works after somebody renames the page it points to.

Your wiki has more than one diagram format

Architects draw in draw.io, developers write Mermaid, somebody exported SVG out of Visio in 2019 and that page is still the one everyone opens. One app per format means several macros to learn, configure and migrate.

The map outgrew the page

Past thirty boxes a rendered image is unusable inside a page macro. Without search and full screen, people stop opening it.

What our app reads

Element	Support
Declarations	`component`, `database`, `cloud`, `actor`, `queue`, `node`, `interface`, `artifact`, `storage`, `rectangle`, with `as` aliases
Boxes	`[Name]` written straight into a relationship
Arrows	`-->`, `->`, `..>`, `-down->`, with `: label`
Links	`url of X is [[...]]`, external or into your own Confluence
Shapes	database and storage become cylinders, cloud a cloud, actor an oval, artifact a document
Ignored	`skinparam`, `title`, `header`, `footer`, comments — they do not become stray boxes
Other formats	The same macro reads SVG, draw.io and Mermaid
Search	Type a word; matching shapes are outlined, the rest fades
Where it runs	Your own browser, on your own site. Runs on Atlassian — no vendor servers, and no PlantUML rendering service to send your architecture to

Not supported: sequence diagrams. They are laid out along a time axis with lifelines, which is a genuinely different drawing job, not a missing feature we forgot. If your PlantUML is mostly sequence diagrams, this app is the wrong tool today.

One thing worth knowing about privacy

Many PlantUML integrations render by sending your diagram source to a rendering server — often the public one at plantuml.com. That means your internal architecture leaves your network to become a picture. Our app draws inside the reader's browser, so nothing is sent anywhere. If you are under any compliance regime, this is usually the deciding argument, ahead of features.

How to use it

Save the diagram as a file ending in .puml.
Attach it to the Confluence page.
Add the macro.

Keeping it as a file rather than pasted into the page means the same file can live in your git repository, so the diagram and the system it describes change together.

Questions

Send your .puml to support@horizonventures.app and we will tell you whether it renders — before you install anything.