The Confluence alternative for HTML artifacts
Everything you share with Confluence,
without the sandboxed iframe.
Confluence is a documentation platform. It edits and stores structured content. When you paste or upload HTML into Confluence, it strips the JavaScript and CSS – the parts that make modern HTML valuable. display.dev doesn't edit your content. It publishes it. Exactly as created, behind company auth.
The demo shows an agent publishing a doc to display.dev – from a chat or a terminal – then the team opening its URL, commenting, the agent publishing v2 at the same URL, and the doc being shared with someone outside the company.
Cursor, Codex, Claude Code – any agent that writes a file. Switch agents anytime – your URLs, versions and comments stay put.
Indigo Engineering
What happens when you put HTML in Confluence
Confluence's editor works on structured wiki content. Every route an engineer tries for an HTML artifact runs into the same wall.
The D3 chart, the interactive architecture diagram, the responsive dashboard – all of them arrive broken or not at all.
- ✗Paste HTMLConfluence strips
<script>and<style>. Interactive elements stop working. - ✗HTML macroRenders a subset of HTML in a sandboxed iframe; CSP blocks inline scripts and most external dependencies.
- ✗AttachmentDownloads the file instead of rendering it. Viewers open it on their own machine.
- ✗iFrame embedWorks only if the artifact is already hosted somewhere. You still need a host.
display.dev vs. Confluence for internal HTML artifacts
| display.dev | Confluence | |
|---|---|---|
| Renders full HTML/JS/CSS | ✅ | ❌ (strips scripts) |
| Publish time | 15 seconds | N/A (can't publish HTML as-is) |
| Google Workspace SSO | ✅ Included | ✅ (requires Premium/$11.55/user/mo) |
| Microsoft 365 SSO | ✅ Included | ✅ (Premium) |
| Viewers need Confluence account | ❌ | ✅ |
| Persistent URL | ✅ | ✅ (Confluence page URL) |
| CLI publish | ✅ (dsp publish) | ❌ |
| MCP for Claude Desktop | ✅ | ❌ |
| Flat pricing (unlimited viewers) | ✅ (€49/mo) | ❌ ($6.05–$11.55/user/mo) |
| Purpose | Publish artifacts | Edit documentation |
The pricing difference
- Confluence Cloud
- Standard is $6.05/user/month with a 10-user minimum. Visitor auth needs Premium at $11.55/user/month – $1,155/month for 100 people.
- display.dev Pro
- €49/month flat, unlimited viewers, Google and Microsoft SSO included.
- If you already pay for Confluence, keep it
- It's a full documentation platform and it earns its price there. Buying it only to share HTML costs 20× more than display.dev for the same job.
Confluence is excellent – for structured documentation
- Collaborative wiki editing
- Multiple authors on the same page, with page hierarchies, version history and comment threads.
- A maintained knowledge base
- Templates, spaces and search across documentation the team keeps up to date.
- Jira linkage
- Pages tied to projects and issues, which no publishing tool replaces.
What Confluence can't do
- Render agent-generated HTML
- The file Claude Code wrote this morning does not survive the editor.
- Serve a multi-page research dossier
- An agent-authored dossier is a small site, not a wiki page.
- Run an interactive artifact
- Animated D3 transitions and sortable dashboards are applications, not documents – they need a web server, not an editor.
display.dev workflow for HTML artifacts
Try display.dev free
- €49/month flat – not $6.05–$11.55 per user per month
- Full HTML, JavaScript and CSS – nothing stripped, nothing sandboxed
- First artifact in 15 seconds · No credit card
Features
Viewers click a link and sign in with their Google or Microsoft account, or a one-time password. No app to install. No account to create. No IT ticket.
Inline comments on every artifact. Your agent reads them via MCP, fetches the current version, republishes with short_id and base_version, and resolves the thread. The artifact stays the current version at the same URL, not a one-shot screenshot.
dsp publish ./file.html from your terminal, or one sentence in Claude Desktop. No git repo, no deploy pipeline, no project to configure.
Every artifact gets a URL that keeps working. Share in Slack, link in Notion, paste in email. It still works six months later.
No per-seat pricing at any tier. Share with your PM, exec, legal team, or designer for the same flat price.
Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code all work, along with any agent that creates HTML or Markdown output.
Common questions.
Can I use display.dev alongside Confluence?
Yes – and this is the common pattern. Use Confluence for structured documentation your team edits collaboratively. Use display.dev for HTML artifacts (AI outputs, agent-authored research, dashboards, multi-page reports) that need to be served as interactive web pages. Link from Confluence to display.dev URLs.
What about Confluence's HTML macro?
Confluence's HTML macro renders a limited subset of HTML in a sandboxed iframe. It blocks inline scripts, many external CSS frameworks, and complex JS. It works for trivial HTML snippets – not for AI-generated artifacts, D3 visualizations, or interactive reports.
Do viewers need a display.dev account?
No. Viewers authenticate with their company Google or Microsoft email – the same account they use for everything else. They don't create a display.dev account or install anything.
Can I embed display.dev artifacts inside Confluence pages?
Yes. Paste a display.dev URL into a Confluence page. Confluence will render it as a link or a preview tile depending on your setup. For full interactive rendering, link out to the display.dev URL.
Is there a Confluence integration or plugin?
Not yet. The link-embed pattern (Confluence page → display.dev URL) is the current workflow. A Confluence plugin is on the roadmap.
Can I see who published each version, human or agent?
Yes. display.dev attributes every version and comment to the agent and the human it acted for, in the comment thread and the audit log. See how identity works.
Publish your first artifact in 15 seconds.
Free tier. No credit card. One-time password auth on free, Google + Microsoft SSO on Pro (€49/month flat).