Role that grants users and groups the ability to manage users, permissions, spaces, apps, and most administrative options

There are two ways that the term "Confluence Administrator" is used.

The first is technical, where "Confluence Administrator" is the name of a permissions role granted to an individual user or group. Possessing this role means having the ability to create and delete spaces, create users and groups, manage permissions, manage apps, and configure most — though, not all — Confluence administration and configuration options.

The second use of "Confluence Administrator" is more colloquial. It simply refers to a user that has, or is a member of a group that has, the above-mentioned permissions role.

There are two important further considerations:

  1. System Administrator is another role (and colloquialism) used in Confluence. Like Confluence Administrator, it can be applied to users or groups. However, unlike the Confluence Administrator, the System Administrator is granted full access to all of the administrative and configuration options. 

    Please see the Global Permissions Overview page of the Atlassian Confluence documentation for a complete list of the differences between these roles.

  2. There is an out-of-the-box Confluence group called confluence-administrators with the System Administrator role assigned to it. This group is, in fact, a set of superusers, and therefore should not be referred to as "Confluence Administrators," despite the group's name. For accuracy, any individual user in this group should be called a "System Administrator." (By contrast, you may create a different group, say, technical-librarians , that has the Confluence Administrator role and whose members could be called, accurately-speaking, "Confluence Administrators.")