Confluence Graphviz: 14 Apps, 8 Layout Engines, Tested DOT

An engineer pastes a dependency graph into a Confluence design doc. In the Data Center wiki it was a picture; in Cloud it is twenty lines of digraph text in a grey box, and the review starts with “can someone draw this?”.

Confluence Cloud does not draw DOT. This guide shows what each Graphviz layout engine does with the same graph, gives you five templates that render cleanly, lists the mistakes Graphviz accepts without a word, and compares all 14 apps that draw it in Confluence Cloud.

What Confluence Cloud does with DOT

Nothing on its own. Every result for “confluence graphviz” on Google’s first page is a Marketplace listing, a vendor’s documentation, Data Center advice, or a 2012 tutorial for the old wiki markup. A Marketplace search for “graphviz” in Confluence Cloud on 27 October 2026 returned 19 apps; 14 of them draw DOT.

The language itself is the same everywhere. What differs is the app around it: which Graphviz version it runs, where it runs it, and what happens to the diagram when you export the page or remove the app. The DOT you write in this guide works in all of them, so the engines and templates come first.

One graph, eight layout engines

Graphviz has one language and several layout programs. You choose one with a single line at the top of the graph, such as layout=neato;. We rendered one graph, ten services in three clusters with eleven edges, through each engine of Graphviz 16.1.0, the release of 3 September 2026, compiled to WebAssembly. Only the layout= line changed.

Which engines keep your cluster_ boxes matters more than it looks. In our run, dot, fdp, osage and patchwork drew all three cluster boxes where they belong; sfdp, circo and twopi drew none; neato drew them, but around nodes it had placed without regard to them, so the boxes overlap.

Five DOT templates for Confluence pages

Each template is a page Confluence teams write every week. All five rendered with Graphviz 16.1.0 with no errors and no warnings, and the picture under each one is that output. Paste the text into your app’s Graphviz editor or macro.

1. An architecture diagram for a design doc

Clusters group the services, rankdir=LR keeps the diagram wide enough for a page, and compound=true with lhead lets an edge end at a cluster rather than at one node.

digraph architecture {
  fontname="Helvetica";
  rankdir=LR;
  compound=true;
  node [shape=box, style="rounded,filled", fillcolor="#EFF6FF", fontname="Helvetica"];
  edge [fontname="Helvetica", fontsize=10];

  subgraph cluster_edge {
    label="Edge";
    "Web app"; "Mobile app";
  }
  subgraph cluster_services {
    label="Checkout services";
    "API gateway"; "Orders"; "Payments";
  }
  subgraph cluster_data {
    label="Data";
    "Orders DB" [shape=cylinder];
    "Event bus" [shape=cds];
  }

  "Web app" -> "API gateway" [label="HTTPS"];
  "Mobile app" -> "API gateway" [label="HTTPS"];
  "API gateway" -> "Orders";
  "Orders" -> "Payments" [label="gRPC"];
  "Orders" -> "Orders DB";
  "Payments" -> "Event bus" [label="charged", lhead=cluster_data];
}

2. A runbook decision flow

Diamonds for questions, labelled edges for answers, and \n to break long labels. On-call pages are where text diagrams pay off: the next person can fix a step without redrawing anything.

digraph runbook {
  node [fontname="Helvetica", shape=box, style=rounded];
  edge [fontname="Helvetica", fontsize=10];

  alert   [label="Alert: payment errors > 2 %", shape=box, style="rounded,filled", fillcolor="#FEE2E2"];
  deploy  [label="Deploy in the\nlast 30 minutes?", shape=diamond];
  rollback [label="Roll back the release"];
  provider [label="Provider status\npage red?", shape=diamond];
  failover [label="Switch to the\nbackup provider"];
  page    [label="Page the on-call\npayments engineer", style="rounded,filled", fillcolor="#EFF6FF"];

  alert -> deploy;
  deploy -> rollback [label="yes"];
  deploy -> provider [label="no"];
  provider -> failover [label="yes"];
  provider -> page [label="no"];
  rollback -> page [style=dashed, label="still failing"];
}

3. A Jira workflow, documented on the team page

Statuses as nodes, transitions as labelled edges. The dashed edge marks the way back.

digraph workflow {
  rankdir=LR;
  node [shape=box, style="rounded,filled", fillcolor="#F1F5F9", fontname="Helvetica"];
  edge [fontname="Helvetica", fontsize=10];

  "To Do" -> "In Progress" [label="Start"];
  "In Progress" -> "In Review" [label="Open PR"];
  "In Review" -> "In Progress" [label="Changes requested"];
  "In Review" -> "Done" [label="Merge"];
  "In Progress" -> "Blocked" [label="Flag"];
  "Blocked" -> "In Progress" [label="Unblock", style=dashed];

  "Done" [fillcolor="#DCFCE7"];
}

A first draft of this template put “In Progress” and “Blocked” on the same rank with rank=same; the two labels, Flag and Unblock, were then drawn on top of each other. Letting dot place Blocked itself fixed it.

4. A data model with real tables

HTML-like labels give each table its rows, and ports let an edge start at the exact column. The crow’s foot is on the “many” side: many orders, one customer.

digraph data_model {
  rankdir=LR;
  node [shape=plain, fontname="Helvetica"];

  customer [label=<
    <table border="0" cellborder="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4">
      <tr><td bgcolor="#EFF6FF"><b>customer</b></td></tr>
      <tr><td port="id" align="left">id uuid PK</td></tr>
      <tr><td align="left">email text</td></tr>
    </table>>];

  orders [label=<
    <table border="0" cellborder="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4">
      <tr><td bgcolor="#EFF6FF"><b>orders</b></td></tr>
      <tr><td align="left">id uuid PK</td></tr>
      <tr><td port="customer" align="left">customer_id uuid FK</td></tr>
      <tr><td align="left">total numeric</td></tr>
    </table>>];

  orders:customer -> customer:id [dir=both, arrowtail=crow, arrowhead=tee];
}

5. Everything one service depends on

layout=twopi with root puts the service in the middle and its dependencies on rings around it. This is the page you want open during an incident on that service.

graph dependencies {
  layout=twopi;
  root="Payments API";
  ranksep=1.6;
  fontname="Helvetica";
  node [shape=box, style="rounded,filled", fillcolor="#EFF6FF", fontname="Helvetica"];

  "Payments API" [fillcolor="#DBEAFE", penwidth=2];

  "Payments API" -- { "Auth" "Ledger" "Fraud check" "Card vault" "Event bus" };
  "Ledger" -- "Orders DB";
  "Fraud check" -- "Risk model";
  "Event bus" -- { "Emails" "Analytics" };
}

Mistakes Graphviz rejects, and the ones it accepts

We fed common mistakes to Graphviz 16.1.0 and wrote down exactly what came back. The first group at least stops with an error. The second group is worse: the diagram renders, and it is wrong.

The sfdp row deserves a sentence. Graphviz’s overlap documentation says that “by default, sfdp uses overlap=“prism0"", and Prism needs a triangulation library that the WebAssembly build does not include. Graphviz warns “remove_overlap: Graphviz not built with triangulation library” and carries on. Our test graph had 9 overlapping pairs of nodes; with overlap=false, scale or voronoi it had none.

Labels in Chinese, Japanese or Korean

The WebAssembly build of Graphviz has no font files, so it estimates the width of each label from built-in tables. For Latin, Cyrillic and Turkish text the estimate was generous in our test; for Chinese, Japanese and Korean it was too small, and the text ran past its box. We drew each label in a box and measured both in Chromium.

Graphviz says so, if your app shows warnings: “no value for width of non-ASCII character”. The fix is to size the boxes yourself, for example node [width=3]; for the whole graph or width= on one node. With width=3 every label above fitted. This applies to every app built on this Graphviz build, ours included.

All 14 apps that draw Graphviz in Confluence Cloud

We searched the Marketplace for “graphviz” in Confluence Cloud on 27 October 2026 and kept every app that draws DOT: 14. Our four Excalidraw apps for Confluence share one Graphviz editor, so they count as one row. Installs, ratings and prices come from the Marketplace API. “Listing says” means the vendor’s words; we did not install the other vendors’ apps.

The two apps with the most installs are not Graphviz apps at all: Just Add+ is a Markdown and diagrams toolkit, and Stratus’s app is built for PlantUML. If DOT is all you need, the field is small: Appfire’s app, with 605 installs, is the only app built for Graphviz alone with more than 50.

Three questions that decide the app

1. Where is the diagram drawn? For a design doc this is a security question. The Kroki app says its “default kroki server is: Kroki.io”, and Kroki’s API documentation shows how a diagram reaches it: in a GET request “your diagram must be encoded in the URL”, in a POST “the diagram source will be sent as the request body”. Either way the text of your architecture leaves Atlassian, unless you point the app at a Kroki server of your own. Knowvah, Mastero and our app say they draw in the browser; most listings say nothing, so ask the vendor.

2. Does the page export keep the diagram? Appfire’s Cloud migration guide, updated on 27 August 2026, says: “In the cloud version, you cannot save a Graphviz diagram as a PDF or Word file, or export to PDF or Word.” Knowvah says “Export a page to PDF or Word and the diagram comes across as a diagram”, Fulstech’s whiteboard “renders saved diagrams in Confluence PDF and Word exports”, and so does ours. If your design docs go to customers or auditors as PDFs, test an export on the first day of the trial.

3. Forge or Connect? Two apps in the table, Addteq’s and Fulstech’s Graphviz app, have no Forge app ID in the Marketplace API. Atlassian’s Connect timeline says “Marketplace apps with a Connect descriptor can no longer be updated”, and end of support moved to 31 January 2027. “Customers who have Connect apps installed won’t lose access to the app”, but an app that cannot be updated will not get the next Graphviz fix. Addteq’s last release was in March 2022.

Moving Graphviz macros from Data Center

Most teams searching for Confluence Graphviz have pages written for Appfire’s Server and Data Center app, the one that needs “Graph Visualization Software (Graphviz) installed on the Confluence server”. Appfire’s migration guide says “All the macros available in the server are supported in the cloud version as well”, and lists what does not move:

• templates as a source, and “File option is not applicable for Confluence cloud”;
• macro nesting, and “Render wiki markup macros in body”;
• the outgoing link in Graph from table;
• PDF and Word export of the diagram, as quoted above;
• URL sources, which “Have to be configured manually from the Global Configuration page”.

If you are moving to another vendor instead, Mastero’s listing says its app “Finds Mermaid, PlantUML and Graphviz macros left by other apps” and converts only the ones you tick. With any other app, the DOT text moves by copy and paste: it is the same language, and the templates above render in all of them.

Where our app fits

Our Excalidraw Architecture & Sequence Diagrams for Confluence is a whiteboard with a Graphviz editor in it: you write DOT with a live preview, insert the laid-out graph into an Excalidraw scene, and then circle, annotate and sketch around it by hand. The source stays editable, the page’s PDF and Word export includes the drawing, and everything runs in your browser on Forge with no external calls. It draws with the same Graphviz 16.1.0 build we tested here, so every layout= line above works, and the Chinese, Japanese and Korean width issue applies too. See the documentation for the editor.

It is a whiteboard first. If you want a plain diagram macro with no canvas, Appfire’s or Knowvah’s app is quicker to use; if you want to point at the part of the architecture that is changing, ours is built for that. For Jira, the same editor is in Excalidraw Architecture & Dependency Diagrams for Jira.

How we collected the data

• Which apps: Atlassian Marketplace REST API v2, addons?application=confluence&hosting=cloud&text=graphviz, on 27 October 2026: 19 results. We kept the 14 that draw DOT and left out an image library, a Vega app, a LaTeX app, an SVG library and our Excalidraw Math app, which shares the Graphviz editor of the row above.
• Installs, ratings, prices, framework, release: the API’s app record, versions/latest (release date, and the Forge app ID that Connect apps lack) and pricing/cloud/live (the monthly price for 10 users, and the per-user price of the 100-user tier). Annual prices and discounts are not included. “Not shown” means the API returned no install count.
• Engines, errors and widths: Node.js 24 with the npm package @viz-js/viz 3.31.0, which contains Graphviz 16.1.0, the build our apps ship. Overlaps counted from Graphviz’s own JSON output; label widths measured in Chromium with Playwright.
• Google’s first page: a search for “confluence graphviz” in Chrome, English, United States, on 27 October 2026.

Prices and listings change. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.