LaTeX in Confluence: 14 Math Macro Apps Compared (2026)

You type $E = mc^2$ into a Confluence page, publish it, and the dollar signs stay on the page. You install a LaTeX app, write a formula in the middle of a sentence, and it jumps onto a line of its own. You export the page to PDF for a review, and the equation is missing from the PDF.

All three happen to real teams, and the threads that rank on Google for this question mention two of them. This guide is about choosing an app that avoids them.

Short answer: Confluence Cloud has no built-in LaTeX. You need a Marketplace app, and there are 14 of them. For most teams, pick a single-purpose app on Forge with a separate inline macro and PDF/Word export. Then spend 15 minutes in the free trial on the test page below before you roll it out. Skip the two Connect apps. Prices for the same job differ almost fivefold.

Confluence has no LaTeX button, and Atlassian has not promised one

The request is thirteen years old. CONFCLOUD-30543, “Ability to insert math formulas/equations in Confluence”, was opened on 23 August 2013. It asks for “Tex-like math equations/formulas”. On 27 October 2026 it had 142 votes, no Atlassian comment and the status “Gathering Interest”. A narrower request to allow MathJax on Cloud, CONFCLOUD-59203, was closed as “Won’t Fix” in June 2021.

Without an app, you have three workarounds, and none of them typesets anything:

• Unicode characters (x², ∑, ≤, √) work for one-line formulas and stay searchable. A fraction or a matrix is out of reach.
• A picture of the formula from an equation editor looks right, but nobody can edit it. Keep the LaTeX source next to it, or the next person retypes it.
• A code block with the LaTeX source keeps the source exact for readers who know LaTeX, and is unreadable for everyone else.

For a page that has to explain a model, a pricing formula or a derivation, that leaves the apps.

The 14 apps on one chart

We searched the Atlassian Marketplace for “latex” and “latex math” in Confluence on 27 October 2026 (45 and 75 results). Then we took every app that appeared in the top 10 of either search: 14 apps, one of them ours. Prices, frameworks and release dates come from the Marketplace’s own API. The method is at the end.

Three things stand out.

Popularity does not follow price. The two most installed single-purpose apps are close: LaTeX Math by Appfire with 3,117 installs and LaTeX Math+ by Narva with 2,973. From the 11th user, Appfire’s list price is $1.83 per user per month and Narva’s is $0.39, so Appfire costs 4.7 times as much per user. Appfire’s app has five macros, including formulas linked across pages. Whether that is worth the difference depends on your pages.

The two biggest dots are not LaTeX apps. Mosaic (4,310 installs) and AURA (4,080) are suites of formatting macros: tabs, panels, HTML, and LaTeX among them. Their installs count every reason to install them. If your site already has one, try its LaTeX macro before you buy another app. If not, do not buy a suite just for formulas.

Half the apps are small or quiet. Eight, ours included, have fewer than 300 installs. Two of them, LaTeX EASY (last release January 2022) and Math Formula with LaTex (October 2021), are Connect apps, which brings us to the first check.

Four checks that decide which app works for you

1. Forge or Connect: will the app still get fixes?

Atlassian is retiring Connect, the older way of building cloud apps. Its timeline: no new Connect listings since 17 September 2025; since March 2026, “Marketplace apps with a Connect descriptor can no longer be updated”; and end of support, which Atlassian moved to 31 January 2027. After that, Atlassian says, “Customers who have Connect apps installed won’t lose access to the app”, but only critical and security bugs are fixed.

Twelve of the 14 apps run on Forge. The two Connect apps above have version names ending in “-AC” and no Forge app ID in the Marketplace API. They cannot ship a fix any more, so leave them out of a new rollout.

2. Inline formulas that stay inline

“Inline formatting is broken in the latest Cloud Confluence. Inline is treated as block.” That comment, from October 2024, sits under the Confluence LaTeX guide that ranks second on Google. It is not a bug in one app. It comes from how Forge macros are drawn. Atlassian’s macro reference says “‘block’ type is used by default”. An app has to declare an inline layout on purpose. Even then, “Custom UI inline macros have a minimum rendered width of approximately 300px due to the browser’s default iframe sizing”, unless the app shrinks its frame.

In practice: a formula like $x_i$ in the middle of a sentence works only if the app has a separate inline macro and sizes it well. Most listings now promise one (Narva, Appfire, Kolekti, Yamuno, Stiltsoft, Elevatic, Polaris), and Appfire’s Lite edition says symbols “can be included mid-sentence”. The listings of Bertly and Vico say nothing about inline formulas. A promise is not a test, so put an inline formula on the trial page and look at it in a narrow window.

3. PDF and Word export

Export is a separate job for every app. On Forge, an app has to provide its own export function, adfExport, for each macro, and Atlassian’s reference warns that it “is invoked once per macro instance during export operations”. A page with hundreds of formulas can hit rate limits.

Most single-purpose apps promise PDF and Word export: Narva, Appfire LaTeX Math, Fulstech, Yamuno, Stiltsoft. Appfire’s own Lite listing points you to the full app for “support for exporting to PDF/Word”. In January 2025 a Kolekti customer manager told a user who could not export the formatting macros that “PDF exporting is on our roadmap”. We have not checked whether that has changed since. If your formulas end up in PDFs for audits, customers or exams, export a long page during the trial, then open the file.

4. What you pay at your team’s size

Eleven of the 14 apps cost nothing up to 10 users: Bertly and Yamuno are free at any size, and nine more charge only from the 11th user. Three charge from the first user: Stiltsoft $5 a month for up to 10 users, Vico $2.50 and Polaris Office $2.

From 11 to 100 users, list prices run from $0.15 to $1.83 per user per month (the table below). You cannot buy a licence for just the people who write formulas: Atlassian’s licensing rule for cloud apps is that “the app will only function if its license matches or exceeds the tier of the host product”. So an app used by three engineers on a 400-person site is licensed for 400 users. That favours the cheap and free apps when formulas live in a few spaces. Each listing’s pricing tab gives the exact total for your user count.

All 14 apps, side by side

Installs, ratings and prices as of 27 October 2026. “Listing says” quotes what each vendor claims; we did not install the competitors’ apps.

The last row is our own app, and it is a different kind of tool: see below for what it does and does not do.

Moving from Confluence Data Center? Narva advertises a migration tool for formulas from Server/DC and from other cloud apps; Kolekti, Stiltsoft and Yamuno advertise moving formulas over from other apps. Ask the vendor which source macros they convert before you pick, because a migration that leaves raw LaTeX on 2,000 pages is worse than none.

A 15-minute test page for your trial

On their listing pages, all 14 apps look alike. The differences show up on a page like this one. Create a page in a test space, add each line with the app’s macro (inline where the line says so), publish, and go through the checks.

% 1. Inline, inside a sentence: "The error term $\varepsilon_i$ is small."
\varepsilon_i

% 2. Display formula
x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}

% 3. Aligned derivation
\begin{aligned}
  \text{precision} &= \frac{TP}{TP + FP} \\
                   &= \frac{412}{412 + 38} \approx 0.92
\end{aligned}

% 4. Matrix and cases
A = \begin{pmatrix} 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 \end{pmatrix}, \quad
f(s) = \begin{cases} \text{approve} & s < 0.60 \\ \text{review} & 0.60 \le s \le 0.85 \\ \text{block} & s > 0.85 \end{cases}

% 5. Chemistry (needs mhchem)
\ce{2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O}

% 6. A long line, for phones and PDF margins
L(\theta) = -\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n}\Big[y_i \log \sigma(\theta^\top x_i) + (1 - y_i)\log\big(1 - \sigma(\theta^\top x_i)\big)\Big] + \lambda \lVert \theta \rVert_2^2

% 7. Text that is not Latin
\text{Скорость} = \frac{\text{путь}}{\text{время}}

Then check:

1. Line 1 stays in the sentence at full width and in a window about 400 px wide.
2. Lines 3 and 4 line up at the & signs and do not overflow the page column.
3. Line 5 renders chemistry, or shows a clear error. A blank box means trouble later.
4. Line 6 on a phone scrolls or wraps; it does not cut off the right side.
5. Export to PDF and to Word, then open both files and find all seven formulas.
6. Copy the page and edit a formula in the copy. The original must not change.
7. Switch Confluence to dark mode. Formulas should stay readable, not black on near-black.
8. Open the page as a viewer without edit rights. Formulas render, and nothing asks for a licence.

An app that passes all eight on your own site is ready for the rest of your pages.

When the formula belongs in a diagram

Some formulas are not part of a sentence. They explain a picture: the decision thresholds of a risk model next to its pipeline, a derivation with hand-drawn notes, a loss curve beside the loss function. A text macro puts the formula and the picture in separate boxes.

That is the case our Excalidraw Math Equations & LaTeX Whiteboard for Confluence is built for. You write LaTeX, MathJax typesets it on an Excalidraw whiteboard inside the page, and you draw around it. Mermaid flowcharts, Graphviz graphs and Vega-Lite charts go in the same whiteboard. The LaTeX source stays editable, PDF and Word exports include the drawing, and everything stays in your Atlassian site. It is not an inline macro: for a formula inside a sentence, use one of the text apps above. Plenty of teams will want both.

If the same formulas also live in Jira issues, Jira Cloud has no built-in LaTeX either: the request JRACLOUD-97287, opened in January 2026, is “Gathering Interest” too. LaTeX Math & Equations in Tabs for Jira keeps formulas in tabs on issues and project pages, one formula per tab, typeset with MathJax.

How we collected the data

• Which apps: Atlassian Marketplace searches “latex” (45 results) and “latex math” (75 results) in Confluence, taken 27 October 2026 at 04:07 UTC as part of our regular Marketplace snapshot. The 14 distinct apps in the top 10 of either search. Installs, ratings and review counts come from the same snapshot.
• Prices, framework, release: the Marketplace REST API v2 for each app on 27 October 2026: pricing/cloud/live (the 10-user price and the per-user price of the 100-user tier, monthly) and versions/latest (release date, payment model, and the Forge app ID that Connect apps lack). Discounts and annual prices are not included.
• Features: each vendor’s own listing text, quoted as “listing says”. We did not install the other vendors’ apps.
• Native support: Atlassian’s public issue tracker, Forge macro reference and Connect announcements, read on 27 October 2026 and linked above.

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