Mermaid in Confluence, without a third-party account
You installed a Mermaid app. You wrote a diagram. Then a colleague opened the page and was asked to create an account with a company they have never heard of before they could see a box with an arrow in it.
That is a real pattern in this category, and it is worth understanding before you pick a tool — because it is not something you can turn off later.
Why some apps ask for a sign-up
Apps that require an account are usually doing the rendering on their own servers. Your diagram text is sent out of Atlassian, drawn somewhere else, and sent back as an image.
Once that is the architecture, an account follows almost inevitably: the vendor needs to know who is calling, meter it, and bill it. The sign-up is not a marketing choice bolted on top; it is a consequence of where the drawing happens.
That architecture has three costs your team pays:
- Everyone who reads the page needs an account, not just the person who wrote the diagram. On a documentation page read by fifty people, that is fifty sign-ups.
- Your diagram content leaves Atlassian. For some teams that alone ends the conversation, whatever the vendor’s policy says.
- The diagram depends on somebody else’s uptime. If their service is down or your network blocks it, your page has a hole in it.
The alternative: render in the browser
If the rendering happens in the reader’s own browser, none of that applies. There is no server to authenticate to, nothing to meter, and no request to make.
That is how Crisp Diagrams works:
- No account, for anyone. Install it once and it works for everybody on the site immediately — authors and readers alike. There is no seat to assign, no invite, no separate login.
- No third party. The Mermaid rendering engine is bundled into the app rather than fetched from a CDN, so there is no external service in the path at all.
- No data leaves Atlassian. The app requests no Atlassian API scopes and makes no external network calls. It carries Atlassian’s Runs on Atlassian badge, granted only to apps that use exclusively Atlassian-hosted compute and storage and do not egress data.
Verify it yourself
Do not take the claim on trust. Two checks, neither of which needs any special access:
Network tab. Open your browser’s developer tools, go to the Network tab, and reload a
page containing a diagram. Every request should be to your own *.atlassian.net domain.
There is no third-party host to find.
Pull the plug. Disconnect from the internet and open a cached page. The diagram still renders, still zooms, and still exports — because all of that is running locally.
If an app passes both of those, it genuinely cannot be phoning home.
Where your diagram is stored
In the macro on your own Confluence page, as plain text.
That has a few pleasant consequences that are easy to overlook:
- It is versioned with the page. Page history shows diagram changes like any other edit.
- It is restored with the page if someone reverts.
- It is included in your site export. Your diagrams are not stranded in a vendor’s database.
- It is searchable, because it is text on your page rather than an opaque blob.
Getting started
Type /mermaid on any Confluence page and pick Mermaid Diagram. Choose a starting point
from the Examples menu — there is one for each of the nineteen diagram types — and edit
it.