How to copy Confluence space permissions
Setting up a new space to match an existing one means reproducing its permissions. Confluence Cloud can do this natively, but only on Premium, and only for permissions. Here is what each route actually covers.
The short answer
| Your plan | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Premium or Enterprise | Use the built-in Copy space permissions. Free, no app needed |
| Free or Standard | Re-enter them by hand, or use an app. There is no native option |
| You also need the content copied | Permissions and content are separate problems. See below |
What space permissions actually are
Confluence has two separate access mechanisms, and confusing them is the commonest reason a "copied" space behaves unexpectedly.
- Space permissions control who can view, add, edit, delete and administer within a space. They are granted to groups, to individual users, and to anonymous access. These are what gets copied.
- Page restrictions are set on individual pages and limit viewing or editing below the space level. These are a property of each page, not of the space, and no space-permission tool touches them.
A space with 30 permission entries might have another 200 page restrictions underneath it. Reproducing the first does not reproduce the second.
The native option, on Premium
Confluence Premium includes a feature to apply one space's permission set to another space. Open the destination space, go to Space settings → Permissions, and look for the option to copy permissions from another space.
What it covers: the group, user and anonymous permission entries from the source space.
What it does not:
- Any content. It moves access rules, not pages. You still need a separate method for the content itself.
- Page restrictions, for the reason above.
- Anything, if you are on Free or Standard. This is a paid-tier feature.
If you are on Premium and only need permissions matched, stop here. The native feature does this job and costs nothing extra. No app is worth paying for to replace something already included in a plan you have.
Doing it by hand, on any plan
For a small space this is genuinely fine. Open Space settings → Permissions on both spaces, put them side by side, and work down the list.
Two things make this worse than it sounds at scale. Permission entries are per group and per individual user, so a space that looks like it has six groups may have forty entries once individuals are counted. And there is no diff view, so verifying you got it right means reading both lists again.
The practical threshold is somewhere around twenty entries. Below that, hand-copying is faster than evaluating alternatives. Above it, the error rate starts to matter, and permission errors are the kind you discover when the wrong person reads something.
Count them first
Before choosing a route, find out how many entries you are actually dealing with. Space settings → Permissions lists them. Count groups, individual users and anonymous access separately.
People consistently guess low here. A space that has existed for a few years accumulates individual grants that nobody remembers making, and those are exactly the ones that get missed in a manual copy.
When you need the content too
Usually "copy the permissions" is really "set up a space like this one". That is two jobs, and Confluence Cloud splits them awkwardly:
| Job | Native Cloud option |
|---|---|
| Copy the pages | Copy page tree, free, but only from one parent page down, and it does not repoint internal links |
| Copy the permissions | Premium only |
| Both, into a new space, as one action | None. Requested as CONFCLOUD-3191 since 2005 |
That tracker issue has over 880 votes, several hundred watchers, and more than 150 linked support cases. Atlassian's last substantive comment on it, from a product manager in 2022, directs customers to Marketplace apps.
If you use an app for this
Things worth checking before you pay for one, because these are what go wrong:
- Does it carry permissions on your plan, or only on Premium? An app that defers to the native feature is no help on Standard.
- Does it tell you the count before it runs? You want to compare "47 permission assignments" against what you expected, before anything is written.
- Does it also repoint internal links? If it copies content too, links that still open the original space are the commonest complaint in this category.
- What permissions does the app itself hold? An app that copies does not need permission to delete anything. Check what it asks for.
- Where does your content go? Apps built on Atlassian Forge that run on Atlassian keep it inside your own site.
Clone Space for Confluence copies a whole space, including its permission configuration, on any Confluence plan, and shows you the counts in a free report before it writes anything. It holds no delete permission at all and runs entirely on Atlassian. It is free for up to ten users.
Confluence Data Center
Data Center has had a native Copy Space under Space tools since version 8.3, and it carries permissions along with the content. If you are on Data Center, use it.
This catches people out mid-migration: the capability exists on Data Center, does not exist on Cloud, and the search results for both are mixed together.
Frequently asked
Does copying space permissions copy page restrictions?
No, by any method. Page restrictions belong to individual pages. A permission copy operates at the space level only.
Will the groups need to exist already?
Yes. Permissions reference groups by name, so a group that does not exist on the site cannot be granted access to anything. Copying permissions does not create groups.
Can I copy permissions from a space I cannot administer?
No. Reading a space's permission configuration requires administrative access to that space, whatever tool you use.
What about anonymous access?
It is part of the space permission set and copies with it. Worth checking deliberately after any copy, because it is the entry most likely to be wrong in a way nobody notices.