Confluence: How is a Confluence user defined?
Question
What kind of users are activated when buying a license?
Environment
Cloud/Server
Answer
A user is, by definition, any account with the permission to log into the application.
A named user with this permission is counted towards the user limit, whether logged into the application or not. So a user is defined by an e-mail address and a password.
However, it is possible for anonymous users (without an account) to access Confluence pages and spaces, if these pages and spaces are open for public access.
You can integrate Confluence Server with an LDAP, Crowd or Jira in order to import/centralize user management.
In Confluence cloud, user management is centralized and you can implement SAML in order to enable your users to authenticate through your company's identity provider.