As a tool for communication and collaboration, we believe Confluence is at its best when everyone can participate fully. Confluence keeps a history of all changes to pages and other content, so it's easy to see who has changed what, and reverse any changes if you need to.
Confluence does, however, give you the choice to make your site, spaces, and pages as open or closed as you want to.
Levels of permission
There are three levels of permissions in Confluence: Global permissions, space permissions, and page restrictions.
Global permissions
Global permissions are site-wide permissions, and can be assigned by either a System or Confluence administrator.
These permissions are pretty broad, and don't really interact with space permissions or page restrictions.
For full details, check out the overview of global permissions in the Administrator's Guide.
Space permissions
Every space has its own independent set of permissions, managed by the space admin(s), which determine the access settings for different users and groups.
They can be used to grant or revoke permission to view, add, edit, and delete content within that space, and can be applied to groups, users, and even to anonymous users (users who aren't logged in) if need be.
Page restrictions
Page restrictions work a little differently to global and space permissions. Pages are open to viewing or editing by default, but you can restrict either viewing or editing to certain users or groups if you need to.
Don't forget though, every page in Confluence lives within a space, and space permissions allow the space admin to revoke permission to view content for a whole space. Even the ability to set restrictions on pages is governed by the space permission – 'restrict pages'.