Click a button.
See only the rows
you want.
Sift is a free add-on for Confluence, the wiki and documents tool teams write in at work. It puts a row of buttons above any table on a page.
Click a value and the table shows only those rows. Anyone reading the page can find what they need, without asking someone to build a report.
A Confluence project table with Status filter buttons above it: All, Blocked, Done, In progress and Open, each with a row count. Clicking Blocked leaves only the blocked row. Clicking All brings all seven rows back.
Built with my own time and money, and made free on purpose.
No company behind it, no investors, no plan to charge you later. I built Sift on nights and weekends, paid for the time out of my own pocket, and made it with love. It is yours, free, and it stays that way.
Aravind Arumugam
Cyber security practitioner and senior QA engineer, 18+ years. Currently leading security testing at Trilliant.
More about Aravind →- Runs entirely inside Atlassian. No external server.
- Free. Unlimited users. No card.
- No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking.
Atlassian Marketplace listing in review
How to start
Three steps. About a minute.
- 1Type /sift on a page
Confluence shows the Sift macro. Insert it.
- 2Put your table inside
Paste a table into the macro, or make a new one.
- 3Name the columns
In the macro settings, type the column names you want buttons for. Example:
Status; Owner. Done.
Full list of settings in the docs.
What people use it for
Simple jobs, done in one click.
Click Emma Johnson. You see only her tasks. Click All to go back.
Add the rule Status: Blocked=red. Every blocked row turns red. Click Blocked to see only those.
Click Me. You see only the rows that mention you.
Save the filters you use as a preset. Next week it is one click.
All of these are on the demo page, and anyone can open it.
Features
What Sift does
The pictures below are real Confluence pages, not mockups. Try any of it on the demo page, or open the Confluence page if you have an Atlassian login.
Filter buttons
Every value in a column becomes a button.
Sift reads the column and makes one button per value, with a count. Click Emma Johnson to see her tasks. Click In progress as well to see only her tasks that are in progress. Click All to reset.
- Click more than one button to combine them
- Switch a column to
≠to hide a value instead of showing it - Buttons with no matching rows turn grey
- Prefer a dropdown? Use that for any column
Colour rules
Colour cells by what they say.
Type a rule in the settings. Sift colours the matching cells and the matching buttons. You do not read every cell to find the problem. It is already red.
Status: Blocked=red, In progress=orange, Done=green- Numbers work too:
Cost: >10000=red - Colour the cell or the whole row
- Ten colours. They work in light and dark mode
Presets and defaults
Save a set of filters as one button.
Give a set of filters a name. It becomes a preset button. You can also set a default, so the page opens already filtered. Sift remembers what each person clicked last time.
Emma, in progress = Owner: Emma Johnson; Status: In progress- A
Mebutton appears on columns with @mentions - Page editors can hide a value from the buttons for everyone
- Show only some values:
Owner = Emma Johnson, Liam Carter
Long text
Keep long cells short. Hover to read the whole thing.
Long notes make rows tall. Tell Sift to show one line, or the first 60 characters. The table stays short. Move the mouse over a cell to read all of it.
- One line, 60 characters or 120 characters
- Statuses, mentions, dates, links and lists still look normal
- Merged cells are caught and reported instead of filtered wrongly
Totals and export
Add up the rows you can see. Download them.
A totals row shows the sum, average or count for a column, and it changes when you filter. The header stays at the top while you scroll. Export gives you a CSV of exactly what is on screen.
Sort and click to filter
Click a header to sort. Click a cell to filter by it.
Numbers sort as numbers and dates as dates. Click any cell and the table shows only the rows with that value, on every column, not only the ones you set up.
A live Confluence table that your tools fill in: a webhook from any tool, a scheduled connector, a Jira query, or your own database. Same buttons and colours as Sift, filled in by machines instead of by hand.
Pricing
Completely free. No paid tier.
For comparison: the best known paid app in this space charges per user, and its free tier stops at 10 people. Sift has no size limit and nothing to buy.
Free
$0Every feature below, for any number of people, with no team size cap and no card.
- Filter buttons with live row counts
- Dropdown filters, used on their own above 25 values
- Colour rules on cells, rows and buttons
- Presets, a default filter, remembered selection
- Me button, hide a value, hover to read a long cell
- Sort by clicking a column header
- Click a cell to filter by its value
- Totals row on the rows you can see
- Fixed height with a sticky header
- Export CSV, copy into Excel
- No data leaves your Confluence site
- Email support, reply within two working days
Nothing on this page is a paid feature in disguise. Everything above is free, for good.
Questions
Good to know
Does my data leave Confluence?+
No. Sift runs entirely inside Atlassian and never calls out to any server of mine or anyone else's. Your table is read in your browser to draw the buttons, and it is never sent anywhere or stored by the app. There is no analytics and no telemetry of any kind.
Which Confluence?+
Confluence Cloud only. Not Data Center.
What does Sift save?+
Two small things, inside your own site: the values an editor chose to hide, and what each viewer clicked last. It never saves your table.
Does it work in live docs?+
Yes. Live docs and classic pages, in view and edit mode.
Can I use it on a table made by another macro, like Jira Issues?+
Not with Sift, because that table is not in the page body. Use Sift Board for that. It fetches the data and draws its own table.
Can I see it before installing?+
Yes. The demo page works in your browser with no login. If you have an Atlassian login you can also open the real Confluence page.
Who makes Sift?+
Aravind Arumugam. See the panel near the top of this page, or the full story on the About page. Every Sift table carries a small "made by" link.
See it working before you install anything.
The demo has every feature on it. No login. Click anything.
Questions: aravind@arumugam.co.uk