# How Payabli replaced Confluence with Falconer, an AI-native knowledge base, in 2 days

> Payabli's knowledge was scattered across Confluence, Google Drive, and Slack. With Falconer, teams from engineering to HR now write, find, and trust their docs, and the move off Confluence took two days.

- Date: 2026-06-01
- Industry: Fintech
- Location: Miami, FL
- Company size: 125+
- Website: https://www.payabli.com

---
import BlockquoteAuthor from '@/components/customers/BlockquoteAuthor.astro'

**Challenge:** Payabli's documentation officially lived in Confluence, but it was outdated, scattered across messy Spaces, and full of links to locked-down Google Drive folders. Confluence's search didn't help and its AI features felt bolted on, so Slack DMs and threads became the default way to find and share information.

**Solution:** Payabli moved to Falconer: a single place to store documents that stay up to date and are easy to find. Falconer's agent keeps docs current as the code changes, while integrations with Slack, Linear, and GitHub supply context from the team's favorite tools.

**Result:** Employees across engineering, marketing, sales, and HR can ask questions directly in Falconer or Slack instead of waiting on a teammate. Teams that had never documented anything now contribute knowledge, and Payabli can scale world-class internal knowledge with minimal effort.

<BlockquoteAuthor
  quote="I see engineers sharing Falconer links all day now. We never saw that with other tools. There's the proof."
  authorName="Casey Smith"
  authorTitle="Director of Documentation at Payabli"
  authorImage="/images/customers/casey-smith.png"
/>

Payabli is a payments infrastructure company that helps software businesses embed payment acceptance, issuance, and operations into their products through a single API. Payabli was already well-known for its world-class customer-facing docs. But before Falconer, its internal knowledge management and documentation were a different story.

The company has grown quickly, with a large engineering organization. For years, Payabli's documentation officially lived in Confluence, though teams didn't have time to create and update information. They would write the occasional doc to satisfy a compliance requirement and then never maintain it. Meanwhile, important answers stayed scattered across Google Drive folders, private Slack channels, and engineers' heads.

When Casey Smith joined Payabli as Director of Documentation, she came to own the product documentation. But as Payabli scaled fast, internal documentation became a blocker. The challenge was to build world-class knowledge management for thousands of documents, across more than a hundred employees, in an environment that was always changing. That's why they turned to Falconer.

## The Confluence black hole

"Nobody actually uses Confluence," Casey says. "And if you do, you write a doc to appease someone or to meet some compliance need, and then you never have time to update it again." The Spaces that looked maintained were mostly skeletons, with the real content scattered across Drive folders and Slack threads that answered the same questions over and over. When someone needed to know how a workflow ran, they typically asked in Slack, which usually meant pulling an engineer off whatever they were working on.

Some teams didn't have time for documentation at all. "It was hard," Casey explains. "If you have too much friction for documenting things, teams are going to be too busy to produce any documentation."

Getting off Confluence had been on the roadmap for a while, but it kept getting deprioritized. "We're a startup," Casey says. "Everything is nuts."

## The test was simple: don't be garbage

Payabli started using Falconer before the product was available to the public. The tool was still being built. Casey is direct about why they moved forward anyway. "I'm really hard to impress," she says. "At the beginning, what I really liked was that the docs it writes weren't trash. That's hard to find."

Other team members had their own reasons to be excited. Payabli's head of engineering wanted documentation that updated automatically from Slack, while other engineers were drawn to the fact that Falconer could read context directly from the codebase. Casey's own favorite feature was interview mode, which lets her dictate to Falconer by voice and receive a drafted piece of content she can then edit. "I ramble," she says. "Letting Falconer figure out what matters and come back with a clean draft is my favorite thing."

Casey's bar for rollout was pragmatic: a tool that could create docs, update them, and find them, without frustrating engineers. Out of roughly fifty engineers on Payabli's team, the complaints from the Confluence days have stopped.

## How the team actually uses it

Casey spends most of her day in her editor, where she writes Payabli's external documentation alongside Claude Code. When something needs updating, like a file naming convention that's drifted or an example that no longer matches the code, she asks Claude Code to update the corresponding Falconer doc through MCP. For new content, she drafts inside Falconer itself using voice mode, pulling in context from Linear tickets through the integration. "If it doesn't integrate with Linear, I'm not using it," she says.

Other teams reach Falconer through whichever surface fits their workflow. Engineering and support stay in Slack, while business teams work from the web app, all of them pulling from the same underlying content. Linear, GitHub, and Slack are connected today.

> "It's like if federated search actually worked."

The biggest surprise for Casey has been watching the teams that had never documented anything start to write. With context in one place and friction removed, HR, finance, and marketing now keep their docs in Falconer.

## When the culture started to change

When someone asks a question in Slack now, Falconer can answer it directly from the codebase and docs, rather than pulling an engineer out of their work. Engineers share links without being prompted, and teams that had drifted from documentation have quietly opted back in.

> "We're starting to develop a culture of writing and looking things up before asking someone. That's very important for scale."

The migration itself helped make this possible. Falconer handled the move off Confluence, and the lift on Casey's end was almost nothing. "It was almost no effort on my part," she says. "The Falconer team handled everything. It was the smoothest migration ever."

For a payments infrastructure company moving at Payabli's pace, documentation can't be a bottleneck. It has to keep up. With Falconer, it finally does.

<BlockquoteAuthor
  quote="My stress level is much lower because of Falconer."
  authorName="Casey Smith"
  authorTitle="Director of Documentation at Payabli"
  authorImage="/images/customers/casey-smith.png"
/>