Confluence Reviews

Pros

It is very useful to share all our documentation and knowledge base. All the users are now able to get updated information, and can share any documentation with the team.

Cons

It can become a bit slow sometimes, causing the pages to take longer to load and look for information.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Choosing Confluence

We were looking for a better documentation and information sharing tool

Switched From

Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneNote

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

It was the better option for our company, thinking on how robust is the tool.

Pros

Atlassian Confluence is a platform for teamwork and information exchange that has helped our company greatly improve its operations. The platform is accessible to all users and features a straightforward interface, enabling our company to set up shared workspaces where employees can efficiently complete a wide range of assignments. It's steady, and it's facilitated the simple expansion of our holdings.

Cons

There was a difficult learning curve for some of our less tech-savvy consumers to become proficient on the site. Some users may find it inconvenient that customer service is only offered in English.

Pros

Document managementCollaborationKnowledge managementIntegration with other tools

Cons

Complexity: Confluence is a powerful tool with many features and capabilities, which can make it somewhat complex to set up and use effectively. It may take some time for users to become familiar with all of its features.Cost: While Confluence offers a free version, its more advanced features are only available with paid subscriptions, which can be expensive for some organizations.Customization: While Confluence is highly configurable, making extensive customizations may require some technical knowledge or expertise.User interface - Little bit tricky

Pros

Confluence is a highly customizable content management tool that offers a wide variety of features and functionalities. From creating web pages to collaborating on files and creating custom workflows, Confluence streamlines team collaboration and project management. We love its integration with other popular tools like Jira and Slack, which allows us to work more efficiently. Additionally, we've noticed a significant improvement in team productivity since we started using Confluence. I would recommend this tool to any team looking for a comprehensive solution for content collaboration and management.

Cons

Despite being a useful tool, Confluence can be a bit difficult to learn for new users. It requires a certain learning curve, which may take some time to fully master its use

Pros

Confluence makes team collaboration seamless and efficient, allowing everyone to access important information and contribute in real-time.

Cons

While Confluence offers great flexibility, it can be a challenge to maintain a consistent navigation structure within a large organization.

Pros

I greatly cherish Confluence's extensive range of customization options, which I find incredibly useful for creating personalized workflows using the pre-built templates available on the platform. By leveraging this key strength of Confluence, we have been able to adapt the software to our team's specific requirements, resulting in a notable increase in productivity and efficiency. The broad scope of customization options offered by Confluence has proven invaluable to meeting the unique needs of my team, as far as centralized project information is concerned.

Cons

As much as we would have liked to extend Confluence's use for project management purposes, the absence of task dependencies, customized roles and statuses , workload charts and the likes , limits us to only using Confluence as a project wiki / information hub for our projects .

Pros

I found Confluence as an improvement in knowledge sharing and content management. Making my own site or creating templates for each site, depending on requirements, is what I find the most useful. Also, the learning curve is not steep at all.

Cons

Nothing to dislike at this moment, I am quite happy with it.

Pros

Confluence is a great platform for creating a knowledge base and fostering collaboration. Its user-friendly interface and real-time collaboration features make it a good choice for teams and organizations.

Cons

Getting acquainted with all the features and settings may take some time and effort and customization requires technical skills

Pros

* Well known so many people know how to user it/ interact with it* Very well integrated with the whole atlassian ecosystem

Cons

* Not very flexible* Not as easy to use as some of the competitors on the market

Pros

I think it is a really great concept. I like that you can create documents and make real-time edits right away while also maintaining a knowledge base. I also like that you can create an intranet that is collaborative - without having to upload new content every time you'll like to make updates.

Cons

I'm not a huge fan of the UI, and its ease-of-use could be improved. To be honest, I wish the editing functions would appear more like Microsoft Word, so I would intuitively know how to make edits.

Pros

Confluence is an incredibly powerful and flexible collaboration platform for teams. It enables teams to easily store, share, and collaborate on documents, notes, tasks, and more. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, making it simple for teams to get started quickly. It also has a wide range of powerful features, including powerful search capabilities, easy-to-use editing tools, and the ability to create custom workflows.

Cons

While Confluence is a powerful collaboration platform, it can be a bit overwhelming for users who aren't familiar with the platform. Additionally, the cost of using Confluence can be prohibitive for smaller teams.

Pros

Confluence has become the defacto wiki tool for most of the companies that I've worked with. The barrier to entry is super simple and VERY easy to setup (either Enterprise deployment or in the Cloud). Either way, most engineers I know these days are very familiar with Confluence.

There are also a ton of plugins and enhanced features that you can bolt onto Confluence which make it robust and scalable.

Cons

There are a few things I don't like about Confluence:

1. The search functionality is a bit... wonky (?) to use... they try to load predictive results, which don't open in a new page automatically, it takes too long to load sometimes and if you press 'enter' and don't wait for the predictive results to load it takes you to entirely new page where the results have to load again. Also if you try to search before the JS has fully loaded the search doesn't work, takes your focus away. This means I have to be very slow when using the search feature and it easily frustrates me.

2. They advertise all these awesome plugins and support widgets, which cost a ton of money, but they only apply at the space level, not an individual account level. I'd be more inclined to buy stuff if I could also apply it to my personal Confluence account and take it with me. There are features like enhanced project management, and task management, and charting, and RTF features that I want, but the last two organizations LOCK THIS DOWN and getting a plugin installed is like moving heaven and earth.

3. Im a web dev and an embedded systems engineer. I like to touch things. Confluence can be a bit locked down sometimes and regid in the HTML5 layouts and JS run on page. I wish I could be an 'advanced user' and just make the changes within page. But I cannot. Im stuck with the one size fits all.

All of that said, they are gripes of a dev, but otherwise the wiki space is pretty fantastic. I use it daily!

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs and Azure DevOps Services

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

The price + feature set met the needs of everyone.

Pros

Confluence gives best documentation platform for your projects. We can categorize based on different projects and sub projects. we can create links to another pages which is very useful to route to another document without searching for it. we can see all the documents related one project in one section. It gives you wide range of features to include images and diagrams to make the documentation more useful. We can also subscribe to the pages so that anyone make any changes we get notified.

Cons

Confluence needs more integration with the CICD tools available in the market to make more automated documentation. confluence needs to provide to create diagrams for documentation so that users dont need to go for external software for that.

Alternatives Considered

Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

In confluence I can categorize based on projects and sub projects and I can see all the documents for that project and select based on the priorities. But in google docs we need to we need to keep a separate index for each documents and the docs are separate. we need to browse through the google docs to go to next one.

Pros

From the word go, our team was able to jump start and create a solid knowledge base for our entire enterprise. Being in Education and E-Learning domain - content is the heart of our business.

Managing content created by various teams inside company, partner contributions, freelancers content is extremely crucial and critical.

Some of the most important features of this product for us are: Document Management, Knowledge base, Version Control System, Structured Pages, Search

Cons

Confluence product does content related work really well. But that's not enough as we have grown in last 3 years and so are our requirements.

Integrations with forms, data collections, Kanban board, tasks etc have become kind of a must rather than good to have features.

We are currently on the premium plan and $10 per user for just managing document and collaboration seems little too much, specially when there are products which provide much more for less.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint, Drupal, Zoho Docs, Dropbox Paper and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Confluence

Initially we started maintaining and collaborating using Google Docs. With the amount of documents created, it was really getting difficult to manage, tag, structure the content and files around various categories of our educational departments.

Switched From

Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

With confluence managing, creating and organizing content is extremely easy and above all confluence will keep track of all the changes. With easy file uploads, managing documents and creating structured pages will only help create better content.

Pros

It's incredibly simple to work collaboratively and provide feedback on written documents using this platform. Its "wiki on steroids" approach is particularly effective for overcoming writer's block, allowing users to start writing without hesitation and continuously improve their work.In addition, the tool's seamless integration of pages and information, as well as its ability to connect with Jira and extract relevant data, are noteworthy.

Cons

Many essential features are only accessible through paid plugins, which is disappointing. For instance, the team calendar should be a standard feature available to all users.Furthermore, the administrative features are often difficult to use and unclear, particularly for larger organizations that require a greater degree of granularity.The pricing model for the plugins is also problematic. For example, users are required to purchase a license for each person on the platform, even if only a small number of individuals will use the plugin.

Pros

Confluence is a great option for existing Atlassian users looking to seamless integrate an active knowledge base into their project workflow. With direct connection to the JIRA project management platform, Confluence allows you to connect existing users directly to relevant project documentation. Its base functionality is fairly intuitive for novice users, and its advances permissions schemes allow you to create a variety of admin tiers that can restrict access to relevant users only. The integration between Confluence and JIRA is as simple as checking a box in the user admin panel.

Cons

As a general word processor, Confluence can be a little clunky when compared to the UX of similar processors such as Word of Google Docs. While its advanced features can be very useful for more experienced users, available tutorials can be difficult to come by and are often outdated. Like most Atlassian products, the bounty of features, settings, and schemes can be very overwhelming to the average user and are not overtly intuitive. Document organization can also be very confusing, as there are a variety of options to choose from when creating parent and child pages.

Alternatives Considered

Google Docs, Trello, Microsoft 365 and Basecamp

Reasons for Choosing Confluence

Direct integration with JIRA.

Switched From

Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

Direct integration with JIRA.

Pros

Confluence has been used extensively by my team to keep track of and add new information to the knowledge base. It appears that we have done a good job of creating pages that provide the information new employees require. Small businesses can use the tool, but I believe it is better suited to larger ones. It's quick and easy to set up a wiki for your team. Real-time collaboration, complete version history, and automated change logs and diffs are all included. You can move and drop documents in the document tree with ease because each document has a unique URL. This is one of the most convenient methods for obtaining such a combination. Confluence integrates seamlessly with the other Atlassian products, making project and product management as simple as possible. This year has seen an explosion in the number of templates that are available to help you keep your documentation organized and easy to fill out. Useful, but sometimes you must look up exactly how to use macros. Confluence's macro documentation is extremely helpful.

Cons

If you don't have a lot of experience with wiki software, the editor can be difficult to work with. When it comes to macros and formatting settings, it can be difficult to know which tool is best for your project. It's difficult to organize a collection of articles, but that's to be expected. With the help of the software, you can organize your pages in a predetermined way. This is effective, but it necessitates a great deal of self-control as your familiarity with the software increases.

Pros

The interactive features of Confluence serves as the best feature and function of this platform! Our organization is relatively small (20-30 employees) and is a Foundation that interacts with other nonprofits in the area. As a result we had many touch points in the community through various teams and often time what we were doing would get lost. In an effort to improve our internal communication our organization adopted Confluence as a means of servicing our company. We used the blog feature heavily which proved to be the best method of communication internally and cut down on the amount of emails adding to the clutter in our inboxes. It also allowed discussions to happen seamlessly and served as a point of reference for folks to easily access when needed.

Cons

It wasn't always very user friendly. Our organization consists of a variety of ages, so the way that people have engaged with technology is also varied. There are times that adding spaces or pages have proved to be a challenge for those who don't consider themselves as "technologically savvy". There was a bit of a learning curve for me in learning to how to use the software, but the customer support team was helpful in walking me through difficulties. The mobile function also wasn't the best depending on how users have different spaces setup.

Pros

Since we work remotely, confluence is the main repository for our documents (I belong to the People & Ops team and we have a lot of policies and processes documents to maintain).

Here is what I like the most about confluence:

1. I feel its a perfect combination of a word and a presentation file; you can be as creative as you want with your content with no length limit (like in a presentation file)
2. I absolutely love how we can create sections within the document - makes the whole document look absolutely organized
3. We also can create indexes like in books so it's very convenient to find any particular topic that we are looking for
4. Easy to create and share any document
5. If you are collaborating with multiple people on a document, it's very easy to assign a certain task to them using the tagging and action item feature
6. You get amazing options to complete your document - layouts, table, heading, alignment of text/images, emoji
7. Also if you have not tried the insert function yet, you are missing out a whole deal there - with so many options to choose from, this makes the document very very interactive

Cons

All the features in confluence are great. However, since I am also a user of the google sheet and word, the only pinch I feel - and this is about every time I use Confluence - is the lack of font to choose from.

The default font is good as it makes the whole document look very professional. But for documents where we actually want to add more fun, I believe, we would definitely need more fonts :)

Pros

With Confluence we have an environment that is very efficient to work in to add new content, very easy to update articles and manage file attachments. The keyboard shortcuts are second to none. It is an absolute pleasure to work in Confluence all day. Setting up spaces for various audiences, including a "personal space" allows me to draft documents privately and then move the document over into a space with an audience. Effectively I can "publish" content to employees with a couple of mouse clicks.

Permissions are very well thought out. The permission scheme is based on spaces, individuals and groups, with flexibility from super-locked-down to wide open on the public internet. It allows control of various actions per person or per group, and affords us maximum utility of the product. People within the business are dreaming up different ways to use it faster than we can implement them.

As with any full-featured system that allows you total control as an administrator, successful use of the product requires that you lay out your business requirements clearly first so that there are no unexpected outcomes. Establishing best practices for content creators within the system is also advisable.

I have used other systems in the past, notably MediaWiki and SharePoint, and while I enjoyed them at the time, Confluence blows everything else out of the water. The control and flexibility is unparalleled and the product has obviously been designed for use in environments where project priorities, staff hierarchies, etc can experience rapid significant change.

I also highly recommend the Atlassian sister product JIRA and add-on JIRA Service Desk for task based work management. It is incredibly useful.

Cons

With great power comes great responsibility and great potential to make an absolute mess of things. Deployment of this tool to a large user base would require some serious preparation to establish access schemes, permissions for user groups, best practices for editing and creating new content, and organizing content within the spaces. End user training is critical to cement those rules and establish a culture around using it effectively. I would not recommend deploying this tool in a slapdash hurry (Although, given it's innate flexibility, it would be easier to correct it later with Confluence than some of its competitors!)

Pros

The best part about this software is the close integration with JIRA software. This is in real competition with Sharepoint as far as my understanding goes and I am an admin user for multiple scrum teams in my organization. Confluence in its own way is by far the easiest user-friendly software that I introduced in my team that was new to the agile world and now all our collaboration and communication on the process and tech document standpoint happens on Confluence.

The comment section and different macros that can be added for adding content on a page and tree structure for pages created give this tool the edge and flexibility for teams to create the format that best suits to specific scrum team needs

The technical document and usage of code snippet macro are very useful add-ons that have been given for formatting the content.

from the project management standpoint, the product backlog and release planning can be done simply by adding JIRA tickets and their specific status that automatically is being fetched by confluence every time page is opened.

The other most important feature is the ability to create JIRA tickets directly from the confluence page just select the text and then Confluence will give an option to create JIRA ticket and gets linked

The reporting macros for JIRA tickets is a good way to track progress of projects

Cons

At an enterprise level, there are few web designing that is required to be done so that content that is already there can be structured in a much more web design format like links to confluence pages to be embedded in an image. That option is available but to central Admin and not to the page admin that makes confluence little crunched to admin users within a project. But this negative point is a very small piece in comparison to positives with this application.

Pros

Confluence has a lot of advantages and here are some of them. Confluence is part of Atlassian Suite which is connected with Jira and you can easily integrate them. This software provides a documentation platform for your projects. You can create links to other pages, see other documents that are related to some specific project, also it provides you with different kind of images and charts to make your document more powerful. This software supports everything starting from images, tables, diagrams, charts, whatever you need Confluence has it. Also, another thing that is worth mentioning is that you can see if anyone has made any change to the document and if it has you will get notified.

Cons

There are not so many disadvantages, to be honest, this is great software, maybe a bit hard for some beginners, but not too hard and you will have to spend some time on this software to know how it works. Another thing that I don’t like is that they are changing Confluence non-stop. They are doing updates most of the time and changing the software. I understand that they need to make changes for better but that can sometimes be annoying because you know something where is it and then they change it and add something else and you have to learn again.

Pros

The main advantage about Confluence is that is part of the Atlassian Suite which involves Jira and Bitbucket among others. This makes pretty easy to integrate them and add quick references to a jira issue with just write the reference number.
The text editor in Confluence is pretty complete, allowing to create really decent pages for any kind of documentation desired. The possibility of create nested pages makes really easy to organize the information in "chapters" "sub-chapters" and so on, giving your documentation a really neat look.
This feature also allows to segregate the information, so you can have your product's documentation on one place, perfectly organized and set another "Chapter" for your team info, where you could store info about code conventions, timetables about overtime or availability, and so on.
Confluence is also useful in order to create software designs, since it allows to create pages where you can paste your diagrams and so on and allows to discuss on them by adding comments or remarks.
And the Watch utility keep you posted via e-mail whenever a page you're watching is modified in any way so you can keep track of a discussion or whatever.

Cons

So far didn't find any big issue with confluence. Maybe for beginners it has a bit of learning curve and some option like the page nesting and so on is a bit difficult to learn. Besides that, I think is a pretty complete software.
Something I miss is the possibility of "downloading" a page with all nested ones into a pdf. That would be a great feature in order to generate documentation files.

Pros

It comes with rich features, below are a few features which I personally liked:

1. Documentation: When there are some important knowledge articles that need to be shared with the team, we use this tool. It comes with multiple options to make the page feels catchy and rich, it also allows us to attach the images.

2. Search Functionality: When there are 1000s of confluence pages, and if I want to access the page containing a specific word or a line, the search engine works like a champ it finds the pages almost immediately, this feature really helps me in easing my office work.

3. It displays the name of the person who had created the page and last modified person name, this helps to know whom to reach out to when we need additional info pertaining to the details as written on the page. And if required we can add the approvals, thus whenever someone edits the document without your consent changes won't reflect others until you approve the updates.

4. Like and Comments: Similar to social media, readers can either hit like if they like the content or they can mention their feedback in the comment section, this feature really helped me while suggesting something to the author or express my thanks via a LIKE.

Cons

There should've been an option to keep the page in draft before publishing it. But unfortunately, there is no such feature in confluence.
Apart from this, I didn't find any other flaws in the software.

Pros

Being an Atlassian product it is fully compatible with the rest of the suite, and being used together with Jira and Bitbucket is a real hit.
It allows to link a Jira task/bug/story/whatever by just writing the element reference number; it will automatically create a link to the real stuff on Jira. This makes easy to keep work briefs about epics and stories, so you can easily talk about when or where you fixed something, and just link the task in which you logged the work.
Besides that is really flexible allowing to have multiple sub-level pages to properly organize the information in a much more structured way than a Wiki. This allows to keep software documentation, teams structure and oranization, meetings briefs, and so on in the same application but in a well structured and easy to use way.
Regarding the usability, the text editor is quite complete, and allows to create very neat pages really fast. It supports images, tables, formatted text... everything you would need in a documentation app, is there.

Cons

For this software I have not found any serious cons... maybe something I would like to be changed is the placement of the save button. On that location I use to miss it and sometimes I just closed the page without saving because I forgot the button was there; but that is just my problem remembering things.