Confluence Reviews

Pros

Confluence is a powerful collaboration tool that offers several impactful features. Its most impactful features include the ability to create and organize content, collaborate in real-time, and have version control for easy tracking and reverting of changes. With a user-friendly interface and intuitive design, Confluence is generally considered easy to use, allowing users to navigate, create, and edit content seamlessly. As for integration with existing business processes, Confluence provides various integrations and APIs that make integration with other tools and systems relatively straightforward. It offers flexible options for customizations, allowing businesses to tailor the tool to their specific needs and workflows, thus facilitating a smooth integration process with existing business processes.

Cons

As an end user of Confluence, I find the tool to be quite robust for collaboration, but there are a few features that I feel could be improved or added. For instance, I would appreciate more advanced formatting options, better task management capabilities, and improved visualization options for data. Additionally, I must admit that certain aspects of the product, such as complex permissions settings and the learning curve associated with advanced features, can be difficult to use initially. When it comes to integrating Confluence with our existing business processes, the level of difficulty can vary based on the complexity of our processes and the specific integrations required. In some cases, it has been challenging and has required additional configuration or development efforts, but Atlassian does provide resources, documentation, and support to help facilitate the integration process.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Primavera Cloud and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Confluence

Less features in Workday

Switched From

Workday Adaptive Planning

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

Those are planning tool but confluence come with JIRA tool as KM application.

Pros

Confluence is a well established, feature rich, easy to use and highly scalable collaboration tool. It makes writing and sharing documentation very easy. There is a vast library of (mostly paid for) plugins that can customise the experience.

Cons

It's expensive and the plug in system ramps up the cost considerably as well. Plugins have a habit of launching for free but after some time they start charging.
(usually shortly after you realise it's indispensable). They make it hard to remove and replace plugins.
Th search facility is not configurable and heavily weights results to more recent documents.

Pros

A adequate documentation system that can integrate with Jira issue/ticket system.

Cons

Not the best collaboration without adding in third party addins.

Pros

Confluence is our go-to content management and knowledge based tool. The ability to create spaces by team or departments is really useful and my favorite feature is the ability to give permission by page instead of just by space. We have a main team focused on maintaining our knowledge base, but it's helpful that we can also assign unique individuals who are subject matter experts to also help that team update the content.

Cons

At times it feels like Confluence may be a bit too robust. It's a great content management system, but can sometimes over complicate a search for a particular page. It can take some time to locate the page you are looking because so many results pop up. You have to weed through the results to find the one you're seeking.

Pros

For our development team, Confluence is an intuitive platform that just works!
It's easy to use, more performant than Sharepoint and has great Jira (the other essential tool we use for Agile project management) integration, given that both tools are from Atlassian.

Cons

Search accuracy needs to be improved. Page insights require additional licensing.

Pros

Perfect for documentation, with various supporting features around that.

Cons

Probably cost, pay per user, it is perhaps not good for start-ups.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SharePoint and Azure DevOps Services

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

Better features than the others, particularly for documentation

Pros

The ease of use makes it one of the best team work management platforms out there. We are a development team that uses Jira and the integration with Confluence makes our work seamless.

Cons

As of now, nothing really. We still don't use the Database functionality as it is in alpha.

Pros

Cloud-based, intuitive text editor, and an assortment of built-in macros for formatting text, embedding content, and linking other pages. The mobile application for Confluence lets our users access data while on-the-go and not in front of their computers.

Cons

Visibility to other data requires permissions to that data as well as the current data. It would occasionally be useful to be able to embed a view of other content that is locked behind restrictions on view/edit.

Pros

It has well implemented page tree which makes it easy to find required content documentation.It makes it easy to create and manage documentation for knowledge base collaboration.It has good import/export capabilities and also browser extension works really well.

Cons

Two issues I've encountered with Confluence are the limitations on customization,which prevents me from making any adjustments and the restricted offline access.

Pros

Ease of use and sharing of documents within the organization.

Cons

Search engine not showing really what I'm looking for usually.

Pros

-No need to use multiple MS software like Ms Project, excel or even Word for documentation. Now I'm using a single tool for my Checklist, Requirement list, action plans, help guides, and testing strategies.
-I like how it is integrated with JIRA which is also one of the main tools we use at work. All Jira dashboards are available within Confluence which allows documentation to be supported by task.
-There are ready templates for creating different types of documents. There is an option to create hierarchy for documentation and link them to each other to avoid duplication.

Cons

-Right now, exporting of documents is only limited to Word and PDF file types. It would be better if there were more options.
-Adding the option to customize forms would be a convenient feature. Instead of only having the pre-build forms.
-It is also better if there will be more complex support for searching algorithms for discovery when searching, not just by typing the exact keyword

Pros

Confluence is the most useful documentation tool of all time. It allows you to have all your documents in one place and not only that but it organizes them so very well. The number of tools it provides for editing a document is just amazing, something that is missing in all other documentation tools. The customizable templates are very useful too. I love adding images and videos to my documents, arranging the texts in blocks or tables, highlighting the important notes, etc. Confluence lets me do all of this. I also like how it allows collaboration of multiple people and highlights the contributors.

Cons

I did not find any cons in the product itself but I would like to see better support service for confluence

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

Collaboration with numerous tools already in use by our company like Asana, Slack, Miro Board, Google Sheets, etc. ,
Ease of use and sharing documents just by a click, and
Permission handling of users.

Cons

Struggle to share snippets of code and adhering to syntax, and
not having a flowchart builder feature.

Alternatives Considered

Notion

Reasons for Choosing Confluence

To incorporate a range of features that confluence offers and docs don't. Most important being integration with tools and Miro board.

Switched From

Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

Confluence has better integrations with other softwares and is a dedicated platform for documentation. Also, we wanted to have a platform where a Knowledge Library can be created and managed easily which confluence gave us.

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

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

It is easily accessible and you have loads of feature to customize your knowledge(renging from Tables , custom built Boards and even Linking tickets makes it a very straight forward solution for knowledge capture) pages or project management files , tools are easy to integrate and work with (highly recommend a cooperation with Jira , as they work very well togather.)

Cons

Administration part can be a pain from time to time , unless you know exactly what roles are correct , it can become a bit confusing .

Alternatives Considered

monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Confluence

Past experience working with it on multiple companies.

Pros

A great collaboration tool where all project documents (from major project plan to reports to release cycle to simple meeting notes) can be organized and shared in one centralized location.
The confluence editor feature makes it easier for me to create documents, review and share feedback and changes can be tracked thru page histories.
Spaces are well organized and structured. There are page shortcuts, page trees, breadcrumb trails that aid users to navigate between pages and information.
It is easy to build links within pages by adding an anchor. You don't need to remember which part of the page you have read a certain information and do page scroll.
I like the gliffy plugin. Whenever I need to embed a workflow diagram, adding gliffy makes it easier to attach flowchart, it's dynamic as changes in the diagram is reflected in the page.
I can highlight people in my reports or meeting notes by tagging them
Documenting a test report is easier with the JIRA integration - JIRA issues highlighted and linked and JIRA issue filters can be embedded and since these two (JIRA and Confluence) work hand in hand, it makes delivering software in agile approach a lot easier.

Cons

To beautify your confluence page, you need to know which macros and plugins you need to add but by doing these, one needs to have very basic knowledge in html or programming which could be a learning curve to most people. But lots of how to videos are shared by Atlassian and lots of documented procedures are out there shared by experienced users. One just need to be resourceful. The challenges in embedding spreadsheet with macros and formatting tables are not a challenge anymore if you know what macro or plugin to use.

Another issue is sometimes finding the information you are seeking is not successful and sometimes the information search for spans to multiple pages - but information actually can be managed by adding labels which again boils down to the user having the knowledge that this feature exists.

Pros

The widgets. I love the team calendars, the roadmap functionality for time lines, decision tracking and criteria, tasks/action items and the ease of defining them, status bars, and the flexibility for meeting notes, how to articles, blogs, file lists, product requirements, retrospectives, task reports, and troubleshooting articles from one source. It has really improved our interaction with customers for projects and documentation.

Cons

From time to time I see issues with editing pages. It does not make the bold or color changes to changes even though the toolbar indicates it is made, it does not display correctly. I also see this display issue with tasks, where the tool bar indicates a task is inserted, but it is not displaying correctly. And also see this issue with bullets. It will display no bullet, or even worse, it displays additional bullets that I don't want.

I would also love to be able to sync widgets between pages (ie a status bar on one page to a parent of that page for a summary. And also be able to sync components/pieces of a page between two Confluence instances. For an example of the use case, we have a time line that we maintain on an internal instance, and I want to sync parts of that timeline to an external instance that we share with customers. This would allow me to have internal only deliverables mapped, but provide a customer facing doc without maintaining two versions

Pros

It is extremely easy to create a large number of documents, it is possible to reference other documents within them to facilitate ease of research, and documents can all be put into sub-folders to contain them within separate trees to aid with organisation.
The mobile app is extremely useful for reading documentation whilst on the go - an example would be that we keep Video Conference details on one page that I have favorited, as such when I set up a VC from any location I am able to rapidly find the correct details to dial.
The search functionality allows for extremely quick location of relevant documents. On many occasions I have not been able to find what I need looking through the lists, only to immediately find it on the first search. Indeed I no longer look through the list as the search is so efficient.
When changes are made to documents it is possible to set it up to notify other members of the team so that they are able to see what has been done.

Cons

The only minor issue I have discovered with confluence is that when creating new documents setting the location is not as smooth as I would like.
Specifically I need to begin creating the document, then select "Move" and finally put it into the desired place. This does not really cause issues as it is still a quick process, however a one click setup would be appreciated.

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

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 rich text central location of document storage and the ability to share based on permissions is a nice-to-have tool for large companies or groups. Utilization is tricky as every team or group will use it in their own way and organize their own way so even if you implement this in your company and you're browsing another department's documentation, you will find essentially that it is just their own internal documentation which requires a little bit of a lucky search to find what you're looking for. Essentially this is a glorified document cloud storage which allows version control, permissions, and sharing.

Cons

It is not much different than say any other software or tool available in this category. It has some nice features like version control and seeing a complete history of who made changes to what along with comments and a social feature to it where you can subscribe but honestly there is so much more potential here especially from a company like Atlassian. I just feel they really dropped the ball here by not implementing better integration with some other apps which are already available. Example is that their spreadsheet implementation is a nightmare. The formatting almost always behaves irradicably and it has the bare minimum when it comes to these spreadsheets. Why not implement at least at the base of other offerings? For a paid product, the level of quality is expected to be much more.

Pros

Confluence is an excellent tool for document management. It offers many features, including version control, access controls, and document organization. This makes it much easier to keep track of changes to important documents and manage them effectively. With Confluence, you can be sure that all your documents are stored securely and have complete control over who can access them. Whether you are working on a project or need to keep your records organized, Confluence is the perfect solution.

Cons

I've heard from some users that Confluence is lacking in some formatting and customization options. Specifically, some have reported that the platform lacks more advanced formatting capabilities, such as the ability to create multi-column layouts. Additionally, while Confluence allows for customization, it seems that the platform's options are somewhat limited compared to other document management tools.

Pros

I have to say that Confluence is an innovative solution that stand out from others of it's calliber in the market . Acquisition and implementation costs were within our budget range. It is also soo easy to use for everybody in our team thanks to it's UI that is perfectly tailored. Most of our work as the vet society in Vetcare Africa is usually outside the office and Confluence has to engage and collaborate as a team working on different rotation projects. It is remote friendly and centralize all the information in one space from tasks allocated to each one of us to projects from where we can coordinate and get status update on our peers as well as shared projects. It is therefore easy to get everyone at par across teams through comments, mentions and notification. It is also flexible enough with options to create plans with texts, tables, images etc . Imagine all of these in one single place and has customizable templates

Cons

I have not encountered any single dislike with Confluence. It is an easy to use tool that enhances collaboration by also integrating with tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive