Confluence Reviews

Overall: We document everything in Confluence. I run a digital marketing team of around 20 people and have a total of 40 users in the tool (a few other teams besides mine use it). It's been a fantastic tool to get everyone on the same page and keep track of our how-tos, meeting notes, plans, goals, features/specs, etc.

Pros: Real-time simultaneous editing Ease of finding and organizing what I've written Constantly adding new features Integration with Jira and Trello is great, but also works as lightweight project management by itself

Cons: Honestly, they've fixed my biggest cons, like storage space (now you can buy a bigger plan) and they keep adding more things. I think my colleagues would say there's still a learning curve, which is understandable, and I think Confluence has been changing the interface with more tips and features for new users (which is sometimes confusing for long-time users like me, LOL) One big con is still the limited integration with MS Office. Confluence fully replaces the need for Word in most cases, so that's not a big deal, but I wish the Excel integration and/or the table functionality was better. Also, printing is pretty tough when you have tables.

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Confluence is quite inexpensive for what you get and it's super powerful. I really love the quick, accurate search results. The macro functionality and new "Slack" style slash commands are really cool. The notification system is very nice, especially the @mentions.

Overall: I have had an overall good experience with Confluence and it is easy to create and share documents. If you are using JIRA already I would recommend this.

Pros: Confluence allows me to easily create documentation on projects that we also have in JIRA (And also content we want to collaborate on as a company)

Cons: It gets increasingly more expensive as you add more users. The learning curve to use is relatively high. The interface is not intuitive

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: A central place for documentation, tied directly to client projects

Overall: The best thing I achieved using this software was to integrate the concept of knowledge base with my business logic, and it really helped because they have a great documentation for starters, and they don't just learn to use the platform, but the overall concept regarding documentation management.

Pros: The best feature that this has is the extended Add-In marketplace. You can find the proper Add-In to express your ideas in the best way: Coding, Images or illustrations, animated gifs or videos, and even forms inside the documents and pages. From a user perspective, this is one on the easiest knowledge base software in the market, and also you have the bakcing of Atlassian. The process of the integration with our existing business logic was easy because we didn't have a strict knowledge base, but Confluence gave us the foundations to build one from scratch.

Cons: The export tools and options you have inside the platform are not good. The data isn't portable, so you can't migrate easily to another platform in case you want. The installation process was complex, but today, they stopped producing self-hosted applications, so you are obligated to use their cloud services, and it can be a problem if the company has a strict data policy, like restrictions in the phisycal storage of the data.

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: It's easier to use from a end-user perspective. It stimulates the generation of the documentation inside the business.

Overall: I spend on an average at least 3-4 hours on confluence everydays since past 6 years. It has become one of the most essential tool for us.

Pros: I have been using confluence since past 8 years where I have used it as a user, managed it and also deployed it in several organizations. Confluence really changed the game of documentation and has helped teams build internal documentation in no time. Confluence cloud allows to make the documentation space more scalable. The solution is so popular it can be integrated with most of the solutions.

Cons: The customer support is not the best as Atlassian reliés more on the community support.

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: It has unlimited options and does everything a collaboration tool should do.

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Twiki was an opem source software which was deployed on a linux server. The upgrade and security control implementation was very tricky on twiki

Overall: This is the best documenting tool I have used but I think it could be a bit better. It allows documenting and sharing between many collaborators, who need to be careful so things do not get messy (I wish Confluence did it by itself somehow). Sometimes it takes a bit too long to load.

Pros: Confluence is definitely a good documenting tool. For large organizations, it helps with the documentation, that can be shared easily. It allows linking different documents, so that's very good when documenting many pieces of the same project. It includes a very useful search bar

Cons: You can get easily lost if people in the organization are messy. Sometimes it is not easy to navigate through all the pages

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: The navigation between pages is key for me and Google Docs did not offer this feature

Overall: Confluence is a nice tool to keep documentation organized as long as you remember where you're putting it (bookmarks). The tool is not sophisticated enough to provide ease of mind but it does provide a place to store documentation and the ability to share it or set permissions to intend on the correct people to view the items. Overall I as well as others use it but its also not the best and we all know it can be loads better in terms of features and formatting.

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.

Overall: Confluence is really good for organizing all of your company/teams requirements related to content, document, knowledge management and file management. Its a must for any company which is dependent on content and content based activities.

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

Reasons for Choosing 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.

Reasons for Switching to 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.

Overall: Overall, I am very satisfied with the confluence. Multiple architects collectively decided to use that over Sharepoint. The key reason is the seamless integration between these two products (Jira and Confluence). For an example, by simply writing the issue key on confluence page would automatically create the link to Jira ticket while reflecting the status of the ticket. This would allow visibility for Release Planning, while allowing you to write an appropriate decisions such as Go-No-Go on the same page.

Pros: Confluence offers pretty good UI for creating excellent documents (requirements or design). It does support pretty much all features of Microsoft word for creating a great documentation. Between all Atlasssian products, if you are tight on budget, I would suggest you to get Jira and confluence combo. It's indeed great tool combo for the remote agile teams to work together due to their seamless integration.

Cons: One thing that I loved on the share point that's not great with confluence is integration with the Microsoft office products. To be very frank, I feel this is not a big drawback as now a days, web interface is pretty much replacing the traditional interface.

Overall: The experience I had the last 9-10 years that me and my colleagues worked with Confluence is excellent. The document editor works smoothly even from the mobile app that is offered. There are many article templates to choose from when you start creating an article, from decision making documents to marketing strategy forms and solution focused how-to pages. Confluence supports a lot of media types in the pages, so it's easy to create helpful articles with video, audio, images and many more like attention panels, embedded spreadsheets, etc. You can even embed the contents of one section of a page to another page, so that if you change that it reflects the change in all the pages that the section was included. Which is great for customer support and of course technical documentation. Did I mention that you can create as many different wikis as you like? Confluence calls those "spaces" and it's a great way to keep things separated. I use different wiki spaces for my employees handbook, customer support, app manuals, design documents per project, etc. The possibilities are endless and having them separately helps with security between different roles in the company and outside of it.

Pros: Confluence, especially the new cloud version, is one of the best tools to use for documenting your knowledge-base. The best parts for me are: - The ability to connect my articles with to-do tasks from project management (Jira from Atlassian, same company, so they work like a charm together). - The articles I can contain any media types, from spreadsheets that I can edit in-line to videos. There are also a lot of native panels to help anybody create very stylish articles with usability. - In-line and footer comment sections help my team discuss and develop documents all together, without losing any of the discussion history. - The ability to also keep an internal blog. I use that to inform my colleagues for the day-to-day developments, and keep everybody on track with high ideas and management efforts. - All of the above can be also used as a customer-facing knowledge-base, to serve your customers with documents, operation manuals and help articles. Very handy if you use it together with the service desk solution from the same company, but can also be used stand-alone too. In general it's one of the best choices that I made when I was searching for a documentation solution for my company and my clients, back in 2010. Almost a decade passed and Confluence is still growing better and better by the time. Atlassian the company behind Confluence is now huge and offers many solutions that integrate with Confluence, making it an even better choice if you use other tools from them.

Cons: I can't find any cons to Confluence. After all there is no perfect solution, only elegant ones depending on the problem one tries to solve. Atlassian is offering a trial period so anybody can see if Confluence is good for their company's documentation needs. From my experience, it would be bad to start a trial before you hove some really motivated people in your team and some content to put in there. Because it would be better to test Confluence with something that you would use in your company, so that you see first hand the pros and cons while your team works with Confluence with material that is close to the true material that you would put in there. If I was to change one thing it would be the way it recognizes internally any of the pages I create, so that Confluence doesn't have any issues with pages with same titles. That would be a nice time saver and space saver in the outline of any wiki one creates.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs and Dropbox Paper

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Confluence is far more advanced and fits our business model as a documentation and knowledge-base solution. The price is right and Atlassian seems to continuously develop new features that help us create awesome online media-rich documents for us and our clients.

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: I made the switch from Google Docs because I wanted a more robust solution that would support a more deep infrastructure and would be easy to manage and interconnect with other project management, software development and customer-facing solutions.

Overall: I use this almos daily and I think it is a great tool for team performance. It allows to create and view all the info in no time and pretty well structured.

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.

Overall: Confluence has become the place for us to collect information, across our business. We use it document our processes and policies (the access controls prove useful there), and our development teams use it on a daily basis to record the outcomes of discussions and to share knowledge.

Pros: Confluence does a good job as a tool for writing, organising and viewing all kinds of documentation. It's fairly wiki-esque, but with a more intuitive editor for pages that should make it easier to pick up for new users that might be more familiar with, say, Microsoft Word. As an Atlassian product, you can expect a full set of tools for managing access to different pages and areas across your organisation, making it more appropriate for enterprises than more basic wiki software that doesn't always provide the same level of control. Another advantage is the high level of integration. 'Macros' allow users to include a variety of rich content, and are customisable. Examples of integrations include JIRA, Trello, Microsoft Office, G Suite, and more. The 'Atlassian Marketplace' can be used to find and install more macros.

Cons: Although the editor is easier to use than the markdown used by a lot of other wiki software, it can occasionally be frustrating to work with. Not all macros and formatting settings behave exactly the same, so while you'd be able to fix these issues directly in markdown, you can end up trying out a bunch of different tools before you find the one you need to achieve your goal. As with all collections of articles, organising pages can become difficult. The software itself provides basic tools that allow you to define a structure for your pages, and these work well, but it still requires considerable discipline as your use of the software scales up.

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: We previously had a bunch of Google Docs in a shared Drive folder. This worked for a while but doesn't scale well. We needed a more powerful tool to better organise our information and control who could access it in a central place.

Overall: My coworker and I use confluence extensively to document all of the work that we perform. As IT staff many issues that we come across will be repeated ad-infinitum. As such to simply be able to look up the fix from any location with internet access increases efficiency many times over. The notification ability helps all users to see what has been changed, when, and by whom providing an excellent level of accountability.

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.

Overall: As with other Atlassien products Confluence is just a charm to use. It is a great Wiki and it continues to be the gift that keeps on giving the more atlassian products you combine with it. I would absolutely chose Confluence again in the past and in the future. If you manage it smart (by setting up well conceptualized wiki spaces and making people patreons of certain areas in order to avoid cluttering) I could not imagine any solution better suited to Knowledge management and business documentation than Confluence.

Pros: We use Confluence for serval years now, together with Jira (Ticket Management) and Bamboo (Build Server). It has proven its value time and again for us and provided us with clear, easy to navigate and edit business documentation for almost all areas of business. The Editor is esy to use, there are Plugins for all imaginable use cases (for example specific PDF exports) and a great FAQ and very helpful community. The Editor for content is fantastically in terms of ease of use and results to be generated. Also all Articles are stored versioned, so you can easyly go back a version, or check what has been changed in case you have to get back up to speed on a topic you left checking a while ago. You can follow authors, topics or wiki Spaces so Confluence keeps you in the loop about what is happening. In case you work on confidential material the user access management is just a dream to use, simple, powerful and without any ruged edges. Additional Features are added and when they are they are well thought through and perfectly conceptualized. I never have found a feature which did not deliver what it promised and more. Some are not for me but the ones that were introduced and sounded interesting generally were. This is THE tool for anyone who wants to document all kinds ok business knowledge from simple things like HowTo or FAQ Article to complex branches of deccsion documentations connected to development progress (by Jira ticket integration).

Cons: Confluence has a lot of great features. The main Issue with Wiki Systems often is they work great in teh beginning and later become bogged down with badly maintained content or just forgotten structures. The search for the wiki still is not perfect. It has improved and is fine to use but I have seen better. There are also not a lot of features that support administrators in decluttering a large or huge Wiki and sometimes we had issues for complex, nested user rights. Also as always the case when you have an ecosystem of plugins, you have to make sure anything is compatible with a new version before you update, especially if it is a third party extension. Don't get me wrong, there is not much to complain here, you have to really look hard in order to find anything bad about Confluence.

Overall: My overall business experience is great. Earlier team was sharing project content via emails that is a clumsy way to mamage and store the information, but as more and more people are using confluence it has become a repository and one stop shop to put knowledge at one palce which can be referred as and when needed. This is a great tool and a game changer for how we manage our collaboration within team for the project under Agile way

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: 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.

Overall: Company: Midsize Industry: Legal Documentation is my bread & butter and I have never used a better solution than Confluence. I also use JIRA and JIRA Service Desk, which taken all together amount to a mostly-seamless solution for all of my documentation needs!

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!)