Confluence Reviews

The brain of our organization

Pros:

Confluence is one of a few systems we use that are crucial to our business, where if there was to be an outage, our business would grind to a hault.Confluence is the central store of knowledge for our company for everything from knowledge management, business process, knowledge sharing, product management, and anything in between. I like the Confluence doesn't try to re-invent the wheel, building on the basic premise of a word processing tool like Word or Google Docs, reducing the learning curve for new users.Confluence grants users super-powers through features that make Confluence documents interactive, engaging and powerful. Confluence's integration with Jira is fantastic and the two go hand in hand together, where 1+1 = 3.

Cons:

Atlassian has a marketplace of apps for Jira and Confluence that provide additive features and integrations. It is incredibly frustrating that you cannot buy licenses for only the users that need to use this app. For example, we have 100+ Confluence users, with multiple teams from customer support to developers. If our team of developers wants to use a Confluence app that costs $10/user/month, we have to buy licenses for all 100+ uses. As a result, apps become cost prohibitive to use, reducing the utility we get out of Confluence.

Document Management cant be more simpler!

Pros:

The product is pretty easy to use, have a great UI. The simplicity of the features are a blessing for all users. Its has made document sharing so easy that anyone can use it without any training.Also, the seamless integration with JIRA and other widgets eases our power to use the tool at the best!

Cons:

The only thing i dislike is when we edit a document in space or add a new document, its really troublesome to remove it properly.Also, the import and export functionality can be improved.

Alternatives Considered: Miro

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: We were already using JIRA, so using confluence was an addition to the product suite.

If you use Jira and need documentation for your projects, you need Confluence

Comments: Confluence and Jira are part of my day-to-day. I use it nearly as much as I use slack and email. It's invaluable - again, when set up correctly. But it takes time to do it properly.

Pros:

The integration between Jira and Confluence is simply amazing. In addition to all the documentation features, the ability to make Jira dashboards of sorts that auto-update is incredible. It takes a slight learning curve, but it's nothing short of magical for managing tasks and epics in a way that can please all stakeholders from engineers to PMs to end-users.

Cons:

It's hard to use, set-up and learn. But once you learn it, it's amazing. But you need to be patient and put in the time to learn to use it properly.

Our knowledge base

Comments: We were having problems to share information, and some users were not getting the right information. Knowing that we have a tool for information sharing like Confluence, we create a plan to start documenting all our processes, and now they are available across the company.

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.

The Project Management Software for Medium to Large Entities

Comments: The experience has been positive to our organization and we have benefited from various cost savings and time savings.

Pros:

As our organization grew and more employees were started to be employed, we needed a software for project management, file sharing and other related services. We decided to implement Confluence as we saw it as a good software with a lot of features. This software has helped our organisation drastically and all employees work much more efficiently.

Cons:

The software may be a bit expensive for small organisations and maybe more price plans can be included. However, due to the various feature that the software includes, I believe that the software is more focused towards medium to large entities.

Alternatives Considered: Miro

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: We saw Confluence as a better software meeting the needs of our business.

Great tool, for documenting all your project information and easy to share amongst different dept.

Comments: Great! 10/10, I will definitely use it in another project, a great way to keep information in one place and share insights.

Pros:

Very intuitive and easy to navigate, as well as, to use it. I was sceptical in the beginning, but now cant image, cant image how we worked before.

Cons:

As part of Microsoft solution, it is very easy to integrate with other Microsoft software, but not so much with 3rd party tools.

Alternatives Considered: monday.com and ClickUp

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: We have some technologies that are built in Azure.

Confluence_Knowledge base

Comments: I loved using it and the changes were updated as an when we encounter new updates on to the SOP standard operating procedures.

Pros:

All documents could be updated and stored with versioning.

Cons:

Need managers approval and manual updation of latest updates.

You can do anything with your ideas in this app

Comments: Overall experience is perfect. Easy to use, nice UI/UX. For me the best tool to collaborate with team members. There are little bugs in access control, but nothing terrible. Highly recommend.

Pros:

Management of documentation for project is awesome. The text editor is very robust. I think this is the best app to collaborate with another people on your project.

Cons:

Access control is a bit chaotic. Sometime we have problem settings right for users and we need to repair them more times to get the right result.

Knowledge Management tool for your Project

Pros:

1. A single repository that houses all the current and gathered data necessary for your project.2. Restricting access to particular individuals for specific documents.3. Great versioning system for documents4. Templates for many page types, such as project planning and how-to pages.5. You can manage teams and construct hierarchical structures thanks to Confluence Spaces and Pages' organised nature.

Cons:

1. The page doesn't update in real time while several people are working on it.2. Less add-ons and customizations as compared to other competitor products.3. Since content cannot be created while the page is being edited, every page you save becomes live.4. Search option does not work up to the mark.

The go-to choice for project/product wiki management

Pros:

I love the markdown acceptance, and how easy it is to create templates and add meeting notes

Cons:

Self hosting support is not great in terms of featureset and security

Class-enterprise knowledge base software

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: MediaWiki

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

Keep everything in one place, best KMS in software projects!

Comments: We are using Confluence for more than 4 years and in multiple projects and compnaes. I can say this too is awesome and although still have lots of space for improvement, but the current version is truly reliable for enterprise-level companies.

Pros:

Easy to use and high integration level with other Atlassian tools is the most interesting part of Confluence. There are more powerful software out there, but none of them has this integration level in a full bundle that Atlassian offers.

Cons:

Managing tables (with a huge amount of data) is not easy here, so usually, we prefer to attach excel files, but if it was more powerful in managing sheets, definitely we like it more!

Alternatives Considered: Notion

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Better document and file management system, Higher access level management system. Better price and very better ease of use.

Switched From: Google Drive

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Better integration with other Atlassian tools that we use during our daily work in the company.

So far, it is the best tool for teamwork

Comments: With the help of confluence, we're able to work together on our project even though our team members are located all over the world and come from a wide range of backgrounds. As a result, all of the project's information may be stored in a single location, making it convenient for everyone involved. This is a huge time-saver.

Pros:

Confluence provides a safe method for sharing knowledge and working on projects among team members. The main business, Atlassian, provides a wide range of reliable plugins. Because everyone on the team can make changes to the document repository and see when and who made them, this is one of the finest features of confluence's document sharing and management system.

Cons:

Many plugins are available, and it might be difficult to pick the ideal one for our purposes. This takes up a lot of time. The guidelines are typically adequate.

The Collaboration Platform You've Waited For

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Switching to 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.

All-in-one collaboration platform

Comments: Aids in the development of specialized work areas, wherein employees may carry out their duties in a relaxed and conducive setting. Integrating with other Atlassian products, as well as third-party apps, makes the platform more robust. It's easy to implement, fits any budget, and can help any business expand its operations.

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.

Best knowledge management and wiki out there

Comments: If you use other Atlassian products, Confluence is the perfect complement. Because exporting documents is so bad, it works best if you, your colleagues and your stakeholders/clients all exist in the same Atlassian ecosystem.

Pros:

Highly configurable and easy to use document templates, beautiful interface akin to using Medium, and deep integration with Jira Software and Jira Service Management are the features I find most useful. Recent changes to Templates to enable you to quickly search and preview available templates is incredibly helpful, as inline commenting while editing and being able to quickly convert anything into a Jira issue. Being able to use Confluence to defer service management requests by offering reporters the option of self serving an answer to their question/problem is a stroke of genius.

Cons:

It's beyond irritating that exporting documents as a PDF is so horrendous out of the box. I also find the concept of Actions vs Jira issues confusing. I consistently find myself missing actions that have been buried in Confluence.

Best tool for Project Management in Industry

Comments: Confluence helped to decommission code check in tools like SVN and fileshare in organization.
Verison control feature always helps to mitigate any risk during release and build deployment activities.
It saved enough time and human efforts for data n file managments for multiple projects.
Confluence turned to be life savior for many projects in cost effctive model.

Pros:

Confluence is very user friendly so no need to spend time and money on employee training and learning. It is time saving tool in agile project lifecycle reducing heavy documentation and support. Better customer support compared to other vendors and softwares. Cost effective and resilient for Risk management and project planning activities.

Cons:

Build deployment sometimes take time and version controlling mechanism require better practice for stability

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Efficiency and ease of use for confluence is better than Jira. It can be integrated to different sources for data management. Easy to work within Service Now platform compatibilty with Confluence

Switched From: JIRA Service Management

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Easy,user friendly,cost effective and version control ability to mitigate project risk

Great for an internal and.or external knowledge base!

Pros:

I enjoy using Confluence because it is user-friendly & intuitive. It is also cloud-based, so there is virtually no maintenance on our side other than the content.

Cons:

Some of the organization features for organizing pages could be a little better, or maybe just having some "best practices" explaining some examples on how to best manage pages & documetns for different scenarios.

Alternatives Considered: IT Glue

Reasons for Choosing Confluence: Needed a system that was made for a knowledge base, rather than jsut having a bunch of Google docs in a folder.

Switched From: Google Docs

Reasons for Switching to Confluence: Price was a major factor, and we liked the UI of Confluence better.

Jira is incomplete without confluence!

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft SharePoint

Best documentation tool I ever used

Comments: 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.

Awesome

Comments: 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!)

A robust and feature-rich collaboration/documentation software that sets the standard

Comments: The best wiki/collaboration/documentation software I've used professionally.

Pros:

- Lots of visual tools for organizing information, as well as molding communications: gliffy diagrams, code blocks, cells, spreadsheets. - Permissions model for segmenting information is greatly useful for organizations that create lots of documents and require some controls on searching and access to documents based on role. - Web-based interface for administrators of Confluence is convenient for managing content, delegation and authorization work. - There are many free software solutions in this sector of software, but generally require significant development to provide the value and features offered by confluence out of the box. - Development and improvements continue to be deployed, Confluence has not been static - Add-ons available through Atlassian marketplace to allow for further feature-adds for organization needs. I work in an IT environment, and diagrams for networks, software, process flows are invaluable for documentation purposes. - Shortcut commands for savvy power users saves lots of time inserting tools and setting up formatting with ease, once you are aware them.

Cons:

- Having used confluence for over 6 years, I have seen Confluence become more reliable with every update. At times, when something would go wrong with text formatting (bullet point indentation, for example), a power user could go to a tab of the document page you were working on, and edit the markup language of the page to correct the quirky formatting issue. This feature was removed. To the credit of Confluence, fixing such issues is less and less necessary, but power users like myself still miss it. - The permissions models can be confusing at times, even for highly technical people supporting the software. I do not think this is an issue with Confluence, but rather, a caution to administrators who approach permissions from different eco-systems.

It should be taken seriously

Comments: As I mentioned before, I use it as a company wide manual where all employees have to leaf through it whenever they have a question on a certain procedure and if they have any changes they'd like to make to any old methods then they are encouraged to make the edits to keep the company knowledge up to speed.

Pros:

Confluence is great for creating company manuals or documenting company procedures. Think of it as a formal business blog or a wiki where you can keep a record of anything from basic tables outlining company info to company policies which can then be shared with the rest of the employees so that they can in turn, learn and input their own observations and knowledge. It organizes the pages for you and it makes it easy for anyone to search, edit and add new pages to keep the knowledge growing. At my company, we use it as a manual and all new employees have to read through it as part of their training. It allows you to add photos or videos to document special past events or to just simply make the page more interesting. The formatting ribbon looks similar to Microsoft word's so if you have experience with using a Word document then it should be no problem using the different types of formating options and if you have no experience then you'll get the hang of it pretty soon as it's fairly easy to deduce what each button does. I love how it is able to save any edits you make to a page and it doesn't publish it until you are ready so you are able to make new pages and edit old ones at your own pace and once you are done you can click on "publish". It alows you to restrict what other people can and cannot edit, it sends notifications to those who have a user in your account. I would recommend it.

Cons:

The interface could use more color or some pizzazz as it looks pretty dull and it reminds me of an electric appliance manual: gray and boring to the point that you feel like throwing it away but then you are too afraid to do so because you may never know when you might need it. But then again, I use it as a company manual so I can't do much there, I'm guessing if you want something prettier then go get a blogging account but Confluence gets straight to the point and it should be taken seriously.

Wiki Engine on Steroids

Comments: We are using Confluence as our internal documentation storage system. It allows us to easily create documentation and share it among our various teams while controlling access to the teams. It is better than a document storage system for this purpose, as it allows us to create the documents on the fly, cutting a step out of the process and making documents easier to manage. We host it on site, so it is more secure than a solution like Google Docs as it's not on the web.

Pros:

We use Confluence on a daily basis to document various aspects of our organization. There is a large variety of built-in templates for a variety of sorts of documents. We heavily utilize the how-to articles to record procedures. Although it does link with other Altassian products, like Jira, we don't use that functionality currently as we run Confluence on-site and Jira in the cloud. The upgrade to version 6 greatly increased the usefulness of the product, as it brought in concurrent editing, ala Google Docs, which was functionality we needed when developing procedures for an event as a group. The search and indexing capabilities make it easy to find a document if its location is not obvious.

Cons:

Search and indexing can lose usefulness in the event you have many similar documents, like say a checklist that is executed often. I would like a function to be able to click a check box to "ignore results like this." The initial setup of Confluence was not completely straightforward, however, we were installing on an older version, version 5. (The upgrade to version 6 went much smoother.) I would prefer an omnibus install package if it doesn't currently have that rather than having to install PostgreSQL and the application. The LDAP integration could have been a little bit smoother than it was, although it is in line with the other Atlassian products I have integrated.

Documentation is key and Confluence is the perfect place for it

Comments: My overall experience with Confluence is excellent. My team has been using confluence for over 5 years now and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We have built an extensive knowledge base in Confluence and keep learning more and more awesome features every day.

Pros:

What I liked most and like most about Confluence is recently the ability to inline edit with team members on the same page. You can collaboratively edit a page together. This is very helpful when in meetings with multiple people and they can all be updating their portion of the document at the same time without stepping on anyone's changes. Second to that I would have to say the quick commands to change headers or add lists to a document on the fly never having to move your hands from the keyboard.

Cons:

The thing I would say I liked the least about Confluence is it's API, while there is extensive documentation for it. When you are new to working with their API it can be very hard to get off the ground running without a lot of trial and error due to the lack of examples.