Confluence is a collaboration and content sharing platform used primarily by customers who are already using Atlassian's Jira project tracking product. The product appeals particularly to IT users.
$10
per month
BoardPro
Score 9.3 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
BoardPro offers board management software for small enterprise, small cap and nonprofit organizations. With it, users can create agendas, build board packs, record minutes, send actions and store files.
It has a comment option on the page, where you can tag other teammates tagging them. it sends the mail notification. Comment at the page end is pretty good for referring to other stakeholders and future references of the topic on the page. Creating the highlights of the discussions, and meeting held points with highlighted tagging. Easy shortcuts such as to add a date just type "//". The interface is cool and has easy shortcuts for quick page making.
The best scenarios for the use of BoardPro are highlighted when there is planning, development, coordination, execution and monitoring of projects and activities, in addition to being an information panel for all the members of the different teams of the organization, it provides the ability to hold meetings, an integrating element that stands out from other software. The management of the boards is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use, in addition to simplifying its content in a way that is easy to understand for all people, granting continuity and consistency to the work or works to be developed. An area of opportunity where it could be developed in a better way is offline work, since it will not be possible for your team members to work in this way.
Agenda-setting and writing minutes is very easy with the built-in structure offered
Compiling and distributing Board packs with BoardPro takes a fraction of the time it used to - and updates to papers are so much easier
Ability to hold all governance documents in one central repository is useful for external Directors
Directors find the Board paper annotation feature very useful. New updates to this have made it an extremely powerful tool.
Flying Minutes feature is very useful for obtaining formal decisions between meetings and then automatically adding them to the next set of minutes.
The ability for Directors to update their own interests in the Interests Register is efficient and puts the responsibility on them to ensure this is up to date - this is automatically included in each Board pack.
The actions feature is fantastic - allocating a person responsible and an action deadline which then is followed up by BoardPro email reminders keeps people on tasks and allows the Chair to stay on top of actions as they are reported in the Board packs each meeting.
Navigation. Similar to other Atlassian products, users have complained that aspects of Confluence are difficult to learn right away[.]
An issue that users can face when using Confluence is attempting to edit a document while someone else is editing. Although users can access the document and save it, they are unable to see the changes happening in [real-time] that other users are implementing until they refresh their page. Some users have also noted that this can result in loss of edits.
Another drawback of using Confluence is its specific organizational structure. All information is stored within one page or project, although the page is able to be broken up into sections, some users do not prefer this style. Users can use the ‘page tree’ on each page to organize the different elements of each project.
I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.
Confluence can - and in my personal opinion, it will - be a bit hard to use in the first moment. Atlassian is a great company and is eager to help you with any question you have, though. The interface seems to be a bit clumsy at first but the customization options are enough to make it easier and simpler. In general, Confluence is easy to use when you understand what each section does, but this can take a while.
Pages load very quickly, which makes it useful for quickly obtaining information. The search functionality is also very quick and is able to parse through all of the documents to provide the most relevant results for the query. Other information based software gets bogged down, but so far Atlassian Confluence maintains its performance.
This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.
We used to use Google Drive to store all of our documentation, but it is disconnected from our every day working environment and it was easy to lose documents and become disorganized within the broad drive environment. [Atlassian] Confluence has kept us more organized and its tight coupling with Jira has made documents more accessible and more likely to be kept up to date.
BoardPro is on a different playing field than monday.com, in fact, BoardPro is in a league of it's own. I used monday.com at a different organisation board and actually found that I did not use it. I found it easier to download and read the PDF board pack that was provided to me. The user interface of BoardPro is such that the software is easy to navigate and use, it is intuitive and such a delight to use.
We've gone from folders and folders of Word documents and PDFs into a single system with a search feature to bring all of our data together and trackable
While onboarding took a bit longer for the company (to switch from a Word document centric mindset - to a web-based one), overall the company has embraced the features and power of Confluence within the working stack
However, as costs continue to climb for the Atlassian product, we are forced to continue our evaluation of the product - with replacing it a remote possibility if it begins to outprice its usefulness to us.
