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
Figma
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
For a larger organization Atlassian Confluence is the best tool we used. We found that since we were a smaller organization it wasn't worth it for us as much as using Google Drive and keeping on top of it. We ended up going back to using Google Drive but only because we …
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.
If you want to create a UI design quickly and don't have much knowledge specifically for using any tool for UI Design, Figma is best-suited. Its basic version is free, so you can first learn it like a pro, and then if you like you can purchase it. It's available for all the platforms as it has a web version that can be directly accessed by your browser. Also, it has preview apps for android and ios. Figma has tutorials on their website but they are somewhat not for basic users, so I'll recommend Figma to create some.
Collaboration! we stopped sharing screen in zoom, now we all jump into Figma and magically everything connects and flow way better.
Memory management! Figma manage all the assets so well, that we sometimes have all project assets in one single file with multiple pages and it loads instantly. Keeping everything in one place, easy to access and to developers or designers complain about they stations running out of ram!
Sharing!, getting a link to an exact pixel is magical, discussion can now have way more context than what it had before.
Auto-layouts! Although is not new in the ecosystem, Figma does a pretty awesome job with molecules and particles, so you can create better design systems that can stretch to any screen, making it a design once for all devices!
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.
Some of the auto-layout features seem to have bugs every so often.
The account management between different Figma spaces doesn't seem super intuitive.
When navigating to the same work space on different devices, the file name view is not remembered (as that may be a device-specific preference that is not tied to an account preference).
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.
Our designers and developers love this tool because it eliminates the need to package designs into a separate folder. We used to upload all PSDs or In Design files in a dropbox folder, and this tool changes that. However, as a project manager, I find it a little clunky. Most of the time, all I want to do is view a specific design, but Figma defaults to be zoomed out and then you have to zoom in and scroll to the specific design in order to see it
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.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
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.
Figma doesn't have operating system problems, working well with Windows, Mac, etc (as Sketch is only available on Mac computers), or a lot of bugs and performance issues (as Adobe XD still does). Figma is a lot easier to use as it is 100% web based, winning over these 2 competitors. Also, is worth mentioning the HUGE plugin libraries, embedded into the app. It makes the work a lot easier.
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.
Lots of saved time and energy by being able to have feedback loops in the same program that stores the designs. We don’t have to use multiple programs to have a conversation about a single design.
Being able to have feedback loops within the program also saves on subscriptions to programs designed to solicit feedback, such as Zeplin or InVision.
It took significant time to onboard designers who were primarily familiar with the interface of Adobe programs to Figma. Because we primarily use Adobe programs, this took a lot of time that we could have spent creating and iterating.