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.
$10
per month
Freshservice
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
Easy setup and a lot of customization which can be made. They offer the full ITSM tool for 75$ per agent and all the PRO are included in the package, which makes it easy to calculate and use. There are only a few add-ins that you need to pay for, based on the number of agents …
As we are a smaller IT team, and a medium sized organization, we found most options for an ITSM to be more robust and overkill for our needs. Freshservice hit the mark in terms of features and pricing.
We used OTRS before Freshservice, and Freshservice is much easier to use and manage. We were checking on Service Cloud, as another branch of the company has implemented this, but there were a lot of features Service Cloud had problems with implementing that we take for granted …
Freshservice is providing us the ability to customize the user interface. It offers us to auto translate the page to other languages. Also, their marketing team came to our office and gave a detailed presentation about the product. Also, the product is budget friendly and was …
I would recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies that want to have internal documentation and minimum governance processes to ensure documentation is useful and doesn't have a lot of duplicated and non-updated content. I wouldn't recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies with a low budget since this product might be a little costly (especially with add-ons).
Offers a full ITSM suite, and core things like incident, service, and problem management are working well. But functionalities like Software, Contracts, and purchasing are too limited. Workflow management offers various integrations like Active Directory, Entra-Id, Smartsheet, etc. But it is difficult to troubleshoot.
Cross product linking - If you use other Atlassian products then Atlassian Confluence is a no-brainer for your source of documentation, knowledge management etc. You can show previews of the linked asset natively E.g. showing a preview of a JIRA ticket in a Atlassian Confluence page.
Simple editing - Though the features available may not be super complex right now, this does come with the benefit of making it easy to edit and create documents. Some documentation editors can be overwhelming, Atlassian Confluence is simple and intuitive.
Native marketplace - If you want to install add-ons to your Atlassian Confluence space it's really easy. Admins can explore the Atlassian marketplace natively and install them to your instance in a few clicks. You can customise your Atlassian Confluence instance in many different ways using add-ons.
Asset Management Module: The features I like most in this module are the discovery agent software, which allows us to collect device information without manual intervention, and the simplicity and robustness of the module itself.
Service Catalog: This feature allows us to create forms tailored to specific service requests based on group requirements. The ability to customize forms greatly helps both us and our end-users provide the necessary information to fulfill their requests.
Workflow Automator and Business Rules: These two allow us to have some automation in place, eliminating some of the manual steps and decreasing the number of human errors that may happen due to manual changes.
UI Design is very simplistic and basic could make use of more visually interesting colour choices, layout choices, etc.
Under the 'Content' menu, it defaults to having a landing page for all L1 and L2 category pages. Meaning as long as the broader content category has a sub-category, it still creates a separate landing page. In my team's case, this often creates blank pages, as we only fill out the page at the lowest sub-category (L3).
Hyperlinks are traditionally shown as blue, however, this results into very monotonously blue pages in cases where a lot of information is being linked.
Limited customisation for the agent view of Freshservice. Although it can be customised slightly, with "business rules", overall the customisation is limited.
Knowledgebase is lacking some basic features and can be frustrating to use particularly when copying and pasting content from other sources (which often rules in formatting issues that need to be corrected with the html editor).
Some drawbacks of the Workflow Automator such as lack of looping (which is on the roadmap), a long standing issue that prevented workflows to run where API calls were used (which a fix is due to be released soon for) and some design choices such as workflows not running on closed tickets.
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.
We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.
Great for organizing knowledge in a hierarchical format. Seamless for engineering and product teams managing software development. Helps in formatting pages effectively, reducing manual work. Tracks changes well and allows for easy rollbacks. Granular controls for who can view/edit pages. Search function is not great which needs improvement. Hire some google engineers
Easy to navigate and use GUI. We have many infrastructure team members from various departments using Freshservice and their on-boarding and training was very straightforward and we have not received much, if any negative feedback from non-technology users in regards to overall usability, interface or functionality.
We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.
Most reports are quick, however, it can take some time for emailed exports to come via email. It would be helpful to have the exports live in the system rather than having to wait on emails.
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 have never had an issue with FreshService support. They address each issue that has come up and has either been addressed within a short period or is placed on their roadmap. I have spoken to them directly and have done screen sharing to show the issue or communicated through email. I know there is a time difference between the US and their support, but I always get a quick response. It's nice to see that they have support 24/7 and all at the same level of experience.
Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.
Use case and requirements have to be very specific. Each business is different so it's very important to be as clear as possible with your initial requirements when communicating with the on-boarding/implementation team.
We chose Atlassian Confluence over SharePoint because it's much more user-friendly and intuitive. Atlassian Confluence makes collaboration and knowledge sharing easier with its simpler interface and better search. While SharePoint can be powerful, it often feels clunky and complex, making it harder for our team to actually use it.
The search list is WAY too hard to use - I have used Jira service management - Freshservice is WAY better ServiceNow ITSM, ITAM (SAM, HAM), ITOM, Project, Change - SNow is WAY better but also WAY WAY more expensive We selected Freshservice based on price and how fast we could stand up the service and start using it.
Ticket count is down from customers due to automation as well as a good knowledge base that is easy to build up over time.
Agents are able to triage tickets a lot quicker which also helps on the ticket count.
We now have much better control of our assets and it is a lot easier and as part of the leaver process assets are put into the workflow to make sure we have all equipment returned.
