Atlassian Confluence vs. Freehand by InVision

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.

InVision Freehand has quickly evolved to be a very robust solution for our pre-design process and collaboration with stakeholders and other product teams. It has brought a lot more hands-on workshopping opportunities and created engaging spaces for cross functional teams. Internally to our design org we are able to prototype ideas faster and generate insights or changes BEFORE going into more hi-fidelity design tools or processes.

Incentivized

• QUICK How-to Guides that can be generated and share instantly
• One can subscribe to the pages and spaces and receive updates in the feed on their home page
• Automatic Email notifications of new updates in the Confluence area
• The platform integrates easily with other Atlassian platforms including third-party apps thus improving its reliability

Incentivized

• Bring in and embed external files and view them on the board without having to move out of freehand. eg. pdf's, power point, youtube etc.
• Creating wireframes, flow maps, all and any kinds of created art boards to share with team members.
• Ability to create text and link to external sites
• Can format and create pages with text and bullet points right in freehand, rather than having to go to another software to do the same.
• Collaborate with Team members all on the same board and project at the same time and get feedback live in a meeting and/or even later.
• Love the different templates that have been provided for me to use as a starting point.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The resolution: Our webpage designs always pass the resolution threshold to where freehand starts to work its compression. During presentations, it can be a little embarrassing when we can't read the copy because it looks like potatoes.
• Embedding videos: GIFs are only good to a certain point, and creating Vimeo embeds is tedious. I wish I could embed MP4s or web assets a lot quicker.
• Touchpad panning: I can't tell you how many times I've "gone back" in my browser when I'm just trying to pan across the freehand. Has honestly made me wanna force quit on many occasions.
• Sticky notes and text in shapes: Overall, it's really hard to use the sticky notes and text inside rectangles without the text just getting all over the place. It's different sizes, it gets too tiny, it gets way too big, and overall, it just doesn't look professional, even with a lot of fussing.
• No ability to crop/mask an image. Nice to have, but sometimes we just need to delete a chunk off a screenshot, and it requires opening PS or taking a screenshot to edit anything.
• Wish there was a way to have "internal comments" that are not visible to our clients.

Incentivized

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.

Honestly as in any organization it's up to budget. I feel like every organization I go to I'm constantly striving to keep InVision as part of the main funded tools used by the team especially in a remote environment. I feel there is a push to move to Figma and Zooms new white boarding tool but I'm still not a fan of Zoom's tool. Microsoft also created a white boarding tool which has been buggy.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Color Selection can be tricky when changing colors for shapes and text I've seen other users struggle with creating sticky notes and getting text to fit in the box properly and had to abandon the tool for a workshop for this reason After having a demo, I learned of new features I wasn't using. I don't know it would have been intuitive to find on my own.

Incentivized

I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.

Incentivized

For availability, we never have to even think about whether inVision Freehand is going to be available for us to work with. There has never been a time when we have opened up the application and had any issues of any kind. I can't imagine why anyone would work with a platform that is unreliable. inVision Freehand is realibel, stable, and getting better all the time. Whether it's their built-in tools or the expanding of Templates to work with Freehand has been a reliable go-to platform for us.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is a little slow when bringing artboards from Sketch to Freehand using Craft. I have had some issues loading and redrawing pages when I have a lot of images on my freehand board. It gives me an error message while I am in the file and starts to reload and redraw all the photos again. Not sure if it has a limit on how many images it can handle on a board at a time.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't had to use the support team for anything, which is great news because that means the product usually works as expected! In terms of online support, I've been able to find videos that show how new features work. Also, many of the people I work with have experience with the tools so they are a great resource for me.

Incentivized

Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).

This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!

Incentivized

The implementation is pretty much easy-peasy and plug-n-play. We simply download the applications and install, signed in and were good to go. I really cannot imagine that there would be anyone who would have any difficulty whatsoever in getting started in more than just a few minutes. It's really how implementing these officewide improvements should always go.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Miro (formerly Realtime Board) is the original product concept for this tool and I used it for 3-4 years for product development. Invision is aesthetically a carbon copy of the tool but lacks in fine usability controls. We actually didn't choose Freehand, it just came as an added tool under our Invision subscription. It's helpful but knowing the previous tool, it's been a hard sell because it's just not as good. Again, it's really fine tuned usability things like navigation, zoom, switching from tool to tool, selecting and deselecting, etc

Incentivized

Getting set up with inVision Freehand was super simple. We figured how many of our team members were going to be using it and we set up our account knowing that. There were no negotiations, contract hassles or anything that would have been a waste of our time, efforts or resources.

Incentivized

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

Incentivized

Not everyone in the company has access to Invision, and they can't view the links I provide to them. I also wish everyone could view a file without logging in to the enterprise account. It comes in handy when I am doing focus-group studies or other studies with our customers that don't have Freehand. Unfortunately, if that is possible, I don't know how to do that.

Incentivized

We didn't use an outside vendor - that's why I gave this option a 10.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Positives all around. Everyone is able to see and collaborate.
• Granting access is sometimes a pain. Sending the link does not always work, and I get emails as people try to access boards.
• No negatives really, I love learning all of the different ways it can be used.

Incentivized