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
Jama Connect
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Jama Connect® is a Requirements Management software and Requirements Traceability solution. Jama Software enables teams to manage product requirements and enable Live Traceability™ across the development process, in order to reduce cycle times and improve product quality.
We are using Confluence for software projects requirements. Even if it is not as dedicated to requirements as Jama is, software developers will choose Confluence over Jama if they already have JIRA for their Agile software development. The Confluence macros are a big plus over …
I have used MS SharePoint and Confluence before and feel that as a requirement solution, Jama is more intuitive and easier to maintain requirements and have traceability. It is easier to maintain upstream and downstream relationships in Jama which I feel is a very good feature …
We tried to do with Requirements management with Confluence and other Atlassian marketplace tools. The Jama traceability is still the overriding decider for staying with Jama. FYI, we paid for Jama/tasktop for several years without doing the integration - you would think that …
Jama Connect was the perfect balance between cost, usability and scalability that our company desired. Helix was definitely cheaper but didn't offer the usability or scalability perks. Codebeamer missed the mark on cost and was designed more for a software centric requirement …
Jama Connect is more straightforward than these systems but not quite as versatile or comprehensive. I would choose those other systems if I were at a very large company working on very complex systems (which I am not).
Jama suited our need for collaboration and communication plus a difficult stakeholder's approval roadblock. Jama provides a very easy to use interface and communication system that brought in the buy-in from all stakeholders based on the communication problems we needed to …
Polarion did not have the outside sales support that Jama Connect has. Polarion seems better suited for an Agile development lifecycle rather than an evergreen repository of requirements, design features, and verifications.
Jama brings requirements engineering to the 21st century and sets up the bar to measure other tools. DOORS and DNG never managed to make this jump and stayed in the past.
We originally looked at Connect (Contour) and Doors as we wanted to move away from Word documents. Contour was much easier to use and had a better collaboration environment. The was many years ago; I haven't done any comparison in the last 5+ years.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Jama Connect
I haven't used the other tools in some time, but I know I prefer Jama over Jira and MS Project. Again, this is skewed based on the fact that I haven't used the other 2 tools in years. Jama is used more by clients whom I work with so it seems to be more of a market leader than …
I have mostly worked with ALM and JIRA Software. they are good enough to gather the requirements but not much like Jama software. JIRA doesn't provide approval mechanism and ALM doesn't provide traceability and reuse or reviews functionalities so in all of them Jama is better …
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.
Jama is an excellent tool for requirements management, development, and traceability throughout the development lifecycle. Jama aids in peer reviews of generated artifacts with time-boxed review cycles. Jama provides a robust ecosystem which is highly tailorable to the demands of the particular organization in which it is used
Focus in the content without loosing the track of the evolution of the items by maintaining the exchange of information between the users inside the Tool.
The possibilities to integrate this tool within our IT-landcape and with our other engineering tools is for us a leverage to success.
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 'filtering' capabilities in Jama are not as good as they could be. In particular, the ability to "nest" filters is quite limited. I have certain seen much better capabilities in other tools. ('Cradle' is an example of a tool with excellent "nested filters" capabilities.)
From an administrative point of view, the 'License' admin view is pretty disappointing. The particular thing that I'd like to be able to find out from it is the peak number of 'Float Creator' licenses in concurrent use on each day. If there's a way to get to that information, I haven't found it yet.
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.
Jama is really easy to use and operate compared to other tools. This allows a process owner to get easier buy-in from the organization to see value early. My experience with this tool was very positive and we were able to see value early in its introduction
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.
Jama is mostly designed for requirement gathering, but that can be possible using JIRA if we add only approval type of plugin for special requirement types. Jama's performance and features do not improve on a periodic basis i.e. with each release. Even bug fixes take a lot of time and they don't care about customer impact.
Jama is available most of the time if it is used within the application's boundary. Jama has very good availability if we use very high hardware servers. Sometimes we face issues if there are batch operations running.
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.
With performance compared to JIRA, I do recommend Jama in this case. Jama provides very good performance, it loads immediately for any of the items and searches any item immediately. Performance is really good in all of the operations including creating stories, epics, item types or other support operations or report generation.
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.
They typically answer within minutes of posting a ticket, and then you have a clear expectation of what the issue is, how to diagnose it, how long will it take to get resolved, and in which version a given problem is resolved, or if there is a patch for hosted services. They have a number of support people, and all of them are top-notch.
Jama 2015.5 implementation is very smooth and no need for much manual work. Jama 8 has many challenges and we can not install it as smoothly as Jama 2015.5. Initially, Jama didn't provide the Jama 8's installer files or zip files and they were just providing docker files to everyone (which was really strange). It is the worst that they don't provide all the files at a time. Why should they tell us where we should deploy, and why only a dockerfile? I am not very satisfied with Jama implementation.
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.
The major sellingpoints of Jama were the review-system for internal and external reviewers and the inclusion of (Use Case) modelling tools, while keeping the core requirements-centric. Ability to synchronise with currently in use test-tooling and the low learning curve were additional selling points. Availablity of support in our local language was much appreciated as well.
There is no horizontal scalability available in Jama, we have only one choice to scale it vertically. But vertical scalable applications always have limitations to grow. In this case, Jama doesn't support horizontal scalability functions like multi-node architectures with a shared drive for the home directory.
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.
