Confluence vs Salesforce

I think [Atlassian] Confluence is an amazing option for larger companies however for a smaller team of less than 20 it might not be the best choice. It definitely helps our team stay connected while working remotely and we're able to stay on top of projects with ease.

Salesforce likely isn't going to be your first CRM. However, if you have a Sales team and are looking for a more advanced and possibly customizable way to run your funnel from Sales to Customer Success, you can't go wrong with Salesforce. It truly is the industry standard.

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.

While it's not perfect and can be overly complicated at times, there is not another solution out there that can do what it does. To get the same functionality you would need numerous disparate tools to match the amount of functionality Salesforce has. Having it all aggregated on one platform makes the complicated parts far more bearable

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.

[Salesforce.com] provides an ease of use from two different perspectives. If you're an administrator of the platform, it is easy to navigate and go through the set up process. They focus on a clicks not code mentality, but if you have to customize your [Salesforce.com] instance through code, it's also easy for developers to develop directly in the platform. As for the end-user experience, they've come a long way with Salesforce Lightning and the ability to navigate between records and tables. The only slight negative is that it can be a bit cumbersome to fully customize the UI due to the way the metadata is currently set up.

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

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

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.

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

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 gave this rating because I do not deal with SFDC support. That is the function of our Salesopps person. Last week though, it was incredibly frustrating that the site was undergoing maintenance in the middle of the day. It was very disruptive to the entire team and we lost about 2 hours of productivity. Make the hours that it will be down during the night so people don't lose time in their workday.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Take a bit more time to explain the purpose of Confluence and show demos prior to actual use and content additions.

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

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

I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.