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
Seismic
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Seismic is a recognized leader in sales and marketing enablement. The vendor's value proposition is that their solution equips global sales teams with the knowledge, messaging, and automatically personalized content proven to be the most effective for any buyer interaction. Additionally, the vendor says powerful content intelligence and analytics enable marketers to prove and improve their impact on the bottom line, revealing what is really driving revenue and what needs to be…
The ease of use with Seismic versus Confluence is night and day! Confluence is not a very user-friendly program and what you can find is basically by luck. In Seismic it is accessible to everyone that has the permission to view whatever it is they are trying to view or follow …
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.
Seismic excels at being a one-stop shop for all content that is relevant to salespeople and the deal cycles they work through. It does a great job not only making content and training readily available but also at distributing the right content at the right time/for the right scenario. Based on my experience with the tool, this was a go-to for many reps (myself included) because it saved us so much time. Rather than sifting through documents and collateral, we could easily find what we needed in a matter of moments.
Seismic allows for one location to store all relevant content so that associates are not having to spend as much time searching for what they need.
Seismic provides the ability to fully customize content such that one template can serve many needs with the simple ability to answer questions that drive the customization in the content. This customization can range from simple to quite complex depending on your level of expertise with the tool.
Seismic provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to organizing your content and how to make the experience of accessing that content unique to the needs of each user in the system.
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.
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.
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.
Seismic's support team has been exceptional at providing support when an issue has come up, or when we have had questions regarding the platform. They have responded quickly, and I feel as if they truly try to find a solution to the quickest of their abilities. My team and I truly feel supported when it comes to reaching out to Seismic.
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.
Savo, Google Drive, Shared folders Savo - was best in class a long time ago (and has since been bought by Seismic) - but required a lot of administrative work to setup and maintain. I had three people working on it full time to create pages and managing content. Shared folders and google drive are good to share content, but terrible at searching and tagging (not fully indexed and no tagging)
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.
We can quickly generate product-specific proposals.
We've experienced repeated frustrations while trying to edit/update the LiveDoc.
Errors in LiveDoc coding have occasionally produced errors in the generated proposals where certain fields (Customer Name, for example) should have been automatically completed but were not.
