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
Slack
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Slack is a group messaging or team collaboration app that aims to simplify communication for businesses. Features include open discussions, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as deep contextual search and message archiving, and file sharing. Slack integrates with a number of other tools, such as MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Slack was acquired by Salesforce in December 2020.
The product is free to use, and also has paid plans with more features and greater controls.
The…
Atlassian Confluence is more intuitive than MS SharePoint, however, SharePoint has some reach features because of the MS integration with its tools stack.
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Atlassian Confluence
Confluence smashes competitors out of the ballpark. There is no compromise for quality and great product design with Atlassian
Atlassian Confluence is better than all Google Drive, Dropbox as we can just store files in them without specific versioning, but with Atlassian Confluence file is stored in versions.
It is easily integrated with other softwares like Jira so one can keep track on all the …
It's quite famous and consistency and alignment are what we're after with using Confluence and all of Atlassian's products. This has helped us to be more transparent with out product and development teams as well.
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose Atlassian Confluence
There are complementary and we are in fact using both of them in out organisation. We are using Google Drive for advanced real-time cooperation when creating documents, since Google Drive can handle this in a more streamlined and easier way than Confluence. Still, Confluence …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Atlassian Confluence
I think the only comparable product is Google docs. Google docs is a much simpler product, however, it doesn't have all of the features that confluence has. I think if confluence improved their UI to make it a little better, it can really improve.
I have used other tools that allow for documentation and housing of other business-related documents but none that I used had the same integration or general ability to add and edit information. I am also a general user so I don't know how easy/difficult the backend is, but …
To keep the user stories together, we used the Microsoft Office tools. It took a lot of time to search for the relevant stories, so we moved to Atlassian Confluence which is now saving a lot of time.
SharePoint is great, I use it and I love it. Confluence is a lot like SharePoint with a more modern look and a fancy suit. If you have the skills for implementation, it is great and developers will enjoy it more.
Although similar in the way in which they can be used, Atlassian provides great archival and search features, as well as editing capabilities that set it apart. Security through 2-step verification is an important feature often overlooked, being tested now in beta. Overall it …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Atlassian Confluence
With this tool, everyone is in the same place. You and your teams will have the information that is usually lost in email inboxes as well as shared network drives. Data become much easier to find, use, and update with Atlassian Confluence.
For our needs, Confluence absolutely blew both SharePoint and Google Docs out of the water. We were able to get more granular security than with SharePoint while maintaining the collaborative tool sets found in both SharePoint and Google Docs. Additionally, the integration into …
The Knowledge Base was something we created. We found Confluence to be a superior tool. The fact that Atlassian is constantly working to make it better continues to be a bonus.
We really only use Confluence because we use JIRA and Hipchat and it seemed to work well within the suite of Atlassian products. I would personally prefer a custom made internal website for our organization plus the integration of google docs/hangouts (or the use of something …
So much better, in many ways. You can use it for many differents options. Trello is more just a scrum board, but Confluence is for the whole communication process. It's super organized and very trackable. It has helped the tech team to be very connected! They love it, and we …
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Atlassian Confluence
Confluence is much easier to use, it's philosophy is more modern because of social, and it's a by far lower investment (better value for money).
I would say slack outperforms Microsoft Teams in many areas. The big one would be ease of use and user interface. I strongly prefer Slack's interface and the ease to switch between conversations and calls very quickly. Slack also seems to run a lot better on Mac computers, …
Verified User
Vice-President
Chose Slack
Cliq is essentially a clone of Slack, but it integrated into the Zoho CRM. If your organization is already a Zoho user, and you are looking to deploy a chat service, Cliq is a better choice. If you aren't already using Zoho, then Slack is more widely used in the industry. …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Slack
Easy to setup and use compared to other similar products.
Screen sharing makes the discussions a lot more effective.
Verified User
Director
Chose Slack
Slack is more user-friendly than Microsoft Teams, at least in my opinion. Microsoft Teams integrates natively with Office 365 tools. Microsoft Teams has a limit of five users on paid plans unless you buy more
licenses, whereas Slack allows unlimited external collaboration with …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Slack
We used Spark Instant Messenger before and Slack blew them out the water with a wealth of features we hadn't used before. We didn't need to be on the VPN to communicate and we could do video calls and make our own groups. Everything was better with Slack, as it kind of merges …
We felt Slack [had] more community friendly tools to share thoughts and an individual view to achieve better and bigger goals. It is also easier to browse and search compared to our previous HipChat tools. It encourages more IT people to get involved in ongoing discussions.
Having had to use Skype/Lync in a former life as a Fortune 100 contractor, I can say that Slack's ease-of-use, customizability, and solid integrations with online tools puts it far ahead. It's nice to not be beholden to the Microsoft Stack for every little thing, as well. …
Slack blows Skype out of the water. It is a new, quicker and more efficient instant messaging tool. The capabilities are continuously being updated and can be configured to protect your organization. Slack emojis bring color to your messages and help you feel closer to the …
Slack is a bit more simplistic than the other pieces of software, but creates more meaningful conversations. The other programs create more of a forum based platform, than a social network like Slack. Slack encourages everyone to get involved with the conversation as opposed to …
Slack is definitely the marketplace leader for chat / digital communication. Overall Slack has done a very good job of making communication and collaboration easy and non-disruptive. The biggest feature that sets Slack apart from the other tools is the clean interface and …
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.
Good for real-time or near real-time conversation for time-sensitive discussions. When implemented by the whole organization, it becomes a highly effective group/team chat device with very smart integrations with a variety of tools. Not too good for any extensive discussions that need to be preserved and maintained for a longer period of time. Because of its chat-like nature, finding an older thread or/and reference files embedded in it can be challenging. For those tasks, a more static, forum-like tools might be more applicable.
Schedule messages --> In order to promote work-life balance, we can schedule messages such that they reach the recipient's inbox during the office hours
Entire conversation --> A new joiner to a channel has access to all the previous conversation, making it easy for Knowledge Transfer
Snooze notification option --> This is really helpful so that individuals don't get disturbed during the off-time or when they are in meetings/doing some important work
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'd like to see further ways to organize my chats. Right now, it's very linear. Maybe folders inside folders.
Being able to transfer any videos recorded in Slack between slack conversations without downloading and uploading. Aka, a Slack link for the video (like loom).
A cheat sheet of available commands (like starting a zoom chat) --I'd love to know what all my company has enabled.
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.
As useful as Slack has become within our company, I feel fairly confident we will continue to use Slack as a communication tool. They continue to improve their software and add value to its use within our office. Customer service delivers, which is an absolute must. Looking forward to how they improve.
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.
As long as you use the basic chat features and nothing more, it really is super easy to understand and use. Once you want to take advantage of some of the more advanced features and capabilities, that's when things get complicated. Anyone who has use SMS or a chat program before will be able to figure out the basics though, so rolling this out should be relatively straightforward and not required exhaustive training. Teaching chat etiquette is something else though.
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.
I've never had to contact support for Slack which is a great testament to its ease and use. Adding people outside of the organization takes a little getting used to, but ultimately allows for greater collaboration between FTE and contractors. There is no clear alternative to this software, so it's the best we can do for now.
It always helps if you communicate to everyone in the organization how important it is to drop whatever other chat tools they are using and jump quickly to Slack. They will all fall in love with it.
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.
It depends on the company size, if the company is small its better to use other messengers which are more lean and simple, slack in my opinion is very useful once you can use all of it's benefits as an integration with the other services which are very strong, we have integration with Google, Automation, our internal services as Okta
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.