Atlassian Confluence vs. Socialtext (discontinued)

It is well suited due to the below reasons 1. Easy collaboration between teams 2. Strong integration with other applications 3. Centralized documentation among teams and within the organisation 4. Project planning and report sharing 5. Employee onboarding is easier and maintain HR policies very well. Less appropriate in below scenarios When this is being used as a main tool for communication rather than its purpose of collaboration.

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• Cross product linking - If you use other Atlassian products then Atlassian Confluence is a no-brainer for your source of documentation, knowledge management etc. You can show previews of the linked asset natively E.g. showing a preview of a JIRA ticket in a Atlassian Confluence page.
• Simple editing - Though the features available may not be super complex right now, this does come with the benefit of making it easy to edit and create documents. Some documentation editors can be overwhelming, Atlassian Confluence is simple and intuitive.
• Native marketplace - If you want to install add-ons to your Atlassian Confluence space it's really easy. Admins can explore the Atlassian marketplace natively and install them to your instance in a few clicks. You can customise your Atlassian Confluence instance in many different ways using add-ons.

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• UI Design is very simplistic and basic could make use of more visually interesting colour choices, layout choices, etc.
• Under the 'Content' menu, it defaults to having a landing page for all L1 and L2 category pages. Meaning as long as the broader content category has a sub-category, it still creates a separate landing page. In my team's case, this often creates blank pages, as we only fill out the page at the lowest sub-category (L3).
• Hyperlinks are traditionally shown as blue, however, this results into very monotonously blue pages in cases where a lot of information is being linked.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

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.

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

Atlassian Confluence is a great tool for project management, especially for internal documentation. It has a minimum governance requirement to use its full power. Also, it is a little pricy to unlock its full power as well, so it is not recommended for companies with a low budget in my opinion.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.

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

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

We chose Atlassian Confluence over SharePoint because it's much more user-friendly and intuitive. Atlassian Confluence makes collaboration and knowledge sharing easier with its simpler interface and better search. While SharePoint can be powerful, it often feels clunky and complex, making it harder for our team to actually use it.

Incentivized

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

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

Incentivized

• We totally rely on this tool since a decade now and despite being so much transition in our company it has served us well in those transitions
• Many times, during security audits we are asked to showcase our readiness for various compliance points and confluence helps us a lot in maintaining that
• Talking about Confluence in front of clients and customers gives us an upper hand that we are up to date with latest trend and technologies and tools for our RnD planning and management

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions