Atlassian Confluence vs. UserGuiding

I would recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies that want to have internal documentation and minimum governance processes to ensure documentation is useful and doesn't have a lot of duplicated and non-updated content. I wouldn't recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies with a low budget since this product might be a little costly (especially with add-ons).

Incentivized

I would recommend this to teams who have multiple people who can work together in getting the necessary source codes input, the guides built, and the parameters identified. I would also recommend this product to anyone who is primarily concerned about price. Compared to competitors, the price vs the feature set was by far the best out of the 6 companies I demoed with. If one person is trying to get this set up and it isn't part of their full-time job, it will take a while because there is a pretty big learning curve as to what order to do things. Further, once the basics are set up, it does take a fair amount of time and testing to build the walk-throughs, especially if you want to use advanced logic

Incentivized

• 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

• Good price
• Responsive CS and sales team
• Had all of the features we were looking for

Incentivized

• 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

• The initial setup process isn't as transparently intuitive as it was sold
• It's a fairly large barrier to entry for one person to get the guides set up
• We weren't instructed how to 'turn off' the URL hits until we had our parameters segmented so the first two months we hit our limits before anything was even launched on our end. That made testing hard.

Incentivized

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.

Great for organizing knowledge in a hierarchical format. Seamless for engineering and product teams managing software development. Helps in formatting pages effectively, reducing manual work. Tracks changes well and allows for easy rollbacks. Granular controls for who can view/edit pages. Search function is not great which needs improvement. Hire some google engineers

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

By far the best price for the available features. They had a really easy demo scheduling process (and had availability to demo within a day or two where some of the other products were a week+ to schedule). You can build unlimited guides and if you don't hit your user limit because you failed to identify target parameters at the start, that is a huge selling point ;)

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The AI feature which lets me find relevant documents while reading one document is really beneficial.
• Centralising of knowledge systems is one of the key differentiators for large organisations.
• As long as folks keep using Google Docs and Atlassian Confluence, there is going to be a challenge in building a continuum.

Incentivized

• We lost two months due to running out of 'hits' before we were able to target the right fields. This was partly our fault for not having enough time to dedicate to it, but it would have been helpful to have a 'pause' button or be told to look out for this scenario.
• We canceled our account after 4 or 5 months because I, as the sole user on our team, didn't have nearly enough time to build out the guides the way we had envisioned. It wasn't quite as easy to understand as I'd hoped. It was doable, but a slow process and I got too busy with other pressing issues with my company.
• It would have been a good ROI for the available features and price if I'd had a solid amount of time to really build it out and understand it better. The training options could have been a lot more user-friendly to help bridge that knowledge gap.

Incentivized